Sapara Monastery

I was in Borjomi a few days this week to help with training for the 2011 group of trainees. After Friday’s session, Melissa and I met up with fellow volunteer Lacey to fulfill a plan we’ve been working on for a while – a hike up to Sapara monastery, in the mountains near the regional center of Akhaltsikhe. We’d heard good things about it, enough to make us brave a 12-mile round trip walk into the mountains on a day with heavy rain predicted.

We set off in late morning with some lobiani, churchkhela, and fruit for a picnic, and after walking through a few villages, we came up to some beautiful views of the Akhaltsikhe valley.

It was sunny and hot, and, though the storm clouds were looming, we made good time and came around a bend to see Sapara:

It’s a place in which I think it would be easy to contemplate God and his works. The church of St. Saba was actually my favorite of those I’ve seen so far in Georgia. Maybe it was partly the walk up, maybe the quiet and the green all around, maybe the frescoes that seemed to me a little more alive than most I’ve seen, but it all added up to the perfect place of worship.

Hobbits like the place too, apparently.

After spending some time in the dim cool of the stone church, we scrambled up past the monks’ beehives to a ruined fortress on top of the hill before coming back down for lunch on the grass. We set off homework around 2:15, the clouds gathering ominously. About a mile down the road, a taxi bearing a single tourist rolled past us, and we didn’t have the presence of mind to flag it down. We joked that, 5 rainy miles later, we’d be sorry we missed it.

Good joke. It started pouring as we crested the ridge and headed back down into the valley where Akhaltsikhe huddled under a downpour. We tromped and slid through the rain and rocks and mud and made it back down to the first villages just about the time the sun came out. Even with the rain, we would have done it again.

Sunday was a good day to be at home, since it was the first khorovats – barbecue – of the season. Armenian-style summer barbecue is pork roasted on skewers, along with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants which are blackened on the outside then peeled and served as something almost like a stew to go along with the meat, all to be picked up with and rolled inside the ubiquitous lavash. A great early-summer meal, especially finished off with ice cream.

And it really is starting to feel like summer – well, spring, at least – here in Akhalkalaki. The trees are blooming, the snow is almost gone off all but the highest mountains, and everything is greener than we’ve yet seen it. Not a bad time to be in the mountains.