The Houses of Gjirokastër

"When (the city) was first built, the wood had cunningly had itself hoisted up top, leaving the stone to the foundations, cellars and cisterns. Down there in the half-darkness, the stone had to fight the rising damp and the groundwater, while the wood, nicely carved and carefully tended, adorned the upper floors. These were light, almost ethereal: the city's dream, its caprice, its flight of fancy. Now the fancy had met its limit. After giving the upper floors such privileges, the city seemed to have changed its mind, and hurried to rectify the error. It had them covered with roofs of slate, as if to establish once and for all that here stone was king." - Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

The 19th century houses of Gjirokastër are a lot like the Ottoman architecture in Berat. Here, though, they aren't as uniform or clumped together. They are spread throughout the old part of the city and come in all shapes and sizes. Because no two are alike, it's easier to really notice the things they do have in common. Their walls are stone until the top floor, which are white-washed wooden frames. So, they sort of look like women wearing high-waisted grey pencil skirts with a white blouse. The windows are narrow and tall and become more numerous toward the top of the houses. In Albania, people live on the top floor - it's been true for centuries. Even now, driving through the country, half finished houses look like cottages on stilts. One completed floor atop beams and exposed staircases. Of course the third floor is built first, it's where they will live! When the whole city moved into their cellars to seek shelter from constant bombing during World War II, Kadare's young narrator quips that "these were hard times for the upper floors of the city," abandoned as they were.

We're staying at Kalemi Hotel, one of the few traditional houses that have been elegantly restored. The Kalemi family, no doubt, attracts guests wishing to see the interior of one of Gjirokastër's famous Ottoman houses. I recognized things from Chronicle in Stone right away- the curtains with white lace at the ends, the low couches lining the room on which the old women who visited sat "sipping their coffee and making sage pronouncements." "Windows as tall as my father, and a grainy, mottled ceiling of carved wood." This is the dimerorja ("winter room"), where families traditionally spent most of their time in the colder months. The ceilings are elaborate carved wood, but the furnishings give the comfort of a home, not a museum.

And this is a dimerorja in an actual museum, the Ethnographic Museum. It's easy to see the Turkish influence in the traditional furnishings. Most of the large houses of Gjirokastër were built by Muslim landowners and officials during the Ottoman rule. When we arrived, we were let in by a cleaning woman with a comically large key. She just happened to arrive minutes after we had. Inside, spring cleaning was in full swing. The couches along the perimeter of every room were being uncovered, the white curtains were being taken down. Carpets that ran through the house like a line in a maze were being vacuumed. The house itself is significant for an entirely different reason - a faithful reconstruction of Enver Hoxha's family house, built on the same site. Our guide told us it had burned down accidentally in the 1960s, but another source I read said that it was blown up by protestors in 1997. Who to believe?

The Ethnographic Museum may give a little bit of insight and the Kalemi Hotel may be as pleasant as can be, but the real tour de force of traditional houses in Gjirokastër is Zekate House in the Palorto quarter. It is an enormous estate, with two wings. Mr. and Mrs. Zekate sat in their courtyard under a Heineken umbrella and simply walked wordlessly and unlocked the front door when they saw us approach. It was everything I'd imagined and more. After the Ottoman Empire lost control of Albania in 1913, the wealthy families that built these mammoth houses couldn't necessarily fill them completely anymore. The bottom floors are mostly empty, used for storage. A couch here, a rug there, just to make the experience of walking through a little more pleasant. The space between stones in the floors and walls were filled in with red paint - something we'd noticed at Kalemi, too. As we moved upwards, stone gave way to wood and the living rooms became cozier. Sheepskin was dyed red and used to cover the couches, looking exactly like 70s shag. 

Then, at the tippy top, we found the glorious oda e miqve, traditionally the most beautiful room and reserved for visits from guests. Frescoed walls, elaborate ceilings. The large rug made all the thin, red runners that guided us up until this point look like dying flower petals, left in a trail to lead us to a poppy field. Here, the chimney-shaped fireplace (the oxhaku) was not draped in white lace, but rather covered in painted designs. To quote Kadare again: "It was easy to see why the other rooms...were jealous of the main room." 

In the highest part of the Zekate house, up on a loft looking over the grand room, we were almost eye level with the magnificent ceiling. Dark, painted, it looked solid and indestructible. The wood beneath our feet, however, creaked and bent. We were careful to walk on the floors' joists, here and everywhere else on the top floor. The decaying planks really felt like they could give out at any time. The staircases creaked loudly. Visiting his old house as an adult, Kadare wrote: "What's wrong? Where does it hurt? It seemed to be complaining of aches in its bones, in its centuries-old joints." His home was just two blocks or so away from the Zekate House, but it was ruined by a fire in 1997. Old man Zekate is probably about the same age. I wonder if they knew each other. (As you can tell, I've got a serious book-crush). 

These houses are only a small protected part of Gjirokastër. The protection offered to buildings deemed 'historic' prevents any sort of alteration of the original architecture. However, it doesn't do anything to prevent weathering and disrepair. Most of the historic houses of Gjirokastër are uninhabited and in steady decline. People that do live in old houses can't help but go against the rules and re-patch their leaky roofs with terracotta or plastic shingles. Restoration according to the preservation rules would be more expensive and take longer. When you look at the Museum Zone from above, you can see patches of orange and red. Sill, you can imagine what the whole thing must have looked like. I bet it was something like looking down at New York on a rainy day, when it becomes a landscape of open umbrellas. With the new buildings in view, the slate roofs described both as "scales" and "a hard shell," by Kadare, lose that cold edge. It's the big, ugly modern architecture that looks menacing now, I think.

The Concrete Pillboxes of Albania

 Imagine living in Albania in the 1970’s.  The country had been plunged into complete isolation, cut off from its neighbors, its old allies, outside news.  They had left the Warsaw pact.  No one was allowed to leave.  Hardly anyone could come in.  A few Americans and British tried, but were executed on the spot.  The population was taught nothing of the outside world except that it was fearsome, ready to attack.  After some twenty years of communism, Albania had become ringed by a silent, unknown darkness.
If you were an Albanian man, you were drilled on the protocol should there be an invasion.  First, get your gun.  Second, head to your assigned bunker… and stay there.

 Albania has over six hundred thousand concrete and steel bunkers, built during the dreamlike shadows of the Enver Hoxha dictatorship.  They squat in low formations at every corner of the country, with greater frequency near the borders and along the coast.  Driving or walking along country roads, it’s impossible to miss them – scrawled with graffiti, painted over or simply blank grey.  They litter the landscape and are almost indestructible.  Even dug up they’re too tough to pull apart, and lie like strange, huge tubers in ditches or dumps.

 Enver Hoxha’s regime had once been friendly with Yugoslavia, but the relationship soured early in the post WWII years.  Russia had been the primary ally after that, but Hoxha had become too bloody for the Soviets to tolerate (in one astounding meeting, he was accused and chastised by eighty other bloc leaders) and the dictator had grown tired of demands from the Kremlin.  Albania parted ways with the USSR in 1961, severing all ties, and became improbably aligned with China.  Most western countries had long since withdrawn diplomatic ties by the time Mao died and China lost interest.  It was an almost complete shuttering.  Behind a curtain of landmines, mountains and fear, the Albanian people huddled.

 The “pillbox” - a small, one man, dome-roofed foxhole - is by far the most common bunker found in Albania.  They were installed literally everywhere, along every road, near every mountain pass.  Tending to crop up in threes, they are so common as to be part of the landscape; they’re interesting at first, then hardly noticeable.  This one, outside the school in Valbona, was in the same condition as most.  Weedy and dull-edged, mostly filled in with dirt and trash, but still as functional and sturdy as it was forty years ago.

 In the heaviest defended areas, the pillboxes are arranged a little more strategically, usually arrayed around one or two larger, permanently manned bunkers with radio contact to a central command.  The smaller shelters - called "firing positions" - were intended for average citizen-turned-partisans, who were unlikely to be trained soldiers or have much of an idea what to do in the case of an attack.  The larger and smaller fortifications were always within sight of one another, so that the soldiers could give visual orders to the gunmen around them.  It’s interesting, in some of the more densely barricaded areas, to look at how the pillboxes were arranged, what their line of sight was, what they were defending.  Each of the firing positions has a “back window” that looks straight at the command center.
The primary element, though, was the domed roof, which was designed to deflect artillery fire instead of absorbing the impact.

 There is a legend that the chief engineer of these pillboxes, Josif Zengali, was so certain of their strength that he “volunteered” (these communist era legends are funny things) to hole up in one while it was shelled by a tank.  He emerged – of course – perfectly whole, though later he was imprisoned under suspicious circumstances.
The construction and installation of this network of concrete was a major project, keeping a large contingent of laborers and soldiers busy for decades.  It’s said that the bunkers became such a vital employer that it was difficult to stop the program.  Indeed, the structures were still being put in place (with the same design) right up until Hoxha’s death in 1985, by which time they’d probably lost much of their tactical relevance.  But what else could the impoverished, lonely country build?

 Today, the bunkers are sometimes used as garden sheds, playhouses, outhouses or (most often) big garbage cans.  Goats graze around them in pastures, they serve as dirty changing rooms on some beaches.  They can be seen built into stone walls, sometimes, or even into the side of some houses.  Albanians tend to think of them less as a reminder of a past era and more as a nuisance.  They weigh nine thousand pounds apiece, they’re dug five feet into the ground, they’re reinforced with steel… how are you supposed to get rid of them?  Younger citizens have begun painting them bright colors, in an effort that mirrors the buildings of Tirana.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Albania's bunkers is that they were never used.  The country was never attacked.  Hoxha relied on the militarization of his citizens to retain control - the goal for the bunker project was to have one built for each family of four, so that every able-bodied man had his literal place in the chain of command, in the ongoing war with the outside world (things were so strangely perverted that Albania maintained a "war" with Greece between 1942 and 1987, even though for decades there was no fighting and Greece essentially pleaded for an end to the madness).  The dictator kept building bunkers and convincing everyone that they needed to dig in.
Driving around here is like navigating a short, intense history - the imprint of a scarce forty years is stamped on every hillside.  It's unique, it's ghostly, the bunkers are part of the landscape yet also jarringly set apart.  On one hillside we counted twelve, their outlines almost obscured by wildflowers.

The Bright Spots

Last night, we had a date with Malvin, a twenty-one year old biotechnology student who waits tables on the weekend. That's how we met him, on our first night in town. He invited us out for some sightseeing and drinks. "This is my favorite place," he said of Sky Club, a revolving bar atop a skyscraper, from where this picture was taken. The rain had stopped halfway through our whirlwind tour of the city's most important buildings and lightning slashed across the clear, cobalt sky as we discussed everything we'd seen over drinks. "Nothing is built by us," Malvin explained with regret and a hint of anger. "The Russians built this, the Italians built that." When he pointed at a whimsical multi-level structure in Youth Park which houses bowling, billiards, a cafe and a casino, he shook his head with a smile he said, "the Chinese!"
He hadn't taken us to the cluster of Albanian-built structures in Skanderbeg Square (above, Skanderbeg on his horse, the miraculously surviving 18th century Et'hem Bey mosque and the historic clock tower). So, we asked about its newest addition, looming large from behind and visible from most parts of the cities. "That is Albanian," he conceded. "It will be the tallest building in Tirana," he said with a contented smile, then added - with his excellent storyteller's pacing - "in 20-25 years, maybe." The builders have run out of money. I wanted to tell him that the museums and government buildings and construction projects are not the parts of Tirana that a visitor would go home remembering - something that I believe to be true. But he was speaking to something deeper about his city and mentioning the tourist impression felt trivial and beside the point.The fact remains that it took an Albanian's stroke of genius (and about a million strokes of the brush) to give Tirana its signature look. In 2000, Mayor Edi Rama - a former painter and Minister of Culture - decided to spruce things up a bit and commissioned bright, patterned paint jobs on many of the communist-era apartment blocks. Sometimes abstract, sometimes geometric, art covers the Painted Buildings of Tirana.
The insides weren't renovated and Rama's critics argued that superficial changes weren't what was most important. But it's pretty amazing what a fresh coat of paint will do. Rama remained mayor for three terms and is now the leader of the Socialist Party of Albania, of which Malvin is a card carrying member. A red business card was removed from his wallet and shown proudly to us, his name written on the back.
I know that its all just a facade - literally - but the bold colors struck me as such a bold decision. Anti-conformity, anti-uniformity, anti-dreariness. Anti-ugliness! For a country that was Communist for 47 years. That period of its life saw the demolition of almost every beautiful historic building in Tirana, the razing of religious buildings and re design of Skanderberg Square. Obviously, the statues of Stalin et. al came down with Communism's fall, but those big, concrete apartment blocks still got the message across. Imagine how terrible this view over Tirana would look without the color? What a blight the buildings would be against such a spectacular natural backdrop.
This is our favorite building, decorated with 'hanging laundry,' made more awesome by the actual laundry hanging around.
Sure, there are a number of people that felt the new look was its own eyesore. Many complained that it made the city look like a circus. Recognizing that these buildings have been fading in the sunlight for a decade or so and are still pretty darn bright, I can see their point. But I keep thinking about what Malvin said and thinking about Rama the artist-mayor signing Albania's name on the skyline canvas in stripes and squiggles and diamonds.
Other Albanian touches around the city include busts of modern-day heroes including this man (whose hair alone is worthy of tribute) and Mother Theresa, possibly the most famous Albanian of all. The man-made lake has seen better days, but the parks are leafy and beautiful. These things may not be the most 'important' landmarks, but they are certainly the most intriguing.
Then, there's the Pyramid. Malvin had us guess what we thought the monument was built for and we mumbled some answer or another. "It is like the other Pyramids. It is for a tomb." The Pyramid was built by former Prime Minister Enver Hoxha, lovingly referred to as "our dictator." "I was not alive when he died in 1985," our winsome new friend said solemnly, "but my parents said it was like the country had no breath. Like there was no sun." Hoxha was interred in the Pyramid for only a short while and then moved elsewhere, Malvin explained. "They will tear it down next year."

The Great Reconstruction Project

We don't post too much about the major tourist sites. After all, what's the point? Chances are, you've already seen hundreds - if not thousands - of pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum. There's not much new to say.

But chances are, you haven't seen a lot of pictures of the Athenian Acropolis that show what it really looks like. Since 1983, Athen's great symbol has been undergoing a prolonged, much delayed fix-up. My thought, when we first arrived at the Temple of Athena Nike, was "why do this at all?"

Right now, Athen's heart is a messy construction site. The machinery's been here so long that it's gotten rusty; stacks of marble and crates of who-knows-what seem part of the landscape itself, like so many bits of Periclean rubble. This will all be cleaned up one day, I didn't mind it at all. It was actually interesting to see the cranes and the lifts, the drills and tin-roofed sheds. I didn't mind that the Parthenon was partly covered. What was troubling was that the whole thing had somehow lost its oldness. It felt too new.

What I'd imagined of the Acropolis was a windswept, sunbaked mess of rocks. In my image, the columns lay about like dead trees after a fire, some standing, some fallen, their foliage gone. The stone was blackened by time, the crumbling rock half-inset into the hard-baked ground. This, of course, comes from grand-tour romanticism - but what's wrong with that?

This isn't the first time that the Acropolis has been re-furbished, but it's certainly the most comprehensive effort. The Parthenon and the structures that surround it were actually in pretty good shape for their first two millennia. Initially built between 447 and 432 BC, it wasn't until the 17th century AD that it was significantly damaged. Ottoman held Athens was attacked in 1687 by the Venetians; the hilltop was fortified and used as a gunpowder magazine. Unfortunately, the gunpowder blew up during the fight and the buildings were almost demolished. Subsequent looting by Turks and, later, by the British further ruined the Acropolis and scattered its many important works of art.

An attempt, in the 1840's, to restore some of the columns went poorly and actually did more damage. Work carried out then focused primarily on the Parthenon, while the other buildings were mostly ignored. The marble was arranged haphazardly, the workmen didn't care which piece went where and the actual outline of the building was shifted, for some unknown reason. Worse, the iron pins and ties that they used rusted and split apart a few stones. As air pollution increased, the stone deteriorated even more. By 1983, the Acropolis was in a very sorry state.

Above, the massive crane, built to lift huge pieces of dense rock. It's designed so that it can retract beneath the Parthenon's roofline when not in use - so that people's pictures won't be spoiled too much.The process has been long, expensive and arduous. About three hundred tons of stone were taken down to be repaired, reassembled or put into their proper place. But the real work was done on the ground, where thousands of pieces of rock were catalogued, examined and re-fit into the various structures - like a giant, architectural jigsaw puzzle. Replacement stone, when it has been used, has come only from Mount Penteliko's marble quarry, which was the ancient source of most of Athen's building material (the quarry has been protected by law, and is now only used for providing material to the reconstruction project).
I should say, before going further, that visiting was spectacular. In the early hours of a cold March morning, we spent the first half hour of our time there virtually alone. Athens spreads out beneath the citadel in all its glory, the Acropolis - no matter how altered by the construction - floats above the city like Zeus' cloud made into rock. This is, after all, the starting point of our imagery for the ancients. It's a masterpiece of European architecture, the foundation of myth, one of the wonders of the earth! If you get the chance, of course you should go.But things aren't what they used to be. The statuary has been completely removed to the brand-new Acropolis museum, everything on view at the site itself is a copy. There's something dispiriting about that, and about the bits of strangely white replacement marble - some of it injected, "liquid" stone - that's visible in odd places around the compound. The officials have said that there are no plans to restore the site to it's pre-explosion condition, only to return the buildings to their historical layout and to protect against future damage. The columns are all standing, though, and the place looks well-scrubbed. New.

Even if it's being done in the most sincere spirit of preservation, the work still feels somehow fake. I would rather see it broken. The thing about the best ancient sites is that they're old. We want to feel that they're old. The cranes and scaffolding don't bother me because they're temporary. But so much about the reconstruction seems at odds with what it is to be the Acropolis, or any other timeless thing.

Isn't it sometimes more accurate, more real, to see something at the end of its evolution? Great things are built, they decay, they lie in scattered pieces in the sun. To see that is to come up against the past and marvel at the thousands of years between the builders and ourselves. To see this is to see a recreation - not the hand of Pericles, but the hand of... who? A scientist? Some architecture professor? The bureau of tourism? After all, you can always just fly to Nashville and see this.

Built to Last

In the small town of Uzunköprü ("Long Bridge") stands this very long bridge, the longest stone bridge in the country, in fact. It was built between 1426 and 1443 by Sultan Murad II who used it to advance into the Balkans, crossing the Ergene River and the incredibly marshy area around it. It's over 4,560 feet long and has 174 arches, all still in tact.
Uzunköprü's bridge has remained actively in use for over 600 years. In 1963 it was renovated. Concrete paving makes the ride across less bumpy, but mostly everything else is all original. Cars move across in both directions, squeezing past each other, and trucks and buses take turns traversing the narrow lane. The structure sure is durable, which says a lot for Ottoman architecture. It's also pretty. Some arches are rounded, some are peaked. Little details show that no matter how functional a design was, aesthetics were important as well.
On one side of the bridge is an information board giving some background history. While we were there, sloshing through the muddy marsh, a family of female tourists is floor-length hijabs pulled up. The daughter, about our age, offered us a potato chip from her bag and explained that they were in town visiting her brother who is in the military. That's when we noticed the large army base right across the street.
On the other side of the bridge was the town's bus station a-bustle with passengers arriving and departing and simit vendors with huge trays of looped pretzels balanced on their heads. Under the bridge, a man disappeared beneath an arch, trash was heaped and this cow's head sat around waiting to become a balder, more picturesque skull.
In Edirne, at least four historic bridges still stand. The Tunca Bridge, named for the river it spans, is recovering from a recent flood. Melted snow, coupled with a Bulgarian dam which had sprung a leak nearby, resulted in a huge rush of water and overflow. Cars couldn't make it across and, just six days ago, Edirne's officials were talking about possible evacuation. An old man sitting feet away from the entrance warned us about crossing, even though it is clearly passable at this point. Uprooted trees and walkways showed the effects of the near disaster- but the 400+ year old bridge itself looked no worse for the wear.
These structures have survived storms and storming troops. Cows, carts and cars have been their daily traffic. They are historic and utilitarian, full of meaning and also just a means to an end. As we stood at the center of the Tunca Bridge, taking photos of an engraving in Arabic script that had been graffiti'd with smiley faces, horse-drawn-carts and tractors shared the road with new cars. The bridges and mosques stand tall with modernity flooding up all around them and then, gradually, recessing back to let them shine.

Baku's Destruction/Construction

In 1850, Baku - the capital of Azerbaijan - was little more than a sleepy, stone village on the Caspian sea. By 1900, it was producing twenty percent of the world's oil, and the population had boomed. In the last hundred and fifty years, Baku's population has grown from seven thousand to nearly two million people. A lot of buildings were put up very fast - now, they're being town down.

We arrived here in a period of mist and chill, to find a city on the cusp of becoming something entirely different from what it has been.
Baku is a city on the line between sea and desert, full of dust, mostly new. Near the water, large steel and glass towers erupt from the ground, standing near neglected oil-boom mansions and obliterating the older, lower houses. The european gilded age was once the style here. Now, it is being transformed into a city of blank lines and large-windowed boutiques. Walking down the main avenues, there is little evidence of place - it could be any wealthy, bland city. The houses that have been left standing are being furiously retrofitted and carved up.
Walking in the northern part of the capital, further away from the old town and the Caspian promenade, there are huge swaths of torn-up earth and knocked-down buildings. One can still see a few graceful rooflines and elaborate mouldings, though the structures are hollow and filled with rubble.

Partly, these blocks were leveled because the buildings there were deemed unsafe or unfit to live in. Skeptics aren't so sure - there are people who believe the government has been leveling houses to provide inexpensive land for development and to help keep the housing market from collapsing.
The housing market, unlike in other places, has been very strong (it grew 7.9% in 2011). Azerbaijan is becoming wealthier - at least on paper - and real estate prices have been going up. Sadly, there isn't a great deal of parity, and most of the people who have been displaced from their homes aren't able to afford the new apartments.

It's common to walk next to glittering, new apartments on sidewalks of earth and debris. Little has been done to help the cities infrastructure. Manhole covers are often missing. Electric lines sag. And row after row of houses have been left to decay and fill with trash, their front walls ripped out, their floors torn through. It's unlikely that they would have become like this on their own, though that's what the government claims. They sit, waiting to be bulldozed.

The modern construction standards aren't necessarily very good, either. Despite claims that the new towers are being built to improve the quality of life and safety of Baku's citizens, that's hard to verify. In 2007, a prominent fourteen-story building project collapsed, killing five construction workers. Look at the state of this scaffolding.
Baku is a place that won't have much of anything old. There wasn't much here to begin with, there will be less soon. In the old town - a potentially delightful warren of small streets and creaky buildings - they are ripping out the cobbles as I write this, to be replaced with more "modern" paving. The old houses have been bought up; oil-company logos grace the plaques on the doors. One corner of the town's wall was leveled to make room for a hotel.

The Traditional Balconies of Tbilisi

On our first night in Georgia, literally minutes after disembarking our flight into Tbilisi, we were taken on a whirlwind tour of the city. Our energetic taxi driver, keen on practicing his English and his steering in the right-side seat of his newly acquired British car, took us around to all the main sights. Saint George atop his horse in the square, Mother Georgia with her sword atop the city on her hill. He circled back, “I will show you my favorite house in Tbilisi!” and brought us to a spotlit row of buildings. I can’t say I know exactly which one he pointed to, but they all made an impression on me. “Typical Georgia architecture,” he noted. Each house was sweetly elegant, with multiple balconies supported by diagonally beams beneath. They reminded me of the underside of a paper parasol. The simple beauty of the houses endeared me to the city and to Irakli.
When we revisited the row in the daytime, I could see just how weathered some were. “I would like to renovate it,” he had said. “Renovate” seemed too light of a term. In fact, all through the city, we came across balconied houses that had crossed the line between diamond in the rough and crushed diamond dust. The most amazing part was that so many of them showed signs of life inside. We’d walk beneath a balcony, marvel at the age and deterioration of the wood beams and then hear laughter emanate from inside. Apparently, many people refrain from making any renovations on their houses if they are considered historic monuments, preferring to hold out for an investor who’d like to come in and fix it all at once. Unfortunately, these investors rarely set their eye on these buildings for restoration purposes.
For the past few years, there’s been a fight to protect traditional balconied houses that are at risk of being demolished. An article written in 2008 by BBC, which cited facts that I would wager are little changed today, spoke about the fight for “Tbilisi’s soul.” A deputy mayor at the time (still in office now) said that he wanted to reduce the number of protected ‘historical monuments’ from 1,700 to 500. Too many of them were simply beyond repair, he explained. I have to say - in my opinion – there’s some validity to this. Poverty, two hundred plus years of life and the earthquake off 2002 have all taken their toll on these 19th century houses. It’s difficult to blame anyone living in almost unlivable conditions to turn down an offer from the city or a private company. Even if it is easy to hate the soulless apartment block put up in its place.
At least in the Old Town, restoration seems to be taking place. Tourist brochures map out a “Traditional Balconied Houses of Tbilisi” walking tour and quote poets who have written about the multigalleried city. New buildings at the base of Narikala fortress, nearby the historic sulfur baths, have been built in a similar style. New, fresh wood balconies have replaced crumbling ones or have been added a little anachronistically to modern buildings.
When I googled “Tbilisi balconies,” I found a press release issued by an energy credit company that cited all the benefits of putting more traditional balconies on buildings. Complete with graphs and charts, they explained how they were designed with precise relation to the sun, in order to cool a room in the summer and facilitate heating in the winter. Even the decorative fretwork hanging down had a noted benefit. Hey, there’s gotta be a reason so many were built this way.
The balconies of Tbilisi, wooden, glass, wraparound, open, closed, old, new, are truly unique and absolutely beautiful. As the city moves into its new phase of high-gloss modernity, I honestly feel that they will try to keep this charm intact. Call me naïve, but I think that conservationists' fears that Tbilisi will lose all its character through demolition is unfounded. You walk around this city and feel like they know what they have going for it – even if they don’t have the time or money to really get around to polishing it all.
Not everything can be saved, but the beauty of these balconies is simply too obvious to overlook. I mean, they’ve gotta know that this stuff is a tourism gold mine, right? Irakli’s favorite house may or may not make the final cut. I’m not sure if he’d rather see it fall further and further into ruin or simply torn down. This is a city in transition and it will be interesting to see where all the chips fall in ten years or so.