One morning in April, 1887, after a five days' passage from Odessa,
we entered the harbour at Batum.
Batum (Hôtel Imperial, Hôtel de France, Hôtel d'Europe) is a town
of 10,000 inhabitants, mostly Georgians; it consists of an ancient
Asiatic quarter, dirty and tumble-down looking, and a European one
only seven years old. Its situation at the foot of the mountains is
lovely beyond all description. The place has a decidedly "Far West"
look about it, everything seems half-finished; the streets are broad
and, with a few exceptions, unpaved, the depth of the mud varies from
three or four inches to half a yard, heaps of rotting filth furnish
food for numerous pigs, and in the best thoroughfares ducks find
convenient lakes on which to disport themselves.
I took an early opportunity of presenting myself at the British
Vice-Consulate, a small, two-storey cottage, the lower half of which
is of brick, the upper of corrugated iron sheets. Mr. Demetrius
R. Peacock, the only representative of British interests in the
Caucasus, is a man whose services deserve fuller recognition. It would
be hard to find a post where more diplomatic tact is required, yet he
contrives to make himself respected and admired by all the many races
with which he is in daily contact. Mr. Peacock was born in Russia,
and has spent most of his life in that empire, but he is nevertheless
a thorough Englishman. In Tiflis I heard a good story about him. On
one occasion the French Consul-General jokingly said to him, "Why,
Peacock, you are no Englishman, you were born in Russia." To which
our representative replied, "Our Saviour was born in a stable, but
for all that He did not turn out a horse."
Although Batum is not very attractive as a town, it is at any rate
far preferable to Poti or Sukhum, and it has undoubtedly a splendid
future before it. Even at the present time the exports amount to
nearly 400,000 tons, chiefly petroleum, manganese ores, wool, cotton,
maize, tobacco, wine, fancy woods, &c. It is essentially a city of
the future; and its inhabitants firmly believe that it will yet be a
powerful rival of Odessa in trade, and of the Crimean coast-towns as a
watering-place. At present we should hardly recommend it to invalids;
the marshes round about are gradually being drained; but they still
produce enough malaria to make the place dangerous to Europeans;
the drinking-water, too, is bad.
The harbour is fairly well sheltered, but rather small; yet, to the
unprofessional eye, there seems no reason why it might not easily be
enlarged if necessary. The entrance is protected by a fortification
in the form of an irregular rectangle, lying on the S.W. corner of
the bay, behind the lighthouse. The earthworks, about seventy or
eighty feet high, and lined with masonry, cover a piece of ground
apparently about 300 paces long by 180 paces broad; a broad-gauge
railway surrounds the fortress. When I was there the work was being
pushed forward very rapidly, and preparations were being made to fix
a heavy gun close to the lighthouse--at that time there were only
about a dozen guns of small calibre in position.
In the town there is absolutely nothing to attract the stranger's
attention; a few mosques and churches, petroleum refineries, half a
dozen European shops, some half-finished public buildings, and the
embryo of a public garden on the shore serve as an excuse for a walk;
but if the traveller happens to hit upon a spell of wet weather,
he will soon have seen all he wants to see of Batum, and will get
out of its atmosphere of marsh gas and petroleum as soon as possible.
The only daily train leaves at eight o'clock in the morning; the
station, although it is a terminus of so much importance, is a wretched
wooden building, a striking contrast to the one at Baku, which would
not disgrace our own metropolis. The railway skirts the sea for about
thirty miles, and on the right lies a range of hills covered with a
luxuriant growth of fine forest-trees and thick undergrowth gay with
blossoms; in the neighbourhood of the town there are already many
pretty villas. The rain of the previous few weeks had made the woods
wonderfully beautiful, and the moist air was heavy with fragrance;
I never saw such a wealth of plant life before. At Samtredi, where
the lines from Batum and Poti meet, we leave Guri and Mingreli
behind us and enter Imereti. On the left we now have a fine broad
plain, and near us flows the Rion, the ancient Phasis. The country
is far more thickly populated than Guri or Mingreli, or any other
part of Trans-Caucasia, but it could easily support a much larger
number if the ground were properly worked. I was amazed when I saw,
for the first time, five pairs of oxen dragging one wooden plough,
but the sight of this became familiar to me before I had lived long
in Georgia. At the roadside stations (I need hardly say that our
train stopped at all of them) I saw some fine faces--one poor fellow
in a ragged sheepskin cloak quite startled me by his resemblance to
Dante Alighieri. From the station of Rion, on the river of that name,
a branch line runs northward to Kutaïs, none other than the Cyta in
Colchis whence Jason carried off Medea and the Golden Fleece.
Kutaïs (Hôtel de France, Hôtel Colchide, Hôtel d'Italie) is a
beautiful town of 25,000 inhabitants, almost all Georgians. The
ruins of an old castle on the other side of the river show where
the town stood a century ago, and from this point the best view of
Kutaïs is obtained. Abundance of good building-stone, a rich soil,
and plenty of trees, render the capital of Imereti a charming sight;
its elevation of about 500 feet makes its atmosphere cool and bracing
compared with that of the coast-towns. The traveller who wishes to
become acquainted with Georgian town-life cannot do better than stay
in Kutaïs a month or two. About five miles off is the monastery of
Gelati, built in the tenth century, and renowned as the burial-place
of the glorious Queen Tamara. From Kutaïs a journey may be made to
Svaneti, the last Caucasian state conquered by Russia, and even now
only nominally a part of the Tsar's dominions; Mr. Wolley's book,
"Savage Svanetia," will give the intending visitor some idea of the
sport that may be had in that wild region. The road across the Caucasus
from Kutaïs to Vladikavkaz is much higher and wilder than the famous
Dariel road, and I much regret that I had not time to travel by it.
Pursuing our journey from Rion to the eastward we soon reach Kvirili,
which is about to be connected by a branch line of railway with
Chiaturi, the centre of the manganese district; at present all the ore
is carried down to the main line, a distance of twenty-five miles,
in the wooden carts called arbas. Passing through glens of wondrous
beauty, adorned with picturesque ruins of ancient strongholds, we
at length arrive at the mountain of Suram, 3027 feet above Black Sea
level, the watershed which separates the valley of the Kura, with its
hot summers and cold winters, from the more temperate region drained
by the Rion. The railway climbs very rapidly to the summit of the pass,
but it comes down still more rapidly; there is a slope of one in twenty
for a distance of a thousand feet; at the bottom is the town of Suram
with its fine old castle. We now follow the course of the Kura all
the way to Tiflis, passing Mikhailovo (whence a road runs to Borzhom,
the most fashionable summer-resort in Trans-Caucasia) and Gori, a
good-sized town, near which is the rock city of Uphlis Tsikhe. It is
half past nine at night before Mtzkhet, the ancient capital of Georgia,
is reached, and at a quarter past ten we enter Tiflis, ten hours from
Kutaïs, and fourteen hours from Batum. Our journey is not yet ended,
however, for it takes half an hour to drive from the station to the
fashionable quarter of the town where the hotels are situated.