Two Waters of Samegrelo
Updated: 1 day ago
Somewhere past the last roundabout in Zugdidi, the road stops being what I would normally call a road. The asphalt frays into patches and potholes before giving way to stretches of packed earth. As I drove, I gripped the wheel a little tighter every time the car dropped into an unexpected dip. Soon, I find myself enjoying this process and becoming more and more skilled at it.
This is how you enter Mingrelia: slowly negotiating the ground itself, rather than passing through a gate or a sign. This negotiation reveals the essence of the region.
Samegrelo, as the Georgians call it, is a place where water has spent millennia arguing with limestone, carving canyons in one spot and boiling up through sulphur springs in another. Meanwhile, people have spent centuries bathing in that same water, trading beside it and building and losing empires on its banks. We spent a week based in Zugdidi looking for both kinds of argument, and Georgii and I found them at Martvili Canyon and the hot sulphur springs of Nokalakevi.
The road does the talking
Before both sites, there was the drive, which deserves its own paragraph. The further we travelled from Zugdidi, the greener the landscape became. Its lush vegetation made it easy to understand why this stretch of the Black Sea coast was once swampy enough to be notorious for malaria, and why Megrelian cuisine is full of sharp spices and vinegar, which were thought to ward off fevers.
The animals owned the road more than we did. Chickens skittered along the verges near town, still a little wary of cars. By the time we were ten minutes out, cows had started lying down in the middle of the lane with the specific confidence of creatures who have never once lost an argument with a Toyota. Piglets trotted along in loose, unsupervised gangs.
More than the animals, it was the abandonment that struck me: crumbling houses with trees growing through the roof, a school with no windows, a factory shell overgrown with grass. Every few kilometres, we passed a blue municipal sign announcing the name of the next village. I kept asking Georgii to mark locations on the map whenever I saw something interesting, such as ruins, strange concrete monuments or a monastery halfway up a hillside. Sometimes, we'd pass someone walking alone on the back roads or a car coming the other way. I'd catch them doing a visible double-take at the rental car with a woman behind the wheel.
And everywhere, dogs. The issue of Georgia's stray dog population is widely discussed here, and government sterilisation programmes have processed around nine thousand animals in a single pilot phase. Each sterilised dog is given a small ear tag to ensure that the same animal isn't caught and operated on twice. We saw those tags on almost every dog that came close enough to check: dozing in the shade outside shops or trotting alongside the road with the same confidence as the cows.
Martvili Canyon: where water carves
Martvili Canyon is a showcase of Samegrelo's geology. The Abasha River spent a long time cutting a two-and-a-half-kilometre gorge through limestone, leaving cliffs that rise up to seventy metres above turquoise pools so saturated with colour that they appear to be artificially lit.
Before it became a ticketed attraction, the Dadiani family — the princely dynasty that ruled Mingrelia for centuries from the Dadiani Palace in Zugdidi — used a private walkway through the gorge to reach the natural bathing pools.
Martvili is a place that is clearly in the midst of a transformation. The canyon only gained national monument status in 2013, and renovations in 2019, including the addition of walkways, a ticket office and inflatable boats to ferry visitors through the most dramatic and otherwise inaccessible part of the gorge, have turned it from a local secret into one of the most photographed spots in western Georgia. This is what happens when spectacular geology meets a struggling economy in need of a new export. Samegrelo's canyons and limestone formations are becoming one of its real industries, alongside its corn, dairy products, and hazelnuts. You can witness this change in the contrast between the crumbling road that led you there and the newly built visitor centre at the end of it.
Nokalakevi: water that heals, and a city that isn't there anymore
While Martvili's waters have already finished carving their mark, Nokalakevi's waters are still actively doing so. Located about an hour from Martvili, near the Tekhuri River, hot hydrogen-sulfide water so powerful that it can boil an egg emerges from self-flowing boreholes and cascades over pale, pillow-shaped carbonate deposits that resemble ice. It's as if a hot waterfall is wearing a cold waterfall's costume. Locals have been coming here for generations specifically because the water is said to have healing properties. When we arrived, a van was parked near the springs, and its owner was settled in for what looked like the long haul.
About three and a half kilometres away is Nokalakevi Fortress, also known by its Greek name, Archaeopolis. Archaeologists date its origins back to the thirteenth century BC, and the fortifications, palace and citadel walls still standing today date to around the fifth century AD. The fortress once controlled trade along the Tekhuri river, moving gold, honey, wine, timber and flax through the ancient kingdoms of Colchis and Egrisi until it was destroyed by an Arab general named Marwan in 736 AD. Some believe that this was Aia, the mythical city where Jason and the Argonauts came looking for the Golden Fleece. A local legend associated with the spring tells of a pregnant woman who threw herself into the river while fleeing an invading army, and turned to stone. The spring is still nicknamed Dedamoka, meaning 'pregnant mother', after her.
Unfortunately, we didn't make it to the fortress this time, but I'm sure we'll find occasion to explore it on our next visit to Zugdidi.
Back to Odishi
Both days ended the same way: back in Zugdidi, at a restaurant called Odishi, ordering more or less the same things because we'd really liked what we tried the first time. Shashlik, as the main event of the table: chunks of meat (pork in our case) marinated and grilled over charcoal on skewers. Then, Nigvziani badrijani, thin aubergine slices rolled around a filling of ground walnuts and garlic. Pkhali, small mounds of minced greens (spinach, beetroot leaves, and leek) bound with that same walnut paste and usually finished with pomegranate seeds. And to share, a khachapuri filled with spiced kidney beans instead of cheese, which I learned afterward has its own name, lobiani, a close cousin of khachapuri.
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