Architecture – Page 3 – The Book-Butterfly

What once was ancient Colchis

Percival Everett is an unlikely choice to read on a trip to Batumi. But before his international fame catapulted with “James,” a retelling of Huckleberry Finn — which just won the National Book Award — he wrote “For Her Dark Skin,” a retelling of Medea’s story. The modern and humorous take is a contrasting companion read to Euripedes’ “Medea.” Everett’s version has only one word on the first page: Colchis.

Colchis, in Greek mythology the opulent kingdom, the place Jason and the Argonauts had ventured forth to obtain the Golden Fleece, homeland of Medea; and in recent times, the city by the Black Sea dominated by financial-oil dynasties of the Rothschilds and the Nobels; modern-day Batumi.

The scenic and comfortable train ride from Tbilisi to this city bordering Turkey is something worth experiencing. Seeing snow-capped mountains in the window gradually dissolve into the shores of the Black Sea was already worth the five-hour trip.

But when I arrived, the city’s superficiality was what I instantly felt. The hodgepodge of strange architecture seemed almost grotesque, and the sports cars driven by the showy spawn of Russian oligarchs did nothing to expunge that feeling. To shake off my first impression, I strolled to the corniche where the sunset was setting against the Black Sea. A dog was wading in and lapping up its history-rich waters, locals were sitting by the banks despite the wind chill, then I sought refuge in its art gallery which, thankfully, was a nice building. And then I started to soften, and I reminded myself why I was there.

I was there because of the stories: Because of everything I read about the Black Sea; because of Medea’s tragedy, whose statue is the centerpiece of its main square; because of Ali & Nino, whose two figures pass through one another as the sun sets, and separate again after a few minutes, depicting the bittersweet cycle of what is deemed to be the greatest love story of the Caucasus — written by a writer who happened to be Stalin’s first biographer and whose life was as adventurous and intriguing as his writings.

What Paul Theroux writes in the afterword is especially true of Batumi: “Ali and Nino is both a love story and a cultural artifact, and part of its message is that governments rise and fall, wars rage, cities are laid to waste, people are displaced, authors die. What remains? Well, written words remain…”

If my photos of Batumi look like an incohesive potpourri, that’s on Batumi. What weaves all these images together is intangible and invisible, but also transcendent — the stories.

The Cave Towns of Georgia

There are three significant cave towns in Georgia: Uplistsikhe (6th-4th century BCE), Vardzia (12th century CE), and David Gareja (6th century CE). These sites have distinct features that are unique to each, so I was naturally inclined to visit all three. Because I have already shared photos of David Gareja along with the Rainbow Mountain excursion, this set of photos will mainly focus on Uplistsikhe and Vardzia.

Uplistsikhe

UPLISTSIKHE lured me first because it was an important center of trade and culture along the Silk Road. The entire cave system covers an area of approximately 19.8 acres. Georgia’s major earthquakes have damaged a vast portion of the rock-cut architecture, but many vestiges of ingenuity in design and detail remain. The presence of a theater awed me. One room has an oculus and its walls bear markings of its raiders throughout the centuries. The first photo in this set is not of mere round holes overlooking a spectacular landscape, but evidence of Georgia’s ancient wine-making tradition. The holes are where they buried the qvevri, the clay vessels used in fermentation. It is the same technique that they use in natural wine-making today, and which sets their wines apart from the rest of the vinification world.

Vardzia

VARDZIA is close to the Armenian border. Some of its caves were already inhabited since the Bronze Age and then developed into a shelter from invasions during King Giorgi’s time, but it was under Queen Tamar’s reign in the 12th century, Georgia’s Golden Age, when it flourished as the complex cave city of 50,000 people. It is 13 stories high, although 19 during its zenith. The water system, the underground river, the ventilation, the frescoes decorating the church, the carvings, its library, apothecary, wine cellars, and monastery, are nothing short of impressive. The black figures you might see moving from afar are Georgian Orthodox monks. Amazingly so, the monastery is still being actively used up to this day. But even more impressive to me is the fact that at the peak of Georgia’s Golden Age, the king was a woman.

Rainbow Mountains, drunk monks, Russian authors, and Beethoven, near the Azerbaijani border

A day trip close to the Azerbaijani border had the Rainbow Mountains (preferably, bacon mountains haha) and the 6th century David Gareji Cave Monastery on the itinerary.

What I did not expect was the off-road adventure getting there, trekking some tricky paths, the otherworldliness of the landscape, and stopping at a far-flung, family-run restaurant in the mountains. This small restaurant had a cozy room full of books; an unplayed and untuned Russian piano; and two drunk, flirtatious, bearded Orthodox priests as old as the piano, who blurted out the names of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov in their drunken stupor. I was so amused by them, so when one saw my eyes light up in recognition, he asked, “You understand? You understand?” The names were all I understood, but it became a game. He would say, “Bulgakov,” and I would answer, “Master and Margarita,” and he would smile broadly and say a string of wine-soaked words. When he said, “Dostoevsky,” I said, “The Idiot,” and he laughed so heartily.

My frozen fingers which hadn’t caressed a piano in a week felt grateful for the contact with the piano keys despite the avant-garde sound that they produced. I felt the warmth generated by my fingers begin to spread to my heart and into the room. And even though it would have been more logical to play a Rachmaninoff, the Adagio of Beethoven’s Pathetique just flowed naturally out of me; and I relished in how it hushed the room, hushed the drunk priests, and somehow it hushed my soul. I did not wish for a better piano. I did not wish for anything else at that moment. Up near the Azerbaijani border, music still found me, and it felt like home.

An Unexpected Supra in Sighnaghi

The Caucasus Mountains is a sight that cannot be dismissed in Sighnaghi, and so is the thought that

The Caucasus Mountains is a sight that cannot be dismissed in Sighnaghi, and so is the thought that beyond that horizon is Russia.

This was the setting for my first and unexpected “supra”. I have read about these intimate feasts that are inextricable from Georgian culture; and dreamt of experiencing at least one during this trip; but at the same time, setting realistic introvert expectations that I could not simply get myself invited into one.

By lunchtime, however, I found myself in a group of two Uzbeks, two South Koreans, two Australians, a Spaniard, and a Georgian. The Georgian decided to perform the duties of a “tamada” to our very own supra. Simply put, a tamada is a toastmaster; although the role and significance of a tamada cannot be fully encapsulated in just one word.

Traditionally, a tamada is a family patriarch or a village wise man, and as he steers the course of the supra, the feasting is not merely on food and wine, but also on meaningful conversations.

And there we were. The united nations. The food was relished, the “kantsi” (a drinking vessel made from ram horn and filled with wine) was passed. After a poignant discussion on the two main topics that should be avoided — geopolitics and religion — our tamada prodded us to express what was important to each of us: Peace, said the Georgian. Love, said the Spaniard. Friendship, said the Korean. World leaders who are not war freaks, said the Uzbek. Meaningful experiences and learning about different cultures, said the Australian. Gratitude, said the Filipina. And even though we said different things, we all meant the same thing. If only the world could be one big supra…

Gori, hometown of the most (in)famous Georgian

Do not look up Gori on a map. You might chide me for going to a place that is less than an hour’s drive away from the zone of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that is closely allied with Russia, is inaccessible to tourists traveling through Georgia.

Gori, however, is lovely and I’m glad that I was able to have enough time to stroll around its old city, buy steaming cheese khachapuri from a random bakery, and see its medieval fortress and quaint old town — Gori sites normally overlooked for its main attraction. History enthusiasts come here for only one reason: It is the birthplace of the most (in)famous Georgian: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin.

All in a single compound, one can find the wooden house in which he was born and in which his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, maintained a shoe workshop in the basement; Stalin’s personal bulletproof railway carriage that he used from 1941 onwards; and the stately Stalin Museum that was built in 1951.

Nagged by the question of how someone so dashing and acutely intelligent became the ruthless tyrant that he was, I squeezed this sizable book into my busy schedule while planning this trip. Doing so earned a valid question from my goddaughter as to why I was reading about him if I knew he was a bad guy. Haha! But this book is informative, and engaging, but also heartbreaking. Young Stalin’s life turns out to be the stuff movies are made of. This award-winning biography doesn’t turn one into a Stalin sympathizer, however. It offers an in-depth understanding of the world that nurtured him (“a ferociously Caucasian kaleidoscope of east and west”), the times and the circumstances surrounding the would-be dictator, and a rather sinister intimation of how idealism mixed with unchecked personal trauma and history can dangerously spill into collective trauma and history.

Stalin is celebrated as a hero for defeating the Nazis, but part of me still cannot grasp how anyone can revere him and overlook the Holodomor and the Great Purge of his rule in which the death toll was millions more than that of the Holocaust. But who am I to judge when Filipinos also have a penchant for charismatic strongmen who disregard human cost for political gain?

But before I end up touching on something too sensitive, let me just say this: It should be a crime for a war criminal to be this good-looking. 😅

The Georgia Book Stack

A light rain was falling, a fine spray, unlike what rain is in the tropics. Within a couple of hours the deep purple of evening entered through that same window and transformed the spray into delicate snowflakes that vanished even before you could touch them; inconspicuous magic in the micro details when one season gives way to another.

It was toward the end of the trip when I took this photo of my traveling companions on the windowsill. Absent from the stack, but verily lodged in my consciousness, are Euripedes’ Medea and Percival Everett’s For Her Dark Skin.

I went to Georgia accompanied by seven books, and after jaunts to Tbilisi’s charming bookshops, a modest number of three Georgian masterpieces were read on the train and during long drives, then added to the pile.

The eclectic curation is an education in itself as it includes a Greek tragedy, a rather feminist and modern retelling of the tragedy, a wonderful and informative chronicle of Georgia’s unique wine culture, journalistic reports and stories from the early years of post-Soviet Georgia, the greatest love story of the Caucasus, literary criticism, a portrait of young Stalin that is also a portrait of a nation, a painful recollection of the Georgian-Abkhazian armed conflict in the 90s, epic poetry, and Tolstoyan short stories.

Once again, people wondered whether I had gone to another destination just to read. But I know they’re only kidding.

For who isn’t aware that reading and traveling are not separate experiences? They are halves of a whole that lend clarity and depth to each other.

In our travels, what we notice, perceive, and experience — and what we contribute to meaningful interactions, or how we overflow — largely depend on what is already inside us. “Nothing flows out of a jar except that already inside it,” writes the preeminent Georgian author, Shota Rustaveli in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.

In life, reading and traveling are merely expressions of how one chooses to take their fill.

Sheesh Mahal (Mirror Palace) and a passage from Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”

“…Your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art… Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the Shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirrors, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches… I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how these mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred… it means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures.” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Currently reading Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and this passage reminded me of the 16th century Sheesh Mahal (“Mirror Palace”) in Rajasthan, and the photos I still have not uploaded from the India trip.

I have not read historical evidence, but I was told Sheesh Mahal’s mirrors were transported from Belgium by Elephants.

William Dalrymple: In Xanadu – A Quest

Trace Marco Polo’s 700-year-old passage from Jerusalem to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Xanadu? “Insane!” most people would say, as this journey runs along war-torn lands and the route bestudded with disputed territories.

But that is exactly what twenty-one-year-old William Dalrymple set out to do in 1986 under a travel scholarship. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale and published this book, his first, in 1989.

The first several pages impressively encapsulates both the divisiveness and the beauty within Jerusalem: “If history repeats itself anywhere, it does so in Jerusalem. […] For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived here. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them. […] It is only when you get here and have a moment to sit, and think, and look back, that you come to realize… how beautiful Jerusalem still is.” With a few hundred pages left after reading such lines, and a dreamy itinerary that includes Cyprus, Syria, Eastern Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashgar — a city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Peking, and Xanadu in Inner Mongolia, a reader could only look forward to the adventure.

The Dalrymple of In Xanadu, however, is a far cry from the more perceptive and compassionate Dalrymple who affected me deeply in the pages of Nine Lives last June. It is understandable, considering the twenty-year publication gap between the two books. (In Xanadu, 1989; Nine Lives, 2009.)

The author admits, in the introduction of the 25th anniversary edition of In Xanadu, how he still feels “deeply ambiguous” about his first book. “For In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self – bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarrassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations – is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can’t quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to, or at least cutting down to size, for his own good.”

He was but a boy whose judgments were not too tolerant and whose remarks were yet impervious to today’s hyper political correctness. In spite of that, this is probably Dalrymple in his funniest and most candid. If Nine Lives found me crying inside a room of a Jaipur haveli, In Xanadu found me chuckling in public several times. For all his faults of youth, I think we can still count on him being a more reliable and entertaining narrator than Marco Polo.

As a fan, I find it encouraging to be able to track, through his books, how much his travels, his experiences, and his eagerness to learn and inform has transfigured him into the literary hero that he is today. It is comforting to be able to observe how our traveling intellectual icons grow. That way we are reminded that they are human and their writings are those we can grow with. Either that, or we’ll come to realize that we’ve somehow grown, too.

By reading In Xanadu, one is assured that the reading journey with Dalrymple can only get better from here. Who else is looking forward to getting their hands on The Golden Road?

Traveling Companions in India

“A small bookcaseful of the right books, and you are set for life.” — Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey

Friends can tell when I have re-attuned to daily life because I become a bit scarce on social media, and I return to writing about (or not about, in the case of Vikram Seth) the books I have read.

This is the India-themed reading stack for June that has spilled over to July. Not too different from the way India spills beyond what you have allotted for it. India has a way of spilling over from a journey and into a life.

But it’s time these books are homed into the sections where they belong, in close proximity to each other, in a library organized by political geography. And I can’t do that without at least writing a few lines about each one.

These particular books deserve exhaustive reviews, but for the time being, I will have to be content with abridgments of why they accompanied me on my trip and what I loved best about them.

Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry

Several Mistry volumes wait on my shelf. And yet, this is my first time to read him. I was not sure where to begin. All I instinctively felt was that a Mistry perspective was necessary for a more encompassing idea of India. I ended up choosing his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

Contemporary Indian literature that come my way overflow with the repercussions of British colonialism, the partition, or the relationship of India’s Muslim and Hindu populace. But this is a seldom explored perspective of India’s modern history through the Parsee experience — an exciting realization for someone who is enamored with Iran! (As most of us know, Parsees are descendants of Zoroastrians from Persia who fled to India as a result of the Arab Conquest.)

It is set in 1971, the year of the Indo-Pakistani war and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Centered on Gustad and his family, this is a story of ordinary lives enmeshed in extraordinary times. It teems with the humor, the pains, and the realities of living. This is a book for readers who do not skim over the prose but find beauty in taking time to appreciate details pregnant with cultural understanding.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple’s name is often identified with lyrical prose and India, so this choice does not need any expounding. Although I was wrong in thinking it would be an easy read. I thought it would not be too emotionally affecting and would balance out the heavy themes of The Raj Quartet. Three stories in, I was already sniffling and wiping away tears inside my room in a Jaipur haveli.

This resulted in the decision that I would not read the nine stories straight, that I would read them in-between other books, in between deep breaths, in between exploring the land in which these stories are set, and that it would be the book I’d carry in my sling bag throughout my whole stay in India.

The nine lives that Dalrymple immortalizes from his travels flow from a pen of empathy and genuine curiosity, always with the intention to “humanize rather than exoticize”. It is a portrayal of nine characters that break free from standardized religions, and which represent different sects and personal beliefs that the author hopes to have escaped “many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much of Western writing on Indian religion”; they are also manifestations of how, despite the exponential rate of change and modernization in the country, an older and more diverse India survives.

It is a book I would highly recommend even to those who are not planning a trip to India. Its lessons in faith and tolerance are relevant and enduring.

Jaipur Nama, Giles Tillotson | Banaras, Vertul Singh

“There is a beautiful word in Bengali — boi, which literally means a book. The word was commonly used in the vernacular for cinema and later came to be picked up by the Bengali elite while referring to an artsy movie and continues to be used to imply films. It has a deep connotation in that cinema is not just seen, it is also read. While walking through a city, one also reads it…” — Vertul Singh, Banaras

These two books have these in common: I purchased them from independent bookshops in Jaipur; they concentrate on a single city in India as the subject for the entire book; and they are books a reading traveler would benefit from tremendously when traveling to Jaipur or Varanasi.

While I learned so much about Jaipur from Tillotson’s Jaipur Nama, was thoroughly entertained by it, loved the passages on Jaipur’s architecture, and saw with my own eyes the wonders described in its pages, I was inscrutably drawn to the tone of Singh’s Banaras. There seemed to be an imploring strain that made itself heard to me, beckoning me to Varanasi, waiting for me to read the city beyond book pages, asking me to look into its soul.

Pyre, Perumal Murugan

Rajat Book Corner’s shelves were cascading with the best selections. They had Pamuk, Mahfouz, Proust, recent literary prize winners, the Indian greats, among many others. So you can imagine the argument between my other selves against the practical one who kept whispering firmly, “Just one book, just one book.”

After a while of intense internal struggle, I finally went with something I hadn’t seen in Philippine bookstores: Pyre, a 2023 longlister of the International Booker Prize written by Perumal Murugan.

“Good choice,” said the man at the counter.

“Thank you,” I answered, thinking it was something he always said to bookstore clientele.

“It’s a great book! We discussed this in our bookclub.” That’s when I realized he meant it. He had read Pyre. To my surprise, he added, “Wait. I think this is a signed copy. The author signed it when he came here.” And indeed, it was!

Pyre was the only book from this stack that I was able to finish reading within 24 hours, but the ending left me stunned for days!

This is powerful storytelling, but it is, by no means, a pleasant read. It feels claustrophobic and asphyxiating: But that’s how prejudice is. That’s how ignorance and intolerance feels. That’s what hatred is.

The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott

And now, the portion of this stack that took me longest to finish — The Raj Quartet: Four volumes of what is often declared as the nonpareil narrative of the dissolution of the British Raj.

The claim was convincing enough for me to take the massive tomes along for the ride even if that was all I heard about it. As I slowly turned page after page, I increasingly understood that it is necessarily heavy. It is, as Scott himself wrote, “The luggage I am conscious of carrying with me everyday of my life — the luggage of my past, of my personal history and of the world’s history.”

In Hilary Spurling’s introduction, she writes, “Scott did not condone the Raj. He looked long and hard at its many failures, its inhumanity, its smugness, self-righteousness and rigidity.” And although it is written in a Tolstoyan sweep, it finds a Filipino parallel in Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun in the way it shows how India’s War of Independence was not merely a confrontation between the Indians and British, but also between British and British, and between Indian and Indian. Scott lays open the lives of the unrecorded men and women, the lives that fall under the gray shadows, the ones “historians won’t recognize or which we relegate to our margins.”

Imagine this, a sketch. The first volume an outline on which Scott would continue to color and add contrast in the succeeding volumes, peopling it with new characters and adding the Second World War as another layer of complexity against an already rich and tumultuous Indian tapestry.

The first page of Volume I reads, “This is the story of a rape.” Reading about rape is not something a solo female traveler would intentionally do on a trip. But I was astonished by how Scott’s writing carried me through anyway. It made Volume II inevitable, wherein, all of a sudden, the characters became so fully dimensional you could touch them!

It was not lost on me that the first two volumes ended with two women giving birth but with grave consequences on the women. A metaphor for the birthing of nations, perhaps? Volumes III and IV continued to consistently reveal the multifacetedness of human beings, of nations, of identity, and of history. By the end of it all, I could only close my eyes, sigh, and try to take it all in, then whisper to myself, “What a journey!”

Rohinton Mistry’s Gustad once wondered, “Would this journey be worth it? Was any journey ever worth the trouble?”

Whether the question refers to journeys in literature or other lands, you won’t really know the answer unless you take it. Take it.

The transmutation of India into a memory…

And just like that, I am back home, and immediately started teaching a series of online students in the US within the hour I arrived.

When people ask about my trip, I find myself answering that it was eye-opening, very much like reading a satisfying book.

I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I knew what it would be like. I soon learned that what I had in mind was a narrow-minded, stereotype-based, and extremely ignorant idea of India and its people. And to think I read! To think I’ve been lugging books, including all 2000 pages of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. How much more if I didn’t?

But the beautiful thing about being a reading traveler is that we do not read or travel for the certainties; and reading and traveling is an intuitive acknowledgement of an ignorance that we treat with a book or a trip.

It was Emerson who wrote, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” A great book does this. India does this. But only, perhaps, if one pays attention. India has expanded the way I think about places, people, and even design.

“Thank you,” one guide said earnestly, “for paying attention.” After I repeatedly refused his offer to take touristy photos of me, “So you’re not a Tiktok girl, huh? Most of the time people are only interested in having their pictures taken, they don’t even listen anymore.”

We have stereotypes of Indian men and they have stereotypes of us. Fair enough. But would you believe that two of the most cultured, educated, and refined men I have ever interacted with I encountered in a father and son duo in Jaipur? Would you believe that I felt more safe and respected in the company of my guides, drivers, haveli owners, hotel staff, than in one provincial event that I attended back home where a senior and former politician (someone I’m supposed to be able to trust) undressed me with his eyes? But that’s a story for another day. I have way better memories now.

Like this memory of a Mughal garden across the Yamuna River, yet unravaged by the claws of Agra’s over-tourism, where one can spend the entire afternoon reading and contemplating, or gazing at the Taj Mahal.

Just like that, the transmutation of India into a memory has begun…and what a memory to relish!