The Day of the Tura

Sometimes, I can have an active imagination. For instance, one night during my first week here, my host brother came inside with a firecracker and waved me over to the back door. He motioned for me to listen, and I heard some howling in the distance. He lit the firecracker and threw it outside, where it presumably scared off the animal.
Afterward, I asked, "Wolf?", to which he replied, "No, tura, tura." Neither of us knew what a 'tura' translated to in English, and for 15 minutes or so, I had visions of a beast known as the "Tura" roaming the giant hill behind our house. It was something no American had ever seen before, sort of a combination of a grizzly bear and werewolf, with glowing red eyes and fangs as long as my fingers.
At that point, my host brother found his old Soviet-era dictionary and found the translation:
"tura - n. jackal"

This overactive imagination made itself known again the last week of Februrary. We had a really windy week, which one night led to my room door and window swinging open loudly at 4 AM. Visions of Paranormal Activity briefly dominated my thoughts before falling back asleep.

My imagination took another flight as we planned our next trip. For the last weekend of the month, we took the night train to Gori, a town about 90 minutes west of Tbilisi. Gori is most famous as the birthplace and childhood home of Josef Stalin. During my initial trip from Tbilisi to Zugdidi (wayyyy back in January), I remember looking south from the road as we passed Gori, and seeing a collection of shadowy buildings wedged between two mountains and covered in a dense fog that seemed anchored to the city.
These two things gave me some apprehension about visiting Gori. I pictured it as a place of great evil. I very much had it pegged as a snowy, urban version of the Dagobah cave.

"What's in Gori?" "Only what you take with you."

In fact, Gori was none of these things (except snowy). We had a nice time walking around the town and climbing up to spot where a fortress had been since ancient times, and where the current stone structure dates from the Middle Ages. It provided a lovely view of the town and the mountains to the north, which comprise the southern border of Tskhinvali Region (South Ossetia).

The big attraction in Gori, however, was the Stalin Museum. It was conveniently located on Stalin Ave. The outside is notable for a green train car and a large stone statue of Stalin, recently relocated by the Georgian government (in the middle of the night) out of the town's main square (Stalin Square). The same statue is replicated inside, and there's another inside Gori's train station. The yard also features Stalin's boyhood home, where he lived for the first four years of his life. It's a small building, and his family rented only one tiny room in it. Now, it's protected by imposing columns and stands alone as the only surviving building from his old neighborhood. Apparently, the others were bulldozed to make room for some sort of museum.

If you lived here, you'd be home by now and one of the most murderous rulers of the 20th Century

 Inside, the museum is chock full of pictures and artifacts our guide was sure to speed us past without getting a chance to enjoy them. There were paintings (Young Stalin in a Field Outside Gori, Stalin at the Seminary, Stalin with Stalin's Mom, Stalin Leading the 1905 Revolution He Actually Played Little to No Role In), poems (Stalin's pastoral poetry), and newspaper articles (Stalin Wins War!) There are lots and lots of photos. Some of the best include 'Stalin as a Young Man' (and quite a handsome one at that), 'Stalin Awkwardly With His Arm Around The Founder of the KGB', 'Stalin Voting for Stalin', 'Stalin With Lenin and a Whole Bunch of Other Bolsheviks Who Aren't Trotsky', and 'Stalin Definitely Not Sending Millions to the Gulag'. There are a number in which Stalin seems to have been enhanced or possibly added later, and one of Stalin with a large number of military officers, a few of whom seem to have different lighting, as if they were originally in a different picture.

Stalin proves he has a Cheka friend

Top left is Trotsky, killed by Stalin. Bottom right is Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin after Joe's death. To his left is Lavrentiy Beria (another Georgian) who purged millions for Stalin until he was purged. And then to the left of Beria...

We have this guy. GLENN BECK WAS RIGHT

There are also a lot of gifts Stalin received, including a mink coat ("He never wore it," added our guide), a giant table clock/lamp/compass/desk with a big tank on it, and a plate from the PR China for its 50th birthday in 1999 ("Oh, he's been dead for 45 years?" said China, "How embarrassing. Our mistake.")

Background: Stalin's house (exterior). Foreground: Statue of unidentified figure.

Notable for its absence was the mention of anything really negative about Stalin. I never heard the word "gulag" once, nor was there any mention of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s or his purges of just about everyone. The guide did show us the small space the museum devoted to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact signed in 1939, which included a picture of a smiling Stalin shaking hands with the Nazi foreign minister. For some reason, this picture had deteriorated far more than any of the others in the museum. The guide noted that soon after the pact was signed, "Hitler broke the agreement by invading Poland." Although the Museum only showed the first, public part of the pact ("The USSR and Germany are friends and promise not to attack each other..."), both the guide and display left out the second part of the pact ("...and super secret promise to cooperate with invading Eastern Europe.") and the fact that invading Poland was a fulfillment, not a violation, of the agreement.

"Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov with unidentified man who is most definitely not Nazi Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop"

We also got to visit Stalin's personal train car, which he used due to his intense fear of flying. Stalin's toilet was probably the top attraction. On the way out of the museum, I poked my head in the gift shop, but aside from some books ("Stalin Kills His Team of Rivals"), a few statues (Stalin Looking Heroic, Stalin Looking Heroic Again), and commemorative plates, the only thing that really interested me were some baby booties I saw hanging on the wall. I couldn't tell if they had Joe's picture on them or not. In other words, the museum is well worth a visit, but I'd recommend skipping the guide.

Stalin's toilet on his train car

It's like the old adage "Vote Early, Vote Often", except replace "early" with "Stalin" and "often" with "Stalin; also you are under arrest"

Meanwhile, back home, the power was out for 10 days in the days around my trip to Gori. It's been very windy, and the old Soviet electrical system just wasn't up to handling it. Fortunately, we have running water - a friend of mine in another village outside Zugdidi lost power, and with it, use of the electric crank to his family's well. He now is subsisting on hand-cranked well water, which takes a while and must be used sparingly. Power is back on now, and hopefully will remain so.

Next up: Bakuriani!

Stats:
4 - children hiding behind Stalin's train car planning a snowball ambush during our visit. (And you thought Stalin had Snowball exiled...)
2 - UNHCR SUVs parked outside the apartment building next to our hotel in Gori. Both Zugdidi and Gori have large IDP/refugee populations, as they're both located close to Georgia's conflict-prone breakaway regions (Zugdidi to Abkhazia, Gori to Tskhinvali/South Ossetia). Both towns have sections of identical houses for those IDPs, along with a number of international NGOs, the UNHCR, UNDP, and World Food Program. Both towns were also occupied by Russia in the 2008 war, so they both host EU Monitoring Missions presumably keeping an eye on the ceasefire.

Vocabulary:
atami - peach
amindi - weather
gemrieli - delicious
deda - mother
mama - father
cheemagoatch - friend (Magrelian)

Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book:
"Piss off."
"He's a tacky bloke."
"He's a tawdry guy."
"He's got the buzz."
"Stop it with the PDAs/Stop it with the petting (inappropriate places)"