I nearly titled this ‘Letter’ ‘An Englishman Abroad’ but instead I’ve taken the title from Peter Nasmyth’s wonderful account of his life in Georgia: ‘Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry’. From a chance conversation at a dinner party, a young Nasmyth determines to visit, arriving by rickety bus in 1989. Throughout the next 30 years he steeps himself in Georgia’s culture and traditions – the people, the places, its history and potential – all vividly brought to life in this splendid book.
This indispensable guide provided, for me, the key to a previously unknown country.
He has an eye for a good picture and an ear for a good anecdote. And, as its title suggests, the book itself is poetic, following his Russian literary heroes Puskin, Gorky, Tolstoy into the High Caucasus.
He is also Co-Founder of ‘Prospero’s Books’, the first English language bookshop in Tbilisi. It’s difficult to stress the challenge of keeping its doors open, for more than twenty years, through revolution and invasion, the ups and downs as vertiginous as the mountains themselves.
A small corner of Tbilisi then, that is forever England.
Below, I include a clip of the fantastic film, set in Georgia, ‘And Then we Danced’ (a subject of a previous ‘Letter from England’):
