Chiatura April 2025

I guess it’s the nature of any planned trip that the planning, by definition, has to be done in advance and this may bring with it regrets as the journey unfolds and reality, for better or worse, does not match original expectations.

As Kierkegaard supposedly said ‘Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward’ (and even if he didn’t say this my use of this quote in an interview presentation so impressed a senior director that it undoubtedly swung the job my way).

The point being that you may sometimes feel like you’ve overstayed your welcome in a particular location, while on other occasions you feel like you really could and should have stayed longer but plans and schedules get in the way.

It is the latter category that is of relevance here, and the way in which a half-day stopover in the Georgian town of Chiatura so impressed us and left us yearning for more.

A bit of background… Chiatura is a small-ish town in the centre of Georgia but a little bit north of the main highway that connects Tbilisi and Kutaisi. Although we had taken the direct route while travelling up to Kutaisi we decided to take the wider loop on the return in order that we could take in both Chiatura and another swathe of Georgian countryside. Fortunately this also included this striking example of Georgian religious architecture (although in this case location trumps design really).

The town of Chiatura itself appears to have barely registered until the latter stages of the 19th Century when, for better or worse, significant deposits of manganese were discovered there. This was a valuable enough metal to warrant not just a large-scale mining operation but a bespoke railway line to transfer the ore for processing. And, of course, as the mine grew so people followed and the development of town infrastructure that goes with this. The mining may have declined in recent decades but we still found a bustling town centre. Unlike Western towns the centre of communities like this is still the lifeblood of the town, a long sequence of shops, markets and stalls providing a busy and lively community. No hollowed out town centres here.

It feels like a geological insult to say Chiatura is located in a valley. Rift is probably a better word, the steep and dark precipices giving the feeling that they were ripped from the earth in a cataclysmic moment more than gently eroded over time by the shallow and meandering river. And herein lay the problem for the extraction of manganese. Shipping the mined material along the valley floor on the newly laid train tracks was one thing, but getting the miners up and down to work each day was something else again, being both time-consuming and dangerous. The response of the Soviet Government (and Chiatura had long been a Bolshevik stronghold) was to build a network of cable cars across and up and down the valley in the 1950s.

The legacy of these is still visible, derelict stations straddled by abandoned and rusting steel cars fondly known as flying coffins but still, quite incredibly, in operation until a few years ago. There are in fact some fantastic videos on YouTube of intrepid travellers braving a journey in these tin cans, although it appears that there has never been a fatal accident involving them (unlike the horrific tragedy that befell the Tbilisi equivalent in 1990 or, indeed, the grim accident in Italy that occurred during our stay in Georgia).

Much of the industrial legacy in Chiatura matches the condition of the cable cars, rusty dereliction or crumbling brutalist concrete all too evident whether in railway ridings, mining buildings or the concrete tower blocks thrusting from the valley floor or sides, and which provide so much of the housing for the residents.

While the town clearly shows its age and a significant degree of physical decay, as with so many Soviet era towns and cities we have visited the legacy of community and social pride are still visible, whether in civic buildings or - a personal favourite - a decaying football ground that is still clearly used by the local residents.

Psychologists will tell you that scarcity can create desire. Maybe the transient nature of our short stay in Chiatura created a yearning to see and learn more. And maybe a longer stay would not have been as fulfilling, But boy would I have liked the chance to explore more broadly and deeply and really delve into the heart of this fascinating place that is both a contemporary community and a remarkable piece of living history.

One to add to the list of repeat destinations maybe but that's such a growing list…