You can stay in Georgia for a year without a visa. That is the kind of fact that tells you a country either feels very sure of itself or very much wants the company, and after a week in Tbilisi I still could not tell you which. Most people I know could not find it on a map. It sits where Europe gives out, under the Caucasus, Russia above it and Turkey and Armenia and Azerbaijan around it, and it has spent three thousand years being argued over by everyone bigger. You feel that the moment you start walking. Tbilisi will not be filed. It is not quite Europe and not quite Asia and not trying to be either.
The old town rewards the early hour, and I walked it not long after dawn, before the coach parties, which is the only sensible way. Inside an hour I had passed an Orthodox church, a mosque, a synagogue and a sulphur bathhouse, its brick dome breaking the pavement like a knuckle. I went down into one as it opened, when the attendant was still sweeping the night off the steps and the sulphur hung in the empty room. The bathhouses are the oldest thing here; the city's founding story starts at these hot springs, and you can still boil yourself in one for the price of a coffee. Persian tiles on one façade, Art Nouveau ironwork on the next, a slab of Soviet concrete behind both, then a sheet of glass the government put up to look modern. None of it matches. All of it is Tbilisi.
The wine found me before I went looking. A man in a basement bar near Freedom Square poured me something the colour of weak tea and watched my face. It was wine, amber wine, white grapes left to sit on their skins in a clay pot buried in the floor, the way Georgians have done it for eight thousand years. They have the oldest winemaking on earth and they keep it, literally, in the ground. That turns out to be the national habit with anything that matters. When the Soviets wanted big sweet factory wine, the villages went on making the real thing in cellars where no inspector looked. When Russia banned Georgian wine in 2006 to punish the country for facing west, Georgia lost most of its market overnight, shrugged, and went looking for new drinkers elsewhere.
The longer I stayed, the more the pattern showed. Georgia has its own alphabet, one of only a handful on the planet, a looping script related to nothing else. Its language is a loner too, cousin to no major tongue. It was among the first countries anywhere to take up Christianity, seventeen centuries ago, and stayed Christian while the map around it turned Muslim. Its singing is so old and so strange that NASA put a Georgian song on the Voyager record, and it is out past the planets now, still going. None of this is museum stuff here. It is how a small country at a crossroads has kept being itself while empire after empire walked through.
I understood the place best at a table. A friend of a friend sat me down at a supra, the Georgian feast, and it ran for five hours. A man at the head, the tamada, stood before every glass and made a toast, real ones, to peace, to the dead, to the people who could not be there, and we drank to each in turn. Halfway through, three of the men started to sing, those close old harmonies, with nobody asking them to. I have been to a lot of dinners. This was the first that felt like a country telling you, plainly and over wine, exactly who it intends to remain.
Go now, while it is this easy and this cheap and this little known. Walk the old town at first light, boil in a bathhouse before the crowd arrives, drink the amber wine out of the ground, and say yes if anyone asks you to a table. Georgia will not tell you whether it is Europe or Asia, because it has never much cared to decide. What it guards instead is older than that question: whatever the country turns to face next, the part that counts is already buried somewhere safe, in a clay pot, in the dark, where it has always been.
