| ID | 193492 |
| Title Proper | Poetic Chaos” of Gardens and Genres in Colonial Tbilisi |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Manning, Paul |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | One summer afternoon in Tbilisi, my friends Elizbari and Malkhazi, both native Tbilisians, and I bought some beer from a local store near Malkhazi's home in the hillside residential Tbilisi neighborhood of K'rts’anisi. For various reasons I can no longer recall, it would not do for us to drink in his home, so we randomly chose a deserted spot nearby: a patch of gravel next to a decrepit building with a large fallen tree, which afforded us a place to sit. Malkhazi surveyed our abject drinking spot, raised his beer in a heroic pose, and proclaimed: “Ortach'alis baghshi mnakhe, vina var!” (In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am!).1 We laughed at the absurd poetic reference. It was a famous line from a Persian-style Georgian poem by the noble romantic poet Grigol Orbeliani. It was a mukhambazi, a genre of poetry emblematic of “Old Tbilisi” city poetry associated with a nostalgic Georgian mythology of the nineteenth-century colonial city, centering on the island gardens of Ortachala, the site of drunken feasting of typical Tbilisian street peddlers called kintos (Georgian k'int’o). The stanza goes as such: |
| `In' analytical Note | International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol. 55, No.3; Aug 2023: p.498 - 516 |
| Journal Source | International Journal of Middle East Studies 2023-09 55, 3 |
| Key Words | Poetic Chaos ; Colonial Tbilisi |