A BLACK SEA BONDING

by Richard Randell

Adler Airport is about thirty-two kilometres from Sochi. A narrow triangle of flat land provides just about the only possible entry into the wall of the Caucasus Mountains which rise almost sheer from the Black Sea. Our Aeroflot jet from Moscow executed a smooth left turn over the sea before nosing in through the haze to land facing the mountains. It had been a pleasant two-hour flight. The heat rose from the tarmac as we stepped off the aeroplane, the palm trees outside the airport building testified to an exotic climate, our interpreter’s smile matched the flowers that were everywhere around as we boarded our bus. After two visits to Russia’s North I was unprepared for the warmth of this Southern welcome.

Along the coast road new villas were under construction and during our stay the finishing touches would be put to a stylish new bridge, built as a joint Russian/Italian venture, which enabled the road to cross a deep ravine. It wasn’t long before we reached the outskirts of the city. Squeezed between the sea and the mountains, Sochi extends along the coast for a distance of 145 kilometres, its tree-lined thoroughfares winding and climbing around and upon the foothills of the mountains. The elegant resort is the capital of what is sometimes known as the Russian Riviera. This is because this part of the Black Sea coast is only one degree of latitude north of the Mediterranean, and both the climate and the lifestyle are similar in many respects to those of the Western playground.

We were met by thirty degrees of heat and eighty per cent humidity, but fortunately the latter was alleviated by the cooling sea breezes permeating the fifteenth-floor terrace where our reception party was held. Our visit was an official one and this was the first of a number of functions sponsored by our hosts. As representatives of Cheltenham, Sochi’s English twin town, we were honoured guests. Some excellent Russian champagne provided the lubricant for welcoming speeches. Sochi’s Deputy Mayor Viktor Skripkin announced that an English Language Centre supported by the British Council would be opened in Sochi later in the month in a ceremony to be attended by the British Ambassador. There were several television cameramen in attendance and, separate from our party at a corner bar, one of their colleagues appeared to be filming an interview with a beautiful girl.

Following the reception our hosts led us to another part of the hotel where a trade fair was taking place. As if to belie the stories of imminent economic collapse that had filled the English media before we departed for Russia, there was an abundance of expensive goods on display and business appeared to be proceeding normally. Indeed, there was a positive air of affluence and this was perhaps the first of many signs we were to receive that Sochi is something special among Russian cities. Once again we were given a taste of Russian hospitality when the director of the exhibition, Mr Zakharchenko, offered several varieties of vodka and brandy for our appreciation. This was demanding going for a group that had risen at 4am in order to catch the morning flight. However, some members of the party summoned up resources of energy in order to visit the circus in the afternoon (it was the very last performance of the season) while others attended a service at the Methodist Church.

The mayor of Sochi, Nicolai Karpov, is the only elected official on the city’s council and he has held his office for seven years. With the assistance of four deputies he controls a very large area, so that in practice his post is more akin to that of the chief executive of Gloucestershire’s County Council than that of the mayor of Cheltenham who performs rather more of a ceremonial function. One of the Sochi mayor’s deputies is Vassily Drachko, who in his capacity as Director of International Relations plays an important role in the twinning arrangements between the two towns. It was in Drachko’s office in the Municipality, a large airy room panelled in light wood, that a formal meeting was held between the two sets of officials, with the remainder of the visiting party invited as observers. Outside, a heavy storm arrived, prompting Karpov to note in his opening speech that he had arranged the weather specially in order to make his visitors feel at home. His speech also was welcoming. He recalled his visit to Cheltenham in 1993, and declared that he had particularly fond memories of the racecourse. He explained that Sochi had twinning arrangements with eight towns and cities across the globe, but called our attention to the civil plaques displayed around the walls of the room because Cheltenham’s crest was of course the first in order of longevity. ‘Old friends are the best’ was the theme of his address. In his reply, the Mayor of Cheltenham stated his desire to see closer links between the two boroughs three thousand miles apart, particularly in the areas of health and education, but explained the difficulties of his position as an official allowed only one year in which to make his mark. ‘Perhaps a little Russian-style democracy would not come amiss in England’ was his rather whimsical suggestion.

Hovering around the speakers were several television cameramen while at the side of the room a number of smart secretaries were taking notes. This was real politics. We had watched – briefly – on television the previous evening how things were shaping in the Duma and this had the same authentic flavour. There was one important difference however. In Sochi, there was no hint of crisis, quite the opposite in fact. Even the cut of Mayor Karpov’s suit seemed to emphasise that all was right with the world.

At the conclusion of the meeting an agreement drawn up by Sochi council was signed by the two mayors. This described the intention to continue and develop the friendly links between the towns over the following two-year period, with particular reference to the fortieth anniversary of the twinning arrangement due to be celebrated in 1999. Some of the declared aims were to organise in Sochi and in Cheltenham permanent exhibitions about the twin towns, to exchange photographic exhibitions devoted to the towns and to exchange exhibitions of children’s paintings and school compositions. It was also agreed to promote further development of links between the editorial staff of Sochi and Cheltenham newspapers, between school N1, the Centre of Creative Activity for children in Sochi and educational institutions in Cheltenham, between the Christian churches and the “Esperanto’ clubs and to give practical help to the establishment of links between clubs for sports and recreation. Finally, consideration would be given to the establishment of direct links between Sochi television and radio broadcasting companies and similar organisations serving the Cheltenham area and business cooperation between business organisations within or immediately adjoining the two towns would be encouraged. Afterwards, in the traditional manner, an immediate declaration of friendship was manifested by an exchange of gifts.

Next day, accompanied by Vassily Drachko and his assistant Natasha, we visited one of the sanatoria which make Sochi more than just a holiday resort. The Metallurg Sanatorium is a palatial building standing in a hillside garden of seven hectares just off Kurortny Prospect, Sochi’s main thoroughfare. Its classical columns are framed by mature trees. From the terrace of the Sanatorium the visitor looks down on a series of terraces with stone steps and balustrades leading to the lower levels. In the foreground a fountain plays. Beyond, through the trees, is a view of the sea. We were met on the terrace by Oleg Mikailov, the young, casually dressed deputy director. He told us that he was an accountant and it was a surprise to learn that Russia had embraced this very Western concept of putting the money men in charge of everything.
There are more than thirty sanatoria in Sochi and the city has long been established as Russia’s principle health resort. Indeed, it was also the Soviet Union’s principle resort with four million visitors a year, according to Drachko. But now this figure has shrunk to one million because citizens of the former satellite states tend to stay in their own countries. Sochi’s reputation for health, like that of Cheltenham, is based on the discovery of mineral waters believed to be beneficial for many ailments.

The first man to be seduced by the region’s charms was a Moscow publisher, N N Mamontov, who built a villa there in 1872. Many others followed, including members of the nobility who had been granted land by the Czar. It became a matter of high fashion to own a summer villa in Sochi. As a result, the architecture of the new villas in Sochi made a considerable contribution to the development of ‘Russian Art Nouveau’. Then in 1909 the first hotel complex ‘The Kavkazskaya Riviera’ was opened. But the real acceleration in the city’s development came after 1917 when Lenin decreed a policy of providing holidays for the workers of the state. The leading architects of the day were commissioned to build sanatoria and other public buildings. During the Second World War, Sochi became an important medicine centre and more than half a million injured soldiers were treated in the city’s sanatoria.

Joseph Stalin, regarded by many as the most ruthless man this century, had two known soft spots. One was for his daughter Svetlana and the other for the city of Sochi. Both he and his daughter spent many holidays at his villa at Zelyonaya Roscha not far from the sulphur springs of Matsesta. The house is preserved, still painted camouflage green, and is sometimes open to visitors but it was not on our programme on this occasion. According to Mikailov, a great deal of state money was allocated to Sochi during the ‘Father of Peoples’ thirty years of despotic rule and this was the basis of the city’s present day prosperity.

The Metallurg Sanatorium is a good example of the type of building favoured in Stalinist times. Constructed in the 1950s it has a solid institutional feeling with interior fittings of exceptional quality. It was originally intended for the exclusive use of workers in the heavy metal industries – hence the name – but is now open to all, at a price, of course. Mikailov suggested that the latter would be around $1000 for a two-week stay. This would include hotel standard accommodation plus treatment from resident medical staff. As we talked, he showed us the deep baths where patients are immersed in the medicinal waters as treatment for joint ailments, skin problems and conditions of the nervous system.

Our tour of the building included the library, where Burns and Shakespeare appeared to be the favourite English-language authors and the pretty librarian showed us her carefully compiled photographic history of the sanatorium, and finally the attractive bar where, surprisingly, only a range of herbal teas, also believed to have medicinal properties, is served! The latter proved to be misleading because outside in the courtyard there was a bar of a more conventional nature.

From the sanatorium we followed a route taken by many of the patients of sanatoria in the city and visited the sulphur springs at Matsesta. Here another impressive building, with an elegant curved façade, houses the baths that are used for treatment of, mainly, the locomotive support systems. Here also are numerous stalls selling fruit, nuts and many herbal remedies. And the architectural ensemble is of course completed by a tall column in the forecourt bearing a bust of Lenin. In this case the column carries an inscription signed by the revolutionary leader declaring that the buildings at Matsesta spa, sanatoria, villas, private mineral springs, etc have all become the property of the state. For our party a particularly interesting feature of the journey to and from Matsesta was that we travelled along Cheltenham Alley (!), a name chosen of course to honour the twinning link between the two towns. It is necessary to explain that this is unlike any alley in England, being a long, straight, tree-lined country road, and also that it sounds much better in Russian – Allea Cheltenhama. But it is also necessary to add that the road runs alongside the River Matsesta and the sulphurous smell rising from the very blue water of the river is anything but complimentary!

The remarkable vegetation of Sochi, which owes its variety and profusion to the unique climate of the region, is one of the city’s principal features. It reaches its pinnacle in the Dendrarium, a large sub-tropical park divided into two sections by Kurortny Prospect in the east of the city. The park contains more than a thousand species of trees brought from all four continents. Some of the more exotic types are a candy tree, a fig tree, an iron tree, a soapberry tree, a strawberry tree, a sakma and a Magonia Billa. The upper park is laid out in formal style and is centred around the residence of the founder, an Italianate villa which is undergoing long-term restoration. From the villa a series of avenues radiate, each flanked by a different type of tree. There are classical pavilions and fountains. In such a park one would expect to see a squirrel of course but the one we spotted during our visit was black, with a white shirt front, not the familiar grey breed seen in English parks. The lower park is reached by an underpass and is designed in the ‘English’ style – that is to say much more freely – with lakes and a stream on which ducks and swans glide idly by. However, this ‘Englishness’ is offset by the sculptures which are most definitely Russian, large, muscular and uncompromising.

It was a surprise to learn that the founder of the Dendrarium was not as one would expect, a botanist, but a literary man. Sergei Khudekov came from St Petersburg in 1892 where he was publisher and editor of the Peterbourgskaya Gazeta. He was also the author of a four-volume ’History of Dancing’.

The two names in Russian literature most readily associated with Sochi are Ostrovsky and Mayakovsky. Nicolai Ostrovsky was a tragic figure who endured a long illness and met an early death. Born in 1904 he continued to work throughout his illness, which eventually made him blind, until his death in 1936. The house in the city where he lived and worked is now a museum. Ostrovsky’s novel ‘How the steel was tempered’ is a good example of the genre that was acceptable at the time, that of ‘Socialist Realism’. It tells the story of a young Bolshevik from a poor background who joins the revolutionary cause and succeeds under the new regime in realising his ambition to be a writer. It was no surprise to learn that the novel had been a set book in local schools during the Soviet period. Mayakovsky’s association with Sochi was, in complete contrast, a rather comical one. It seems that in the early hours of the morning in July 1929 the great man was obliged to climb into his room at the Kavkazskaya Riviera Hotel from someone else’s balcony because the night porter had gone off duty at midnight. He was seen by a number of other guests, woken by the sound of loud voices. Next morning Mayakovsky wrote a letter of protest which became a museum piece and he was subsequently lampooned in the press. There are some who still do not take him seriously. Our guide in Moscow, Alexander, for example, had a sardonic comment when we passed the poet’s statue in Mayakovsky Square: ‘That is the statue of the famous revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Famous? – yes. Revolutionary? – certainly. Poet? – I’m not so sure!’.
Tuesday, the first day of September, was a beautiful late summer morning in Sochi, the perfect day for starting school. And it was at Gymnasium Number One that we presented ourselves with shining morning faces, not quite promptly at nine o’clock because – remarkably for provincial Russia – there was something of a traffic jam outside the school. We were there to see the opening ceremony, which in a Russian school is quite a dramatic and colourful event. In the school yard children and parents were massed on all sides. On the balconies of the tall apartment building on one side of the yard families had gathered to watch the scene. A loudspeaker system with a volume of totalitarian proportions had been set up to relay the music and the speeches. Television cameramen were in attendance.

First we had dancers. Graceful young maidens in frothy white ball gowns swept around the arena as though in a scene from Swan Lake. These were followed by two groups of younger dancers, one dressed in blue and silver, the other in red and gold, who performed a dance involving washing bowls which I was told acted out a story about chickens. Everyone seemed to have bunches of flowers. Then there was a prize-giving in which children stepped forward to loud applause. When I wondered aloud how it was that prizes were being awarded before the term had even started I was informed that these were prizes for good work done during the holidays such as helping to clean the school etc.

Finally, the speeches, with Cheltenham’s mayor adding his voice to that of headteacher Eleonora Molchanova to stress the importance of young people in matters of international friendship. Afterwards our party was able to move inside the school because this opening day was purely ceremonial and lessons were not due to start until the following day. A senior pupil, Svetlana, was chosen to make a speech in English in the main hall describing how the school functioned. It seems there is a selection process for admission in which the requirements are both academic and physical. One of our party noted that she had seen only one child in the school wearing spectacles. After a further speech by the headmistress both she and her deputy were willing to answer questions, but this particular point was not pursued.

I asked Svetlana later why she had chosen to study English. ‘It gives the best chance of a job’ she answered. She wanted to be a journalist but was going to university first. And who was her favourite English author? ‘Burns’ was the reply and the chauvinist in me was driven to point out that the poet was in fact a Scotsman. This was not the only evidence I received regarding the popularity of Burns with Russian English-speakers. Could it be that the heavily-rolled ‘Rs’ strike a chord?

Anyhow it can be reported safely that the study of English in Gymnasium Number One is in the best possible hands because Yelena Shpak, the deputy head, when complimented on her command of colloquial English, pointed out that she had enjoyed two spells of teaching at Cheltenham Ladies College. I would learn later that her husband, too, speaks fluent English but in his case the colloquialisms are American.

Many of the pupils in this school were already able to converse on a basic level with their English visitors and they were keen to show off their winter garden and their computer room, where, I noted, all the dozen or so Samsung machines were labelled in English. An arrangement was made to transmit some of the photographs that had been taken back from Cheltenham to the school via the Internet. With methods of communication improving at the present rate it seems likely that such primitive ways of promoting international friendship as twinning visits will soon become redundant.

The Dacha Vera, originally the home of the Moscow publisher Mamontov, was the first of the summer villas to be built in Sochi, starting a fashion that led to the development of the city as a health resort. Constructed of slightly reddish stone it is a substantial building with a single tower surmounted by a metal cupola. It stands in an area of woodland not far from the centre of the city. Close by there is the tail fuselage and fin of a Sukhoi fighter plane, now used as a play area. After 1917, the villa was taken over by the state and became the local headquarters of the Young Pioneers, an organisation which was intended to promote and instill in young people the aspirations of Communism. This state apparatus has now given way to a purely local group known as the International Friendship Club, which relies on sponsorship for its funding. Its director, Tatyana Nossova, welcomed us to the club one evening and her young charges were put through their paces for our entertainment.

It was a varied programme, beginning with tall blond-haired dancers in white ball gowns who trailed their pink chiffon scarves as though echoing the red scarves that were once worn as a uniform by the Young Pioneers. Then there were speeches by young English speakers who explained the aims and ideals of the club. With a total of eight towns and cities across the world twinned with Sochi these young people were becoming experienced international travellers, although they have yet to visit Cheltenham. Then more dancers, this time in the unlikely but convincing disguise of flappers! For the dancers’ grandparents, it would have needed a real leap of the imagination to bridge the gap between the Russia they knew in the twenties and the world of the flapper. However, for these young teenagers no doubt one kind of history is the same as any other.

The main part of the programme was a series of knowledge tests covering history, geography and literature. In the history test, competitors were asked to describe events that occurred on specific dates. Cheltenham’s Mayor was invited to take part and was able to uphold national honour with a blow-by-blow account of the Battle of Trafalgar. Rather surprisingly, when it came to the questions on literature, these Russian teenagers with their wide general knowledge and their excellent command of English all managed to confuse Byron with Shakespeare. Art was the next subject to be covered and for this the members of the club acted out a number of tableaux based on famous Russian paintings including Repin’s ‘Barge hauliers on the Volga’. Finally there was a chance for the budding film-makers in the club to show off their talents with some comedy sketches. I liked especially the one in which a young girl was practising her scales on the piano while her father read the newspaper. Each time his attention seemed to be elsewhere the serious practice gave way to a very cool line in jazz. I detected real talent there, and also perhaps an allegory of Russia’s recent history.

One particularly important ceremony that must necessarily be performed by a visiting dignitary to Sochi is the grafting of a new branch to the Tree of Friendship. This tradition, like the tree itself, has grown from small beginnings. It is a curious history. In 1934, a horticulturist named Fyodor Zorin planted a small wild lemon tree in a garden in the city. In order to obtain frost-resistant citrus varieties he grafted it with various international strains such as Japanese tangerine, Italian lemon, American grapefruit etc and some new hybrids grown by Russian scientists, forty-five varieties in all. When Otto Schmidt, a prominent Soviet Arctic explorer, visited the garden six years later, he was impressed by the tree which bore such a variety of fruit and decided to make a commemorative grafting. Thus the tradition began and over the years many international figures have seen the small oval aluminium labels bearing their names and dates formally attached to the tree. The name of Cheltenham first appeared on the tree in 1959 when the then mayor, Charles Irving, made a grafting to commemorate the twinning arrangement between the two towns.

Today the original tree can no longer accommodate new graftings and sixty other trees planted in the garden are used to carry on the tradition. It was to one of these, dedicated to the United Kingdom, that present mayor Jeremy Whales, after a short course of instruction, made the symbolic grafting. His instructor and our guide to the garden and also the museum which has been part of the complex since 1981, was Lubov Drachko, wife of Deputy Mayor Vassily Drachko and an employee of the museum. She explained how the garden now plays an important part in developing new varieties of fruit and flowers in this, the world’s most northerly sub-tropical zone. Appropriately, a light rainstorm accompanied the ceremony and soon drove the party inside to view the museum. Its contents are a most eclectic mixture of artifacts contributed by people from all over the world. The collection includes samples of soil from the graves of thinkers, writers, artists and composers. Perhaps the most haunting relics of all are the porcelain cup and the fragment of a charred jug from Hiroshima. The museum also houses fifty-five books in which the many thousands of visitors have entered their messages of peace and friendship.

One of Sochi’s elder statesmen who attended the ceremony and joined us for refreshments in the museum was Albert Churkin, who was Mayor of Sochi in 1959. Still active in business at seventy-five, he brought along a photograph album which contained an interesting record of his time in office, including visits of Sochi representatives to Cheltenham.

At the conclusion of the visit we were entertained by a highly talented group of singers, dancers and musicians known as Kudrina. Seven singers and dancers – in the unusual ratio of one man to six women – plus four children and musicians playing bass balalaika, accordion, guitar and whistle, performed a variety of traditional numbers including Cossack dances. It would be difficult to imagine a more colourful spectacle than that provided by the dancers in their national costume and the performance was further enlivened by the extraordinary whistling of the male dancer. National honour demanded that the Mayor of Cheltenham too had to play his part in the performance, and he was drawn into a lively dance.

The city of Sochi, with a population of nearly half a million, is able to support two television stations. One is state-owned and the other is that relatively new phenomenon in Russia, a private enterprise. Thanks to a generous invitation from the owner of the latter, George Shpak, we were able to make a visit. The station occupies the top two floors of a tall building that was originally the home of an artists’ colony. It is situated in a most spectacular location, the fairly countrified foothills of the Caucasus Mountains behind the city. It is approached by a steep, winding road on which the driver of our Volga saloon steered a zig-zag course in order to avoid the potholes. There were chickens in the gardens of some of the wooden houses that we passed. The vast panorama of mountains and seashore then can be viewed from the picture window of Shpak’s office would be totally distracting to most people but Shpak appears to have the single-mindedness of the natural businessman. Spells of work in San Francisco and in London with the BBC have given him fluent English and an international outlook. His business card is printed only in English and when I remarked on this his reply was brief: ‘Any intelligent Russian can read English. The rest can just read the numbers’.

His business is comprehensive. He obtains his news direct from Moscow, preferring not to deal in the small change of local politics. He also runs a radio station from the TV centre, which broadcasts a popular nostalgia music programme. His unique selling feature is that, unlike the state-controlled opposition, he provides a twenty-four hour service. This busy commercial operation employs a staff of eighty, all of them young, many of them female and extremely decorative.

Shpak introduced his American friend, Don Wiles, who happened to drop in while we were there. ‘We’ve barbecued together!’ Wiles hails from Chicago and explained that after ‘doing the yuppie thing’ there he became bored and decided that as a free agent he could run a business anywhere in the world. He chose Sochi. Now he has a nice house near Matsesta, a Russian wife and runs a business organising English language courses for managers. It is this that brings him into contact with Shpak, because he is one of the advertisers who provide the revenue for the TV Centre. How was he coping with the crisis? It certainly affected him, he said, because he did not keep his money in Russia, relying on his Visa card for income. Now that all cards were frozen, that source had disappeared, so some other arrangement would have to be negotiated. He did not seem unduly perturbed. Lounging in his chair, dressed in what looked like army fatigues, he radiated an all-American self-confidence. It was the familiar phrase ‘No problem’, expressed in body language.

En-route to the TV centre, driving along Kurortny Prospect, Sochi’s main thoroughfare, we were reminded that everything is not changed in Russia’s new democracy. Suddenly all traffic was halted and the sound of sirens was heard. But the convoy that flashed past at high speed was clearly not responding to an emergency. It consisted of two police cars, then two large black Chaika saloons, then two more police cars. Curiously, after the sirens and flashing lights had disappeared in the direction of the airport, an ambulance followed, travelling rather slowly. It could have been a scene from an early comedy film.

One of the gifts presented by the Mayor of Sochi to his opposite number from Cheltenham was some best quality Krasnodarsk tea. We made a visit to the tea plantation at Dagomys, which is in the mountains to the north west of the city. This is the most northern tea plantation in the world. The first seeds were brought from China by Russian scientists in 1896 and sowed near Batumi at the easternmost end of Russia’s Black Sea coast. Five years later seeds were brought from there to Sochi and the plantation that exists today was started, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that serious production began. Now there is a rustic museum at the site and Klara, the curator, who in her white dress seemed altogether too precious for such a part, showed us the collection of samovars it contained. She also told us that only the top three leaves of the plant are picked for tea-making and that in keeping with Sochi’s reputation as a health resort the green tea which is produced is believed to have medicinal qualities. But the real purpose of our visit was to have a party.

I imagine that anyone who had predicted that a group of staid English people would be able to get into party mood at twelve noon on a sunny day, while drinking nothing more potent than tea and consuming nothing more stimulating than cashew nuts and apple bread with fig jam and honey, would have been regarded as bemused. Yet that is what happened. A group of folk musicians appeared from the woodwork of the ornate log cabin that served as the museum and the three female singers and their male accordion player accompanist were soon persuading members of the audience to get up from the tables and join in the dancing. There was even a mock wedding arranged to fit the storyline of one of the songs. A small group of Orientals in suits, seated at the back of the room, who were, we were told, Vietnamese generals, watched the proceedings with some amazement. What finally lifted this particular event was a remarkably virtuosic performance by the accordion player, who squeezed out the same catchy folk tune from a succession of instruments, each smaller than its predecessor, which his assistant produced from a box. With the pitch rising as the size decreased it made a wonderful musical parody of the familiar Russian matriushka dolls. I did not count the accordions but the last one to be played was smaller than the player’s hand.

It turned out that Tatyana Nossova had not shown us the full extent of her young charges’ talents in the International Friendship Club’s performance at the Dacha Vera. Later in the week she presented her Georgian dancers. This time the spectacle – and indeed it was spectacular in every sense – took place in the concert hall at our hotel. It was a capacious concert hall with tiered seats and a large stage. The latter was utilised to the full by about thirty young dancers many of them, Nossova told us later, refugees from Georgia. There is friction between Georgia and its western province of Avkazia, which wishes to become independent. The border with Russia is closed because of military activity, as I was advised when I enquired about the possibility of visiting Lake Riza, an area of great beauty I had read about. ‘Of course Avkazia belongs to Georgia’ said Nossova’s husband who was standing nearby when she told us about this. ‘You see?’ she said ‘my husband is Georgian, so we always argue about this.’ Anyhow, the result seems to be the export of Georgian culture to Sochi. The most striking thing about the dances, apart from the beauty of the costumes and the sheer vitality of the young dancers whose ages range from eight to eighteen, is the extreme contrast between the gentle grace of the girls and the wild, almost barbaric, aggressiveness of the boys. No western-style equality here! There were several changes of costume with the female dancers resplendent in blue and red and gold while the male dancers wore predominantly black with the traditional high boots and belted shirts. The driving rhythms for the dozen or so dances that were performed in something over an hour and a half were provided by a trio of grown-ups playing accordion plus two drums.

The climax of the dancing was inevitably a sword fight between two champions while the remainder of the male dancers in the troupe joined in the battle, running on to the stage with long knives which they proceeded to whirl around their heads before hurling them into the wooden stage with considerable force. Some of the knives which failed to stick in bounced into the auditorium, fortunately without causing harm to the members of the audience sitting in the front row. Accompanying this miniature war there was dancing on points and dancing on the knees. Just when in seemed that there could not possibly be any more acrobatics the smallest of the principles, no more that four feet high, leapt off the stage and performed a cartwheel. He was followed in similar style by one of the drummers who, it transpired, had choreographed the whole performance. Afterwards Nossova told us with justifiable pride that her Georgians had recently taken part in a competition in Germany involving thirteen international dance troupes and had walked (or should it be skipped) away with first prize.
This has turned out to be a very factual account of our visit to the Black Sea coast. I fear that as a result it does not do justice to the beauty of the area or to the friendly nature of its inhabitants or to the immediate sensation one had on arrival that it was a happy place to be in. There is no description for example of the glorious sunsets, or of the moon shining on a platinum sea, or of the Caucasus Mountains laid out like a papier-mache model and their peaks glistening with a fresh snowfall. Nowhere is there a picture of the sparkling beauty of this tideless sea, which provides a hard-earned playground for so many Russian families, or an attempt to unravel the meaning of its oddly sinister name. No mention of the children at the dancing class in a leafy square that I just happened upon one sunny afternoon; nor of Svetlana, who travelled eight hours by train with her daughter to spend time with us and brought us chocolate and postcards; nothing of dancing in the rain or of the singer who was returning to Kirov the next day, or of the shining faces of the children who received an impromptu English lesson. Certainly the worst omission is my failure to recount the many kindnesses that we received from our hosts and to reveal the genuine emotions that surrounded our departure. Perhaps these are all held in store for another time.

I am grateful to Yuliya Gorbonossova, whose help in providing details for this account was invaluable.
Richard Randell
October 1998