October 31, 2026

The bread comes out of the tone oven on a long paddle, blistered and steaming, and the baker catches it without looking — muscle memory after thirty years of working the underground kiln.

I am standing in a courtyard in Tbilisi's Abanotubani district on a Sunday morning in November, watching a ritual older than the city itself. The sulfur springs that gave this neighborhood its name still run hot beneath the domed bathhouses on the street below. Up here, the air smells of yeast and woodsmoke and something mineral from the earth.

The baker's name is Gio. He speaks no English. I speak no Georgian. We communicate in the way travelers and locals always have — gesture, laughter, the universal vocabulary of bread and coffee. He tears a piece of the shoti and hands it to me across a wooden ledge: dense, chewy, warm in a way that radiates from the inside out.

Tbilisi resists easy description. The Old Town folds in on itself — Ottoman baths below, Soviet balconies above, a medieval fortress watching from the cliff. Layers of empire, each absorbed and digested into something stubbornly, specifically Georgian. They have a word, st'umartmoyvare, meaning love of the guest. In ten minutes, Gio has offered me bread, wine from a clay jug, and a phone call to his daughter who studies English and wants to practice.

I am sitting on a low stone wall by the time she calls. Her voice is bright and careful. She asks where I am from, where I am going, whether I find Georgia beautiful.

"Very," I say.

A dog sleeps in the last of the autumn sun. The Mtkvari River bends below, silver in the flat morning light. A church bell rings once, then stops — as if it thought better of continuing.

#travel #Tbilisi #Georgia #wanderlust