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.