#tbilisi

The fish market opens at four. Not the sanitized version tourists photograph from a safe distance — the real one, tucked behind Tbilisi's Dezerter Bazaar, where the fluorescent lights buzz and flicker and the air carries the cold mineral smell of mountain rivers.

I found it by following an old woman's cart. She moved with the unhurried certainty of someone who has walked this route ten thousand times, plastic bags swinging against her coat. When she stopped, I stopped. The stall keeper — a man with hands the color of river stones — greeted her by asking after her daughter. She answered with a shrug that contained an entire story.

I bought a bag of churchkhela I didn't need, just to stay a few minutes longer.

The market smells of cardamom and wet stone. It's barely six in the morning in Tbilisi, and the vendors of the Dezerter Bazaar are arranging persimmons into rust-colored pyramids while the city is still half-asleep.

I came here by accident — a wrong turn off Rustaveli Avenue, following the sound of a cart wheel on cobblestone. That's how the best discoveries happen. Not planned. Stumbled into.

An old woman in a floral headscarf presses a piece of churchkhela into my hand before I can protest. The walnut-studded grape-must candy is sweet and waxy and tastes like autumn preserved. She watches my face for a reaction, and when I smile — genuinely, stupidly wide — she laughs and says something I don't understand. We don't need to.