Sulphur, steam, and the slowest afternoon in Tbilisi
In the domed bathhouses of Abanotubani, a city that runs on wine and argument finally sits still for an hour.
Tomás Okafor
Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi means warm place, and the warmth is literal. The city was founded, the legend goes, because a king's falcon fell into a hot spring and came out cooked. The springs are still there, under the brick domes of the Abanotubani district, and they still smell of eggs, and the whole quarter has the specific hush of a place where people are, right now, behind these walls, lying very still in very hot water.
I booked a private room at Chreli Abano, the one with the blue tiled façade that looks like it was lifted off a mosque in Isfahan and set down by the river. Inside, a small vaulted chamber with a sulphur pool at forty degrees, a marble slab, a cold plunge that I approached the way one approaches a tax return, and a man called Gia whose job it is to scrub you with a mitt until you are a new person, and who takes this job seriously.
The scrub is not a spa treatment. It is a reckoning. Gia works from the shoulders down with a kisa mitt and a bar of soap the size of a brick, and the grey rolls of dead skin that come off you are held up for inspection with what I can only describe as professional pride. Then a bucket of hot water, then a bucket of cold, then a foam massage under a cloud of lather that fills the room like weather, and then you are put back into the sulphur pool to think about what you have done.
The scrub is not a spa treatment. It is a reckoning.
The city outside is loud, in the best way. It argues over supra tables, it drinks amber wine from clay qvevri buried in the ground, it plays backgammon on car bonnets, its balconies lean over the streets like eavesdroppers. But inside the dome there is only the sound of dripping and your own pulse, and after an hour I had stopped composing sentences in my head, which for me is the closest thing to enlightenment on offer.
Now you are clean enough to drink with us.
I came out at dusk with skin like a peeled fruit and walked up through the old town to the wine bar on Betlemi Street, where a man poured me a saperavi without asking and said, seeing my face, that I had been to the baths. I said yes. He said good, now you are clean enough to drink with us. So I did, until well past the point where I could have told you what the story was about.
