In 2010, when we bought the property in Svaneti where we live, it had two buildings: a house and a two-story barn. Since then, we have added a garage, an outhouse and a gazebo. With the help of an EU grant worth a few thousand Euros, we will be adding the largest and newest structure: a separate café.
This edifice was reworked and re-thought on paper several times before it reached its final form. It will include a dining/meeting room, kitchen, two baths, a pantry and a balcony that overlooks the mountain wall south of us, where I wrote my article last week. A third floor added to the existing home? Two-story separate building? Thankfully, I and the builders shot down these two early ideas before finalizing them, and our large enough one-story version has won out.
For over a year, 14 tons of wooden planks in various thicknesses and sizes have been stacked neatly in a square pile. We had to pay local youths a few weeks ago to move the planks 7m uphill, as they were in the way. The garage is currently filled with over 1000 GEL in 50kg bags of cement. A dump-truck load of gravel from Mestia has also arrived and is parked near the site. Some sand and a few thousand concrete blocks will also be needed from the area of Zugdidi. We have free water and electricity.
The cafe is our first addition to include a surveyor and topologist. It also includes bureaucracy and paperwork. These are the strings that come with the deal. We are also spending money that will be reimbursed. This is different from being given money up front at the beginning or any time during the process. According to the rules, we must pay to get back. This is presumably to minimize the chances that money will go astray. The grant won’t cover everything, but it will cover a significant portion of the cost.
Three of our workers come from a village near Zugdidi that has its own prince (of mixed Mingrelian Dadiani and French (Napoleonic ancestry) and princess (of mixed Mingrelian and French (Napoleonic ancestry), about whom I wrote earlier. The leader of the three has already done work for us and is highly recommended. We are also feeding and housing them twice a daily, as they live about 100km away from home. We are only at the beginning of construction, but so far it looks good.
Currently, they are digging square-shaped holes, filling them with concrete, then adding square-section steel pipes about 6m high. They stabilize these with tripods, or “quadrupods”, of steel rebars and wire until they can fix them into place. Now that the foundation and the first structures are in place, we can get a better idea of how big our building is going to be. It’s big.
We will exclude local men from our establishment as they tend to see it more as a BAR-café and will want to take full advantage of this, getting drunk and making a nuisance for us, their family and the village as a whole, if not even killing themselves or other people in the process. We do not sell any alcohol in our shop. It is only available to our foreign customers. This is a problem that occurs in many tourist-heavy areas and villages.
One solution would be to raise the price of alcohol for locals to an unaffordable level and insist that they pay cash on the spot. This seems to have worked for a friend of ours who owns a restaurant and hotel in another village nearby. We won’t even advertise the bar. The results of these approaches will be seen in time. I don’t want anyone to get plastered on my land. I’ve seen enough of its ugly effects to last me a lifetime.
We will most likely see the roof going on during this building season, but the finished product will not be ready until next spring. So we have plenty time to figure out how it will work in our community. We hope it will be a venue for local events. I will post updates on the progress of the project, describing my learnings about such constructions. Stay tuned.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer is a writer and photographer who has been working for GT since 2011. He has lived in Georgia and Svaneti, respectively, since 1999. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
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