3. THE SACRED MEDITERRANEAN

Train station in Sukhumi. 

The journey south begins.  

First stop: the Inguri river. Images of the bridge, the check point, voices of people waiting to cross.

The arrival in Zugdidi, the train journey from Zugdidi to Tbilisi. While Nadezhda's voice is back off screen, images of Western Georgia seen from the window mix with images of the train and travellers.

Nadezhda: 

In 1930, from May to November, we lived in Armenia and Tbilisi where, after a long silence, M started writing verses again. M said he could only work when feeling in his chest the “rolling of the Colchis”, meaning the connection with the world of history and culture. This connection came into being in the Black Sea region, thanks to its links with the Mediterranean. For Osip, the Mediterranean was the “holy land”, the book “the first men studied”.


M especially longed for Armenia, that he had named the “sabbatical country”. He said that those who had never seen the sea pictured it as the incarnation of blue, and the mountains just like the Ararat: a regular cone, with neatly drawn slopes and a pointy top with a white hat. For him, Armenia was like an outpost “at world's end”.


I could not understand his feeling of the Mediterranean: the ancestors of today's Russian Jews had lost any link to the native sea for long times. Through the Ararat, though, Armenia is connected to the Bible and the old ancestors: “The younger sister of the Jewish land...”, said Osip. He repeated that he had the south in his blood. Is it possible for the blood to retain memory of such ancient pilgrimages?