An expedition to the Vere River: Mziuri to Maghlivi
[note: I wrote this article under the auspices of the Rivers of Tbilisi project. It was originally published in abridged form in the 2024 edition of Denostalgia magazine.]
Conduits of life carve the urban terrain. Forgotten flowers spring out.
Tbilisi is a city of rivers and river valleys. Over the last century or so, the once dramatic relief of its area has been chipped away, subdued, smoothed down, and constructed over, while the dozens of rivers that pour, trickle, or otherwise wend their way down from its surrounding ridges have been mostly tamed, buried in culverts, confined to concrete walls, or used as a dumping ground for trash. But rivers cannot be stopped; no matter how far away they are hidden from the everyday perception, compelled to follow a man-made course while their historical valleys become sites for roads and apartment blocks, they still exist in all their force, carrying under our feet vast quantities of water, energy, and whatever debris the uplands deposit in them.
My project, Rivers of Tbilisi, has already entered its third year. It began partially from subjecting Tbilisi’s topography to my fascination with maps, and partially from the inchoate affinity for the power, energy, and symbolism of free rivers that I had begun to find by the banks of the Rioni in the Namokhvanhesi protests. Over a solitary winter I traced blue lines on an OpenStreetMap layer, feeling an odd accomplishment when I could identify the exact points a river began and ended, feeling an almost morbid curiosity when the blue line turned dotted, signifying the burial of the river in a culvert as it gets swept underneath the relentless “development” of Tbilisi. In satellite imagery, I learned to spot instantly the tell-tale streaks of green between gray buildings and black streets which signified the presence of flowing water or at least a valley too steep for even Tbilisi’s daredevil engineers to fathom installing the next korpusi. At last, unable to contain myself, I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled to Maghlivi, from which point I followed the Vere upstream.
That was the first expedition, in February of 2022. Since then, irregularly and occasionally, I visit sections of river, documenting them with phone photography and sometimes a sound recorder as well. I annotate the documentations with my observations about the health, course, and setting of the river, and post them sequentially on Instagram stories. I am neither a scientist nor an influencer; I am not even a Tbilisian but rather a latecomer. I frequently find myself perplexed by hydrological questions – at first suspicious of every intermittent river having been snatched away from me by human intervention, I now realize that in many cases it may be at least partially a natural phenomenon. The aftermath of an expedition can frequently result in me posting sixty or seventy Instagram stories at once, which I know is not very convenient for an audience. And often there are specific observations I struggle to explain which would be clear if I were aware, like a local, of certain aspects of the urban history. There is much I can do to improve, as both an observer and a reporter. This will be the first expedition described in a different form, presented primarily textually; an experimental method in a project of experimental experiences.
The first principle of a river expedition is to forget about being human. As much as possible, I want to experience the city as a river, not as a human. I am not a river, so I cannot flow fluidly and freely through every crack and crevice, down every steep slope and around every cliff. But I can try. Challenges are both natural and artificial. Not every river valley is meant to be walked in by human legs, but people have also constructed obstacles and barriers through which they unceremoniously let rivers in pipes. If I won’t take my rubber boots and try to keep my feet dry, I have to circumvent these as well, by climbing and jumping. Frequently, I have to cope with a putrid smell in the rivers, the result of graywater drainage from city neighborhoods, and when I see mysterious gray particles swirling in the rivers it makes me wary of touching them. But nevertheless, the spirit is to follow the river’s line as it cuts the city. When it is thrust underground, I traverse above it until I find it again. When the terrain gets too forbidding to stay by the riverbank, I climb and try to keep it in sight until I can come back down. My goal is to follow, eventually, in interrupted pieces, every one of Tbilisi’s rivers from its source to its confluence with the Mtkvari.
This time I have chosen to return again to the Vere river. Vere is one of the longest of Tbilisi’s rivers; only Lochini is longer. Its headwaters arise from mountain streams by the passes of Orbeti and Didgori. Cascading down towards the Mtkvari through thick, steep forests, its main branches converge at Tsveri village where they have already formed a complex system of impressive canyons. I believe, with my limited geological knowledge, that it is the combination of the volume of the Vere’s waters with the softness of the underlying geological layers which have created the extremely sinuous form of its meanders below Tsveri, a habit more typically associated with slow-moving lowland rivers, and a form which it essentially continues until it reaches the Mtkvari. The Vere gathers the collected waters of two steep ridges to its north and south; forests are excellent reservoirs of moisture which allow many of its tributaries to flow with water even in the dry seasons; in times of rain and storm, every crack on the landscape becomes its own river, capturing water in downward channels which conjoin and increase in power until they deliver their contents to the central stream.
The Vere enters the territory of Tbilisi at the foot of the Napetvrebi settlement. This area is austerely beautiful, a true natural treasure just a short step from the metropolis. It is also a site for the unregulated dumping of construction waste. A long parade of trucks enters the valley continuously and pours their contents down the hillside into the valley. Never mind that all this waste must eventually flow through the city itself; the mentality seems to be that once something is down below us, in the realm of the river, it somehow ceases to act with any kind of connection to our lived reality.
This mentality is replicated with nearly every river in Tbilisi: garbage, plastic, sewage, cement, packaging, old bricks, chemicals, and whatever else the mind can think of is regularly pushed, dumped, poured, and thrown down slopes towards any appearance of a flow. (Nearly every river: the Tsavkisiskhevi, placidly passing by the gardens of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, is curiously clean.) Over geological aeons, weather and the groaning Earth will indeed carry all this away to the Mtkvari and the Caspian. But how long shall we, ourselves, endure it?
I have explored this area above Maghlivi before. I have also visited the site of the Vere’s confluence with the Mtkvari. Dashing across the embankment highway by Heroes Square, one finds a metal ladder descending to a “magical garden” on the riverbank, full of stately trees, overgrown bushes and an abundance of plastic bags. Continuing to the end of this, it’s easy to find the outflow tunnel. An ignominious end for a river which has flowed freely for so long. It stinks terribly, by the way, although the huge flocks of seagulls which typically hover about the tunnel suggest that in some sense the putrescence might be at least partially able to be returned to nature’s cycles. Still, one wonders what we people have done to the river in its short distance between here and its spectacular canyons upstream.
Today, my expedition’s purpose is to run counter-flow. The Vere is not seen between its confluence and Mziuri Park, where it enters the great tunnel which carries it under Heroes Square. I will therefore start at Mziuri and follow the Vere upstream as closely as possible until Maghlivi. I am joined by Sopho and Anuka. Sopho is a veteran of river expeditions and Anuka grew up in a Saburtalo flat across from Mziuri, having been witness to many of its changes over the past few decades as extreme urbanization struck the valley, apartment blocks blossomed like mold over the hillsides, and water flow was forcefully displaced for traffic flow, the once open river confined and shunted aside so that a new highway could provide a new venue for Tbilisi’s citizens to entertain themselves while waiting in jams.
Of course, the first implementation of this altered channel was devastated just a short time after its creation by the 2015 flash floods; nature always exacts revenge for its mistreatment, sooner or later. These floods further rearranged and redistributed Tbilisi’s relationship with the Vere in particular; many informal settlements close to the riverbank were destroyed, leading to the loss of 20 human lives. The Tbilisi zoo was also devastated; many animals died in the floods or were killed after their escape. In the aftermath Mziuri Park needed a total remodeling, and the path of the river around the highway was somewhat altered, allowing space for a raging high water to potentially pass. Our trip today will search for clues of the river’s old ways and emblems of its present.
As we leave Mziuri, heading west, the path follows a sort of berm which has been raised above the level of the park. It is clearly a sort of additional flood barrier upon which a path has been laid as an afterthought; there are few stairs or access paths which allow people to climb up on the berm and have a look at the river. This is a repetition of a common pattern, observable at nearly every river of Tbilisi, where access to and perspective on the river is eliminated as a priority from every aspect of urban design and development. The river is perceived as a wasteland, an inconvenience to be circumvented, without any possible attraction to normal citizens.
While the city turns its back on the river, it remains a corridor of life for countless non-human residents of the city. Scrubby trees sprout between the concrete blocks placed to reinforce the riverbank, and a huge heron flaps away from us as we turn round a corner. The river is a place where forms of life can exist which do not have any other place left to them in the increasingly betonized urban landscape. Its very neglectedness saves it as a naturally well-watered ecosystem – at least for now, although the tower cranes and cement mixers creep inexorably downhill. The inherent directionality and linearity of the river allows its space to serve not just as a place of inhabitation but also one of movement; birds, fish, small mammals, and even plant seeds use the river course as one of their essential forms of navigation in an otherwise unhospitable environment.
Passing under the highway, we notice the first of the countless effluent dumps we will observe on our journey. A large white pipe is pouring a considerable quantity of water directly into the Vere. It seems like an excessively large amount of water to be purely graywater discharge, but I do not have another explanation. There has been no rain of any considerable amount for days, and just a few blocks up from that pipe one will directly encounter the eastern end of Ikalto Ridge, which precludes there being any kind of buried river emerging here. It is possible that there was historically a large spring in that part of Saburtalo which continues to produce water with a city built on top of it. Or, it could possible be a large graywater discharge encompassing a significant part of Saburtalo. These are the kinds of questions which I always encounter on an expedition and which always remain a lingering point of curiosity for me. I do not have much knowledge about how Tbilisi handles its municipal sewage discharge. It’s certain that graywater is not treated anywhere in Tbilisi, but it would not surprise me if I learned of raw sewage or industrial chemicals being released into the rivers as well.
The berm at Mziuri provides Tbilisi’s last half-hearted attempt to engage with the Vere. From here westward, it will be a game of hide and seek as we chase Vere in and out of tunnels and culverts. To continue, we clamber down a small hill at the bottom of which the river can be followed fairly closely. Here the riverbank takes the form of short concrete walls punctuated by occasional small discharge pipes, topped by a steep embankment of soil and ragged clumps of thornbushes and spiky trees. Walking on the Vake side of the embankment, we jump over a small wonder – a little stream burbling down from Vake side. Its neutral smell betrays its natural origins. Those living in Vake will have never seen it above their streets; most likely it is from another historical spring in the area that was diverted directly to a culvert.
A little further down, another wonder: the rusted remnants of a large waterwheel. I have often seen historical photographs of watermills on the Mtkvari, but never before have I seen physical, artifactual evidence of them – I hardly expected to see one at what must have been its original site. River power was an essential part of the business of the city before fossil fuels became widely available and cheap. What miracle kept this here through all of its decades of disuse, safe from scrap metal dealers and waves of urban reconstruction? Does the mysterious mansion-like building close by, sandwiched between the highway and river, offer any clues to an answer?
The Vere is ushered into another tunnel, and we traipse to its next emergence, a placid peekaboo less than a hundred meters long. The abbreviated space between tunnel and tunnel is frankly humorous, and one can sense the river’s relief in having at least this space granted it to touch the air and sunlight. A high fence cuts it off from Saburtalo; there is a football pitch on the other side, and perhaps it would be unhandy if the players’ wayward balls would reach the river and float away. Still, it seems sad to have such a relaxing spot denied to its neighborhood. Some larger shady trees, a selection of flowering bushes, a diversion of the graywater discharges, and Chikovani street would have itself a sorely needed green area. Instead, the river’s concrete embankment serves as a canvas for street artists; an angel clutches a watermelon next to a large declamation of ‘FUCK THE SYSTEM’. We walk by the highway in order to have a better look, and then leave the river to its next tunnel while we scramble above ground to search for its next appearance.
Passing along the edge of a rare low-rise section of Saburtalo and some ominous heaps of gravel, we find it again: a truly spectacular curving sweep of current, directly beneath the point where the highway splits in two, feeding one half through the Ikalto ridge towards the Hippodrome. This steep ridge, by the way, should have always remained a green space and never had a neighborhood constructed on it. I will never fathom the planning decision which sited those huge apartment blocks atop it. Here, it is possible to descend to the river’s edge down the steep but manageable slope; we spot a gentleman walking his dog, the first human we have encountered interacting with the river today.
It is a very beautiful section of river, made all the more picturesque by the arcs of the double bridges. It is also the closest I have been able to come to the water since the start of the walk, and I am able to clearly see and smell the large quantities of gray particulate matter swirling in the current and clinging to the aquatic plants. This is, or should be, graywater – runoff from sinks, showers, gardens, basically everything but the toilet. It’s not terrible for the ecosystem, not great either. In principle it could be treated by the city or at least filtered at its origin points, at each house or apartment building, but that is expensive; neither City Hall nor its herd of rapacious developers have the interest in doing more than the bare minimum for the public good.
I had hoped that we would be able to sneak underneath pillars of the bridges to continue following the river’s course, but the highways have been constructed on large concrete walls with holes punched through for the river to pass. The river doesn’t allow us any space, so we must circumvent the highways somehow. It is actually simple enough to climb over the Cholokashvili tunnel where it meets the ridge; we make our way up the side and over the top fairly easily, enjoying a nice view of the terrains we have traversed so far.
Coming down, however, a chainlink fence cuts us off from a parking lot where City Hall tows illegally parked cars. A brace of plump security guards view us with perplexity as we clamber down; fortunately, there is just enough space between the wall of the parking lot and the side of the cliff for us to wriggle out to the side of the highway. Here, however, there is no easy solution; to follow the river, we must be on the other side. We wait for a gap in the cars and run. We perch in the median and then run again.
After the time we have spent risking our lives to traverse asphalt and concrete, the river valley has never looked so welcoming, and we are able to descend to the banks once again, where we find a lovely patch of cattails growing among other trees and grasses. Cattails are a typical wetland plant and usually signify a healthy ecosystem. Further up, the riverbank suddenly becomes a forest of fig and pomegranate trees – two hardy fruits which don’t mind steep slopes and poor soils. Their roots will help to secure the soft, sedimentary banks from erosion, a significant danger with the speed of the river’s current after spring rains.
I often wonder how much the huge apartment complexes built along the riverside have contemplated or planned for the possibility of the ground underneath them slipping away; one of the newest structures has surrounded its base with a large concrete wall; is it to keep the water out or to keep the earth in? And will it succeed in either of those purposes? In the meantime, we spot some young men exercising their artistic talents at the base of the wall with a large bucket of pink paint.
Our path takes us steeply above the river, but suddenly, a change in water color is unmistakable. Below us, we cannot quite make out how, but a large flow of brown, dirty-colored water swirls into the river from beneath our feet. Along the natural course of the river, the water seems darker, bluer, more naturally colored. We are directly beneath the Ikalto ridge as it passes above the Hippodrome; there is no natural flow coming from that direction. Rather, an outflow tunnel is releasing such a large volume of effluent into the Vere at this point that it completely changes the color of the river. The Vere has had this dirty brown color since we began following it; suddenly, it appears to change to a much more respectable color for a river.
Later, on our next approach to the riverbank, our noses verify the change: the stench which had been the constant companion of our expedition thus far has vanished, or at least much diminished. Although we still see plenty of outflow pipes still dumping wastewater into the Vere, here must be the location of the main culprit. What its origin is, I cannot begin to speculate. Its size and location is such that it must be of public rather than private origin. It would be very interesting to see if the city possesses any publicly available plans or descriptions of its sewage system.
This section of riverbank hosts a very peculiar neighborhood: Leopold Bielfeld street, named for the German architect who built Kashueti church. It hangs below the highway and above the river, connected to nothing; the massive slope of Ikalto ridge cuts it off from Saburtalo. Here, apparently, many dwellings began as, or still remain, informal settlements. Precarious self-built cottages line an unpaved, dirt road, and only the din and racket of the skyscrapers under construction across the river on Vake side quash the feeling that one has temporarily entered a rural village. Rude huts shelter flocks of chickens and the steep slope to the riverbank is terraced for vegetable gardens and vineyards. These, of course, are the ones that survived; many of these kinds of settlements, in other locations closer down to the waterline, were destroyed in the 2015 flood.
In my exploration of Tbilisi’s rivers, I have often found these kinds of places taken up by these kinds of inhabitations: those on the lowest economic levels of society descend the furthest down and closest to the riverbank, to the place which is seen as a garbage dump by everyone else, to claim some unwanted land and live off of it, or at least on it. It can be very surprising to see the extreme contrast between living conditions in an area like this and the fancy upscale Vake apartments just across the river. Still, I always get the feeling that those who have chosen to live here understand the river best of all Tbilisians; the river has welcomed them, and they have fit their lives around it rather than seeking to bend it to their purposes. As we continue, we pass some a well-built home with solar panels and a large eucalyptus tree; perhaps these people also began humbly, and began to prosper because of the stability this land was able to give them? The river hides many stories whose answers I will not know.
Finally able to reach the riverbank again, we are wandering along and are just mentioning how much cleaner the river seems to be when we see a shocking sight. An old, decrepit-looking multistory house on the Vake side, across from us, is perched on a cliff above the river, but the cliff is totally covered in all sorts of garbage and plastic bags. Two young boys are standing on the steep slope with brooms, sweeping garbage from the area directly below the house further down the embankment. It seems to be the case that the residents of the house simply throw their garbage out the window at the river, and then periodically sweep further down the garbage that lands too close to them. Two middle-aged ladies regard our phones and cameras with great suspicion, and suddenly a broom comes flying over the river and passes surprisingly close to our heads. Surely an accident? It must be hard to hold onto one’s broom while vigorously sweeping trash down such a steep slope. The middle-aged ladies ask if we are lost. No, we are just following the river. Just in case, they invitingly instruct us how it is possible to leave in either direction. Is there no trash container near their house, or is it just easier to throw trash out the window at the river? And does nobody from City Hall ever pass this way to look at the natural resources of their city, or have they have passed by and simply do not care?
We reach the end of this little section of valley; the river enters (or rather emerges from) yet another tunnel. We have to climb on top, but there is no easy way; here, as in most of the Vere valley, the underlying geology is very soft and sedimentary, and crumbles away with firm pressure; we have to cling to the wires of the retaining wall to keep our balance on the precarious slopes. The spaces we have walked through are so beautiful and peaceful, although they could use some cleanup. It’s just obvious that there is no public interest in using that space for movement. Yet it would cost almost nothing to construct safe and accessible walking trails all along these sections of river where we have been. With that and a little beautification, Tbilisi would have a huge green corridor and a much needed recreational zone right in the heart of the city. It is odd that the river, which harbors so much life, is not given a place in the urban consciousness. I firmly believe that the river has much to give us, and we have much to give to the river. But we have to find the will, the perception, and the connection in order to accomplish this.
Finally we reach a safe space for walking. Interestingly, the space below us still very much resembles a river valley, but one from which the river has been extracted. Here, also, a large flock of chickens huddles under a jeep, a kennel of dogs woofs at us from across the distance, and even the squeaks of pigs can be heard. Someone has themselves a nice agricultural operation on prime real estate right on the edge of Vake. We next reach Tamarashvili street, where we say goodbye to Anuka. Once again there is no safe way to cross the busy road to our upriver destination, and we must run when the cascade of automobiles temporarily stops.
When we have clambered back down the steep slope to reach the river again, we find a clue to the tunnel: the date 1958 marked in the concrete above it. The river must have been routed under here during the construction of Tamarashvili street. That’s why the spot earlier still looks like a river should be there; Vere flowed there less than 70 years ago. Our geographical sensibilities often forget how much we have bent the urban landscape to our will; there was historically no connection between Vake and Saburtalo here, and Ikalto ridge stretched unbroken the whole length of Saburtalo; it’s only recently that the hole was punched in it right here, giving preeminent place to the flow of humanity.
Some grumpy workers are welding pieces of metal together. Small parts of the riverbank appear to have been drilled away on both sides and it seems that they will install a new piece of infrastructure: a bridge? A pipe? A flood barrier? They tell us that we are not allowed to walk any farther, even though they are doing nothing in the direction where we are going. Rather than argue, we walk around the side, where a municipal depot of road signs and a sausage factory are located. We spot also signs that other creative people have passed by and made interactions with the river: on the side of a building, there is a mosaic created from construction waste found in the Vere, and a mark, more than two meters above the ground, showing how high the floodwaters rose on June 13th, 2015. This apparently was one of the areas worst affected in that disaster.
Perhaps because of reconstruction as a result of the floods, this section of river feels a little sad. Even though we are entering a much wilder section of the valley, for a short time the river is entirely channelized – it is walled in on both sides by high concrete and even the bottom of the river has been replaced with concrete. It is an undignified look for a mighty stream, and it seems odd to conclude that bringing the river even further away from its natural state will keep riverside residents safe from natural disasters. The grim appearance is enhanced by the piles of oozing trash which are mounded beneath several different drainage pipes. The river can be dangerous to us, but we don’t seem to think about how we can be dangerous to the river, and what kind of conditions we can create which don’t involve either of us being dangerous to each other, but rather allow us to support each other’s health and well-being. Such kinds of landscapes are possible to be created and nurtured – but they are not here, not yet.
Proceeding upriver, the terrain starts to get quite wild – the cliffs steeper, the bushes denser and bramblier. We begin to pass between two cemeteries, one on each side. Stone walls of traditional Georgian garden-sarcophagi descend in chaotic yet neat terraces, at times nearly to the river itself, in other places stopping where the cliff of the riverbank is too steep to continue. I do not know what tradition causes Georgians to plant cypress trees in cemeteries, but I find great poetry in their forlorn stateliness, their passionate reeling in passing winds. These forests shelter not just the rotting skeletons of humanity, but also a great variety of songbirds and small mammals. The spaces set aside for death become some of the largest green spaces of the city, and havens of non-human life just like the rivers. They form a striking conjunction in this part of the Vere valley.
Unexpectedly, we find a large stream of water entering from our left, and I realize that we have reached the confluence of the Ukanakhevi. I have followed Ukanakhevi partially; it is a wild and beautiful river, rather difficult to access due to the extreme steepness of its course and banks. It comes off of Mtatsminda a bit below Udzo and goes on to create an immense canyon between Tskneti and the mountain, carving along its way some rather remarkable geological formations in the soft sandstone. I know it to be swallowed up somewhere close to the GWP facility in Bagebi; what they do to it there, I do not know. I have seen in the satellite images, but I have not explored, the green patch between Bagebi and Vere, where I assumed it flows.
We have anyways approached a place where the cliffs prevent us from continuing; we could hop over the river and try to walk on in the cemetery to keep an eye on the river, but I decide to use this opportunity to have a look at the course of the Ukanakhevi. The water is issuing out of a culvert under a small road, but much to my surprise, I don’t see it on the other side. The river has been surrounded in concrete, and its course can be marked only by the overgrown roof of that concrete container as it snakes down the gorge. It’s perplexing and I don’t know what is going on – some water issues out of a cracked pipe, more is visible through a brief gap in the roof of the channel, more glints (stagnant?) beneath a large clump of thornbushes.
It’s not the first time I’ve found rivers encased like this – Avchala, for example, can only be followed like this for most of its course. I don’t understand why, unless the river has such an offensive smell that it must be hidden away. But nobody is living in this steep, overgrown gulch. Brambles and thorns block the way everywhere, and the banks are practically too steep to get up or down. The river is in nobody’s way; it could be contributing to a lovely wetland ecosystem here, but instead, it is wasting away in a concrete prison. I am no landscape designer, but it’s hard to look at this and not think that something better could be done. In the meantime, we need to escape – brambles prevent us from following the tunnel-top further. Luckily, some resident above has made a series of steep staircases out of old tires, and planted part of the steep hillside with a garden. We make use of their work to haul ourselves out of the gully, and end up in their backyard. Nobody is home, so we let ourselves out.
All of a sudden, we find ourselves in Bagebi, which in my opinion is the most depressing and stressful neighborhood in all of Tbilisi. I cannot imagine how civilized people content themselves to live there. There is literally no space for free human existence – every spare square meter has been given to cars or buildings. Apartments have been constructed directly at the edge of the busy road, and since they do not seem to have been constructed to include any parking spaces, people have parked their cars all over that infinitesimal margin between building and road. As a result, anyone who wishes to traverse this area on foot is forced to dance around cars in the middle of the street, which is already too narrow for the large amount of traffic that is rumbling backwards and forwards upon it. “I’ll fuck the mother of whoever gave me a parking fine here”, reads the graffiti on a wall next to a fancy Porsche; “PARKING SPOTS FOR SALE”, proclaims a billboard.
Here is no flow, no freedom, no air, and no life. We are relieved to find the side road taking us back down in the direction of the river, passing a large construction site where yet another apartment building will go in. On a high switchback, we are able to see the parts of the river we missed: high cliffs with descending rows of oblong boxes in the Saburtalo Cemetery, a large pipe carrying water (most likely) from one side to the other, and a large concrete structure holding a metal grid which completely crosses the river. I believe this must be a flood barrier intended to hold debris in place in case of another flash flood.
Down at the bottom, the line on the map which led me to believe we could cross the river here turns out to be a shallows where cars can drive through. Some teenagers holding a football wave down a jeep about to make a crossing and hitch their way over, but I determine that in a specific spot a running jump will carry me over safe and dry. Sopho elects to wait for me here; I will press forward to Maghlivi and return through Bagebi. Upriver, the iconic red tower of the Maghlivi bridge now looks much less in command of its place than I remember it; this is the first time I have been here to see the progress of construction on the new road bridge. The pillars and roadway have already been laid, and it seems that the entire project will be done by election time.
The sun is setting, and I still have to make it to Maghlivi. A semblance of a path cuts across the hillside in the direction I want, and I press forward a bit too hastily, getting myself painfully entangled in a thicket of thorny vines. I can feel blood dripping down my face as I extricate myself, but my fading daylight and dying phone battery compel me to finish the mission before I stop to clean myself. As I approach the rubble of the bridge construction site, another stream emerges. I know there are some streams which come down into Saburtalo from the Lisi ridge, and I know another place a bit west of Maghlivi, below the so-called Greenhill building, where a pipe pours a waterfall down the cliff into Vere.
I am not sure that these would have been the natural outlets of those streams on the other side; we are on the extended high ground that becomes Ikalto ridge, and those streams could not have crossed it; most likely, to my thinking, they would have originally flowed down the length of Saburtalo and poured down as a waterfall over the cliffs directly into Mtkvari. They have probably been assigned these outlets here after the development of the Saburtalo neighborhood. But I cannot be sure of this; I have not found any maps or plans that illustrate where a conduit in this direction might be originating from, nor have I met anyone with the historico-geographical knowledge to explain to me how this neighborhood looked before it was built. Possibly, these flows are also simply graywater discharges.
I want to reach the Maghlivi footbridge, but the construction site lies in the way. Next to a large open pile of discarded visibility vests, packaging, and other forms of trash, a security guard asks me where I am going. More likely he is wondering where I am coming from; I am emerging from the depths of the canyon with blood on my face. I want to go to the other side, I say; go carefully, he says. Still, I don’t manage to notice the stairs over the wall, or else I have gotten too used to not having help with barriers. I climb up and jump down.
This new bridge brings me conflicting feelings. One of the truly special things about the Maghlivi footbridge was how isolated you felt over the valley. Upriver, a whole wilderness begins; downriver, you could imagine yourself being swept away into the city. Alone, on a bridge built just for walkers, you felt that humanity and nature could touch each other somehow. The new road is being built scarcely twenty meters away – at least it is on the downriver side. When it is finished, the din of traffic rushing backwards and forwards over it will never stop. The splendid isolation which was not only felt there, but visually projected in that single elegant red tower over the valley, is replaced with the ordinary, noisy, smelly business of the city. It is true that the new bridge will allow some people to move about a bit more quickly, those who can’t be bothered to go on foot or wait for the cable car. Perhaps it will even relieve traffic jams somewhere, although I guess it will be more likely to become a new venue of traffic jams itself. But aesthetically, it feels like another measure of Tbilisi’s magic has been decanted and poured away.
Maghlivi marks the end of the journey: the course of the Vere, through this section, is now in some measure familiar to me. At some point, I will try to return to the small section I wasn’t able to follow, but I have accomplished my purpose. Photographs, memories, and map traces will allow me to make my report, categorize my observations, and create overall reflections. As usual, the visit to Tbilisi’s rivers presented many widely diverse and contrastive perspectives and views, from the scenic and peaceful to the harrowing and disgusting. I think I find the most comfort in the fact that I have physically observed that the river still exists; I know now where it joins and departs from the urban landscape, I know the sum of its parts, and that it is more than that.
Tbilisi’s interface with its rivers is troubled and complicated – mostly, the city turns its backside to them, abuses and dirties them, considers them a hassle or a hazard rather than a resource and a responsibility. It does not have to be this way. I envision a future where the rivers that slice deep canyons between our neighborhoods are clean, green corridors where people can join the many other forms of life that thrive there. I would like to see more attention given to the rivers – on a public level, many simple projects can be done that will vastly improve their condition, but on a private level, regular citizens can also open up their lives to the energy of the rivers. Go walking with them, explore their secrets, discover their hidden courses. Find ways to ask questions, why it is this way, why it cannot be another way. We can clean them easily, diverting wastewater elsewhere. We can build paths, clear brush, plant trees, engineer a welcoming landscape. We can take them out of their culverts and let them run freely over the ground as much as possible. Rivers cannot be stopped. It is we who need to flow with them. Their power will help us, if we will spend time with them and make good places for them.
The Vere is just one of dozens of rivers in Tbilisi which more or less share the same condition and which could all be brought together into one unifying vision for the restoration of natural ecosystems to the city. While I intend to continue my explorations indefinitely, I am limited by my free time and by the fact that I am just one individual. Rivers unite many different landscapes with one flowing form of energy; I also foresee this project as one that unites many different kinds of people in different places. If you have made observations or thought of ideas relating to a river near you, I would love to hear about them and share them with the small community which is growing around my page. Let’s go with the flow.
Rivers of Tbilisi can be followed on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/riversoftbilisi/
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