Urban Decay

This is going to be a really picture laden post, so I apologize in advance.

One of my most favorite things to do on this planet is crawl around weird abandoned places. Urban decay happens anywhere humans have settled; it's anything we've built, or tried to build, and then for some reason or another left a shell of a structure behind. Houses, government buildings, asylums, hospitals, orphanages - you name it, it's abandoned somewhere on this earth. The good thing about urban decay in America is that a quick Google search can usually tell you what the thing you've just discovered is. Even little summer camps that are down a ravine in some mountains outside of Los Angeles are identifiable with some digging around on the internet.

But Google does jack shit here.

Georgia is, I would hazard a guess based on the areas I've been, comprised of about 40% abandoned buildings - structures that have not been occupied since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Architectural feats whose information is buried in some deep cellar which will never see the light of day again, or whose records were destroyed with the dissolution of the USSR. Word of mouth is really the only thing that can keep a majority of buildings identified, and even then you will be hard pressed to get any kind of useful facts out of most Georgians in regards to these abandoned sites.1

This country is simultaneously an urban explorers wet dream and worst enemy. The plethora of places to creep into is matched only by the lack of any kind of identifying information on them. It also doesn't help that many structures have been reallocated for various tasks before ultimately being abandoned. There are very few resources on the larger buildings to begin with, and you might as well just forget about smaller sites because you will never know what the hell they were used for. Google thrives with governments releasing information for the public and crowd sourcing information. When the government (or former government in this case) keeps their records hidden, and the majority of people who do know what the locations were used for a) don't give a shit, and b) don't have internet access, Google becomes useless.

The number of abandoned buildings here is a direct reflection of just how much the rug was pulled out from under Georgia during the dissolution. As Georgia claimed independence in the early 1990s, and the USSR was in its final throes, there was a huge brain drain out of this country. Hospitals emptied as the Russian doctors and nurses who had been employed within them fled back to their home country. Universities suddenly found themselves without professors, official government buildings had no more politicians and high ranking public officers. And this isn't even a story unique to Georgia. Look at any post-Soviet satellite state and you'll find the same thing - the bones of the former Federation empty and decaying.

The area surrounding Telavi is primarily abandoned. Down the hill the city sits upon are huge warehouses, and even a few structures reminiscent of a plane hanger.

One of the hospitals on the south end of town. It's part of a huge complex of buildings on the edge of the forest,  none of which look to have been used at all in about twenty years.

Something about Telavi's endocrine dispensary? 

About a 20 minute walk down the hill from my house, past the Soviet bloc apartments, across the really smelly river that we have affectionately dubbed The Shit River and right next to the super janky water park, is a huge complex of warehouses that are completely empty.

There are three gigantic mostly windowed buildings. What they were used for, I've zero idea, but there is a carpet of moss inside now, so we should probably just repurpose them as a spiffy new greenhouse.

"Sophia! I'm going to run down this thing! Can you take a picture of me being a dork at the end?" This complex has a really impressive view of the Caucasus mountains when it's not foggy out. 

Down the dirt road from the huge complex several paths jut down into small patches of land. They're only trekked by shepherds and their flocks these days, but there are little places like this sprinkled throughout the fields. They're not particularly interesting, and they're probably not nefarious in origin, but my curiosity really gets the better of me when checking them out.

Some buildings have fences around them. Sometimes the fence is just made out of fallen saplings that have been piled on top of each other, while some are legitimate "seriously, keep the fuck out" type of fences. This is behind one of those fences. Which makes me really want to know why I can't go in it!

This is on the road that parallels The Shit River. It looks like it was once apartments,  or maybe a school. We stumbled upon an old vineyard, but didn't dilly dally on account of one room was being used in the main house, and outside there was a small shack with a smoking fire and a Caucasian Mountain Shepherd sitting outside. In case you don't know what that is, I suggest you google it and see why the hell we got out of there super fast.

One of the largest and nicest looking buildings in downtown Telavi - the city's school resource center, and other administrative offices. What you don't see is the inside, which looks like a god damn war zone. Half the lights don't work, there are exposed tangles of wires which bring fluctuating amounts of electricity in, and the walls, like so many in public spaces here, are falling apart. It's not technically abandoned, but about half the building is non functional due to disrepair. 

The lack of functionality in the buildings that aren't yet abandoned is incredibly common, not only in Telavi but all throughout Georgia. Even my school suffers from this, as do many spaces in the main business part of Telavi. What's even more common, however, is the repurposing of formerly abandoned buildings in dealing with the widespread, but not talked about, problem of Georgia's internally displaced people. These IDP's have been scattered to numerous locations within Georgia's borders, but are unable to return home. In some cases, it is because they lack the necessary funding to make it across the country to go back to their towns (many people around Gori in particular were left homeless after the bombings of 2008), but others are left homeless due to the ongoing trouble with the disputed zones of Abkhazia and Ossetia.

The current number of IDP's, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, is 273,997. That's in a country with a total population of a little over 4 million. So we're dealing with a huge percentage of people who are, essentially, homeless. Many are now in makeshift refugee camps (my friend Sophia visited a camp outside of Telavi, so if you're interested on her perspective you can find her blog post here) which dot the empty farmlands of Kakheti, Imereti, and Kartli, while more have taken up residence in formerly dilapidated buildings that have stood empty since the fall of the USSR.

Last semester, TLG brought all the volunteers together in a town named Tskhaltubo, just outside of the major city Kutaisi. We had a conference which was largely a publicity stunt to make the program look more appealing for possible future recruits. While I am never one to turn my nose up at the prospect of a hot shower every single day for four days straight, I did find the location choice to be...lacking a certain tact. 

TLG put us up at a resort spa. It was once a beautiful and expensive luxury retreat for high ranking members of the Soviet government. In fact, the theater room for our conference was used by Stalin and his cabinet. It was a strange feeling, being an American prattling on about the tectonic plates which are responsible for Georgia's landscape in a room where who knows how many terrible decisions were settled upon by Stalin and his cronies. What was even stranger, however, was that although the grounds of the resort were enormous, and a good chunk of the buildings in our part of the complex were abandoned, the resort was actually housing about 9,000 IDPs. I did not see any of them, as it felt weird to go out in search of refugees - but they were there all the same.

Tskhaltubo is mostly abandoned. Once a flourishing resort town, it is now primarily bones of expansive former luxuries. 

The walls inside the abandoned buildings give you a clue as to how recently people had been living in them. I'm not sure if the IDPs who were at our hotel were the same ones who resided in the [what I assume to be a] school on the main road, but at some point in the not too distant past there were absolutely refugees. 

Records on the floor give the date as mid to late 2008. 

I always appreciate some nice graffiti to make things more beautiful. 

A large hotel now being inhabited by people. Whether they're IDPs or not I'm unsure, but this building has certainly seen much better days, that's for sure. 

Inside the former hotel. It was a huge building, with beautiful [broken] domes and windows, as well as impressive masonry. These abandoned buildings are usually never improved upon before relocating people to live within them, so the insides often match the exterior in terms of upkeep.

Bullet holes in the walls make you remember, in case you had forgotten, the tumultuous past of many structures still standing. 

This must have been one of the most impressive resorts ever in its hayday.  It was a gigantic spa, sporting four floors, a concert hall, and even a personal house which Stalin himself favored heavily. A few of us wandered up the stairs, looking for a way inside, when we were met by some security guards. They were very friendly, both curious and surprised that three American girls had found their way to the hotel. They were even more surprised when we attempted to speak Georgian with them. The guards, named Irekle and Giorgi (what the hell else would they be named?), were extremely excited to show us all around the complex.

The first place they took us was up to the roof and attic. While this was probably not the BEST decision in hindsight, especially once we saw this seemingly grizzly scene, it did allow us a great birds eye view of the resort and surrounding Tskhaltubo. But you don't get a picture of that. You get a picture of what made all of our hearts almost stop until Giorgi explained to us that there had been a horror movie filmed here a few days prior. I mean, we should have known from the color of the fake blood, but when you're wandering through a dark attic, unsure where you're going, and you come upon this, your first reaction is not to get all CSI on it. You're going to be thinking, "Ohfuckohfuckohfuck!"

The balcony outside of the concert hall. We were curious about the burn marks, as we had noticed several in various rooms. Eventually we pieced together that they were from refugee's petchies, and that, until fairly recently, this resort had been serving as a home for a couple thousand refugees.

Down the opposite way from the previous picture. There are certainly worse places to call "home," but when your actual house remains unobtainable I don't think anywhere will ever feel right.

A baby grand piano in the concert hall. In Russian, it translates as "Red October," which is a pretty cool name for a piano!

Uh. Guys? I think it's going to take more than a bandaid to fix this place...

Since this was a functioning resort in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, naturally there were guestbooks [left]. As to what the book on the right is, I've zero clue. There were a lot of entries in the guestbooks from Polish guests, and many from the DDR. What were surprising, however, were the Americans. What Americans were doing in Soviet Georgia in the 60s is beyond me, but there was a shockingly large number of them!

Our guides took us to a room which used to be an administrative office. They got really excited, and grabbed a broom [handle pictured on the right] and started poking the top of a bookcase. A few seconds later, that...thing...on the left fell to the floor. They picked it up, put it on the table and told us to take a picture of their "jackal." I wasn't about to argue with them, so I did. 

On a very superficial level I love the amount of abandoned places in Georgia. They're full of intrigue and interest and I would be completely happy just spending the next ten years driving around, finding all of them, and creeping inside.

But that's purely for selfish reasons. It's not caring about why they're there, how they got to be in their current dilapidated states, and it's ignoring the fact that they have probably served as "home" to a family all too recently. It's easy to see them and think about what awesome paintball arenas they would make, or how they look like something out of a post apocalyptic movie, but then you remember they are, for Georgians, post apocalyptic. The satellite states really got the short end of the stick with the dissolution, and Georgia is feeling the ramifications of it over twenty years later. They're still rebuilding their infrastructure, still trying to fill the positions for teachers, doctors, surgeons, skilled laborers. It's a pretty big mess, honestly, which puts refurbishing, or even sparing a second thought to these abandoned spaces, really low priority.

One day, when I am so rich I just don't know what to do with myself, I'll come back and buy a lot of these decaying buildings and turn them into the most badass paintball arenas the world has ever seen.

Until then, I'll keep enjoying crawling around in them, and will always be reminded where I am when I see a line of laundry hanging out of a window of one of these "abandoned" spaces.

1. Georgians are particularly tight lipped about these things for two reasons. One is that they just don't see why it would be of any interest to you, so they've probably forgotten a lot of information themselves. But the more important one is that an American sniffing around for information on old Russian shit is, generally, a warning flag to many Georgians. When this program first started, a lot of Georgians, especially in smaller communities, were very skeptical of the volunteers, believing that we were actually spies. While it's not a super common belief anymore, as most volunteers from this program have just proved to be insane partying drunks and not world class spies, it's usually better to not ask too much after these places. Might as well try to be polite, you know?