Guest Post: The Country That Doesn't Really Exist

Drew Gough spends a few days in weird, weird Abkhazia.

I’m on break this week. Stepping in for me is friend and sometimes-writer Drew Gough. The following is an excerpt from Notes from the Edge of the Earth, a travel newsletter focusing on his experiences in far-away places, like this story about exploring Abkhazia, an unrecognized microstate with a Soviet-era monkey museum, between Georgia and Russia. He urges me to note that the stories he tells are loosely remembered and not to be taken wholly as fact, which I think is self-evident from what follows. All critique, frustrations, protest, and accusations of anti-Abkhazian bias should be sent directly to him. Please enjoy.

Did somebody lose a duffel bag? Photo credit: Drew Gough.

The bridge is empty except for a mule-drawn carriage bumping slowly northward. It’s been so long since this was used as a road, yet a few pieces of tarmac still cling stubbornly to the surface. Most of the old highway has been worn down to dirt, and much of that dirt has been worn down to potholes from the dozens of winters since a car last passed this way. The bridge is low, spanning a broad, dry riverbed that’s just dusty grass and splotchy wildflowers blowing in the noon breeze. The mule cart gets stuck momentarily in a deep pothole, and the suitcase strapped to the back falls lazily into the dirt road, its dull thud failing to produce an echo.

I jump down from the carriage to grab the suitcase and tuck it back into the strap behind the seat, disregarding the futility of the act. This is ridiculous. We’ve been jostling across this bridge for 15 minutes already, and have lost this case about 10 times. Behind us, another traveller has arrived on the bridge. He’s carrying a big wheely suitcase with one arm, but closes the ground quickly. We trundle on. Soon, he’s upon us, smiling and waving. He says something friendly as he easily overtakes us, but I don’t understand the words. I don’t even know what language he’s speaking. Here, it could be one of a few.

My bag falls off a few more times but before an hour has passed, we’ve managed the 800 meters and reached the other side of the bridge. The driver grins a big toothless grin and gestures toward a bend in the road ahead. “There,” he probably says. It’s very slushy, and again might not be in English. It’s hard to say. He laughs and slaps my back. It’s the last human warmth I’ll experience for a few days, the end of Georgian hospitality and the beginning of something far, far stranger.

I grab my suitcase and duffel bag and attempt that weird wave where you have both hands full and just kind of flap your arms low by your sides, then turn and walk toward the bend in the road. Walking is so much faster than the mule cart, even with the bags, but I’m uneasy. There’s a kind of heaviness in the air, like a storm forming. Soon, I’m at the bend in the road, and my uneasiness finds its source. Before me lies a tall barbed-wire fence, many chunky green military vehicles, some German shepherds, and people in headscarves and heavy coats waiting in a long line at a truly bizarre frontier.

Here lies the border of Abkhazia, one of the world’s unrecognized nations.

***

Abkhazia has an old history, but most of it is really boring. I’ll attempt a quick recap.

It was a vassal state under the Byzantines and later became part of Georgia and then part of the Ottoman empire. Ugh. See what I mean?

Byzantine, Georgian, Ottoman. That covers almost 2,000 years of history until things get interesting as the Soviet Union starts to crumble. Georgia declared its independence in early 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, and by 1992 Abkhazia is at war with Georgia. A staggering 30,000 people are killed in this conflict, which lasts almost two years. Many Georgians are expelled, leaving Abkhazia with a population of around 250,000. In 1994 a ceasefire begins, with Russian troops forming the majority of the peacekeeping force. You can probably see where this is going.

Russian troops never leave Abkhazia, and in 1999, Abkhazia declares its independence from Georgia. Georgia ignores this. In fact, most countries in the world have ignored this, with only Russia (who didn’t even recognize Abkhazia as an independent nation until it was strategically beneficial to do so in 2008, as South Ossetia was also forcefully trying to leave Georgia) recognizing its independence. Most of the jurisdictions that recognize Abkhazia are themselves newly formed micronations of dubious provenance, and Venezuela and Nicaragua.

This is not really going to be a treatise on statehood and identity. This context is the bare minimum required to really get down to business at hand: trying to explain the deep weirdness and peculiarities of this little country that doesn’t quite exist.

***

Before the rutted bridge and the dry riverbed, at the north-western point of Georgia, there’s a tidy little town called Zugdidi. I only went to Zugdidi to wait for approval to enter Abkhazia, but it’s a pleasant place to pass the time. Georgian food is rich with cheese and butter, and it has what I think of as the best dumplings in the world—massive khinkhali, stuffed with lamb or veggies and always served steaming hot and aromatic and with thick yogurt and black pepper as condiments. Georgian wine is cheap and delicious, and the weather was nice. I could wait in little Zugdidi for days. I nearly had to.

How do you get a visa for a place that doesn’t have international relations? You send a Word document to a Gmail account, of course. A few days or weeks later, you get an email back completely in Russian with some PDFs attached, and with that you have your clearance to enter. This is less than half the battle. The rest of the battle comes up the road from Zugdidi.

For travellers, the only real entrance to Abkhazia is from Georgia. Entering from Russian in the north is complicated, because Russia recognizes this border and few other places do. This means that your passport gets a Russian exit stamp, but that you’re then in a place that only has two roads out: one back to Russia, where your visa might now be expired.

The only real way to enter Abkhazia is the not-at-all-real border in the south, the one with the wildflowers and the Russian army. Georgia doesn’t consider this a border, because it considers Abkhazia one of its provinces. But to arrive at this non-border, you must have a printout of your Abkhazia-issued travel permit and present yourself and your passport at what looks like a toll booth with two uniformed Georgians in shouting distance of the donkey cart drivers. And then you must follow a kind of script when you hand over your papers.

“BORDER” GUARD [in passable English]: Good morning! Where are you off to on this fine day?

YOU [nervously]: Greetings, sir or madam! I am heading up the road to Abkhazia.

“BORDER” GUARD [curiously]: How curious! What takes you to Abkhazia, if I may inquire?

YOU [nervously, but reading from a script]: I would like to see every part of Georgia.

“BORDER” GUARD [smiling now]: Wonderful! You will see that Georgia is a beautiful and unified nation, where everyone of course speaks Georgian and where no one is a teen parent.

YOU [gratefully receiving your passport]: Thank you. Have a great day.

“BORDER” GUARD [smiling more broadly now, probably taking a sip of some orange wine beneath the desk, cursing his luck at being stationed here, at doing this pantomime dozens of times per day]: And you, friend. Safe travels to this other part of Georgia.

With that, you’re free to overpay to go slowly across the bridge, and before long you arrive at a very different border. This one feels significant. Giant men in fatigues eye you from a long way away, other giant men with guns are perched on towers above the fences. It would all feel terrifying if the other people waiting, locals who make this journey daily, were panicked. But they’re not, of course. Their serene faces are reassuring, and the queue moves quickly. It’s all orderly and polite, and the guard—who is without a doubt a member of the Russian military—checks the visa printout quickly and does his best impression of a smile then says, “Welcome to Abkhazia.”

***

Honestly, I wouldn’t go in there. Photo credit Drew Gough

Growing up in Canada, my concept of a border was always a bit wonky. Until after I graduated university, you didn’t even need a passport to go the United States, just any kind of government-issued ID. And crossing the land borders into the US was always underwhelming. Everything was the same, except the metric system was suddenly gone. People spoke English in the same familiar ways, the buildings looked the same, and there were no changes in the landscape. Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York: they’re both shit, you know?

Everywhere else in the world, borders as a theory make a little bit more sense. This river or that mountain range forms a line, on either side of which language or religion are sufficiently different to require a little demarcation. In 20 years of travel, one of my favourite things has become crossing a border over land.

And the world is full of funny little crossings. At the border from Zimbabwe into Botswana, I was asked to walk through a shallow trough filled with neon fluid that smelled like Windex, splashing my shoes theatrically as directed to prevent the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease. Another time, following a Google Maps shortcut, I ended up on a narrow wooden suspension bridge in a deep wooded gorge that marked the end of Montenegro and the beginning of Bosnia. At one border crossing between Georgia and Armenia, you’re simply asked to pop out of your car to go pay the visa fee for Armenia. You can have a quick glass of brandy for a few cents and continue your journey.

In all of those cases, the sense of being in a different county dawned gradually. Botswana seemed friendlier and richer than Zimbabwe, but just as remote and unpopulated. Bosnia’s forests seemed very much like Montenegro’s, but then the sight of tall droopy haystacks and men selling honey beside the road told of being somewhere else. In Armenia, the landscape inched toward the more dramatic, the roads improved.

Crossing into Abkhazia was something else entirely. First of all, there was the giant fence. Second, there were a lot of guns, those armed soldiers looking serious and purposeful. There was suddenly quite a lot of pavement and official-looking cars, all dark windows and menace. There was a general hustle about the place that can be explained in two ways: one, there’s nothing around and everyone is in a hurry to move on to the towns and cities further up the coast; two, the busyness and bureaucracy of this non-country is simply attempting to confer legitimacy on a place that has very little of its own to offer. It kind of works, so harsh is the juxtaposition with Zugdidi and the final few kilometers of Georgia.

Maybe this is a real place, a real country, I started to think.

***

But no, it isn’t.

It took all of 15 minutes for the mirage to start to fade. I spent those 15 minutes waiting in a parking lot that slowly emptied of its parked cars. Those official-looking all-black sedans had difficulty starting and when they drove away, black smoke sputtered from beneath the sunken rear end, weighed down by the six people squeezed into the back seat. A soldier wandered by and put down his gun and smoked lazily on the grass, looking bored and lonely. Even the birds sounded tired of being here.

I was waiting for a car that the hotel in Sokhumi was maybe sending to collect me, but there was no way to contact either driver or hotel. Cell reception didn’t exist at this particular frontier (and was at the time very limited in Abkhazia in general) and so I had messaged the hotel that morning from Georgia and gave a best guess for when I’d be across the border. They had said something along the lines of “Driver will go” and gave no further information. Another 15 minutes passed, then 30, then an hour. I sat on the curb and read a book, putting my faith in “Driver will go.”

Read the rest of this story on Notes From the Edge of the Earth.