“Maybe there’s something instinctive in us, that we’re drawn to human habitation and can’t resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we’ve retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.”
- Kathleen Jamie, Findings
There was a priest, they told me, who lived with snakes. He lived, they said, in a shallow cave, eating only weeds and grasses and thin strips of silver bark from the trees, emaciating himself slowly into sanctity. The cave was high up on the valley side, within the thick forest of spiny trees, away from the paths of the cowherds. It had been a cave used for different purposes by different people at different times. The rough walls and ceiling of the cave had been blackened by smoke, and into the soot stains were carved symbols and words in different languages; some by the priest and some not. His hair and beard were long and thick. His eyes, dark and bright, shone with a keen intensity from sallow sockets. Sometimes, he would walk through the village with its shouting children and cooking fires and men in circles playing cards. The villagers would feel a power in his presence: he was a gaunt Christ just for them. They would leave him disks of flat bread and bottles of orange wine, but he would leave these libations where he found them. He would pause only at the small village church. There he would cross himself and recite, in the old language, prayers and passages before the simple wooden crucifix in the church garden. When he was done, he would walk away not to be seen for weeks, even months. Eventually, he did not return at all.
There was no path, and our destination was uncertain: a glimpsed cave a few miles upstream, high on the valley side. It was rumoured that people had lived there until recently. We had found such caves before, some of them carved and built into the rock-face with decorated archways and entrances. It seemed impossible that no-one knew about these places except a few of the village boys. Fragments of pots would still be on the ground, the bones of animals, stones covered in intricate patterns. Elsewhere, these would have been famous tourist attractions, or would have at least been pilfered for their relics. We once found a carefully hewn stone horse, grown over by scrub and lying on the ground, its origin and age unknown. We uncovered an oblong stone with the outline of a man carved deeply into it abandoned to the earth. The village boys instinctively understood that these places were important, that they connected them to something inside themselves that felt powerful and valuable. They would enter these spaces with reverence and hushed voices. These caves had been hiding places: places where the villagers’ language and culture had been preserved when waves of enemies broke over their lands.
Indeed, the inhabitation of caves was not unusual in the country as a whole. In the south, there was Vardzia: an entire complex of dwellings populated since the Bronze Age and still housing Orthodox monks to this day. The word ‘troglodyte’, meaning a cave dweller, has come to have negative connotations in popular vernacular. The cave cities both in Georgia and the broader region (the underground complexes of Cappadocia plunge seven kilometers down into the earth and housed twenty thousand people), however, are anything but ‘ignorant or old fashioned’. Excavated from the rock of the steep sided valley of the river Kura, Vardzia spans nineteen stories, and, before it was partially destroyed by an earthquake, had a complex system of ventilation and irrigation. Even in the lower reaches of the cave city, fresh running water was available, cooking fire smoke was extracted, and fresh air was filtered in. Vardzia was not occupied by eccentrics or ascetics but was the beating heart of the country’s culture, its art and its politics: Shota Rustavelli, Georgia’s national poet, had lived there, and many of the chambers were painted with intricate murals. According to legend, there were three hundred and sixty-five caves in all, so that King Tamar (a female King, not a Queen), should she need to, could move to a new room each day throughout the year so that her exact location would always remain unknown for invaders (during her reign, Georgia was under attack from the Mongols). In actual fact, when counted, there were found to be over six thousand rooms, including multiple churches - some of them with domed roofs - and twenty-five wine cellars.
The snakes, who had inhabited the cave long before the priest and would inhabit it long after him, were descendants of those who had escaped from a now derelict farm. Traces of the walls were left beside the river. It had been abandoned for some reason or other, perhaps its owners fled before a wave of invasion: the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Persians, the Mongol horde, the Russians, the Bolsheviks had all come this way. The sound of distant drums echoing through the valley, black smoke, screams. The snakes had multiplied inside the walls until the walls crumbled and the valley became, they said, a valley of snakes.
The caves we sought were less grand and expansive than those at Vardzia, but were still wreathed in mystery and intrigue sufficiently enough to excite us. Although just a few isolated holes in a remote and inaccessible valley cleft, they were nevertheless irresistible: parts of the entrances seemed shaped by human hand, suggested by a straight line here, a symmetry there.
The air was cold on our cheeks that day, stinging them pink, but we sweated under our thick clothes as we laboured upwards over the boulders that had spilled from the valley walls. Although the trees had long lost their green, their roots still tangled among the stones, and the branches would snag our clothing and skin. The terrain was unforgiving, jarring knees and ankles and scraping shins, but we moved quickly. We shouted to each other as we found routes, caught glimpses of the dark shape of the caves above, let out exclamations at the surprising beauty of the place we were in. Most people from the village would never come this far away from the river, especially in the warmer months: they were too afraid of the thick, brown vipers that populated the undergrowth in alarming quantities. I placed my hand on the ground to climb up over a rock and a snake’s head appeared inches away, its eyes yellow and unseeing, concealed amongst some dead grass, luckily lethargic in the cold morning.
Caves are strange things. They are places both of safety and of danger. They are our ancestral homes, refuges from the elements, animals, each other, but also harbour dangerous creatures, darkness, and there is, of course, no way out. They are places of primitive ignorance and places where knowledge is stored and protected. For this reason, it is always a thrill to enter them. The caves that we had reached were several, and many had clearly been inhabited by humans. The entrance of the largest cave had been hewn into the shape of a door, and, inside the cave, there were nooks and shelves carved into the tuff, perhaps to hold lamps that burned rendered animal fat as their fuel. Stones that had clearly been worked were on the floor too, embedded into the ground. We touch the walls, drawn to the human. We conjecture who lived there, what they hid from, what they saw. There was a welcomeness to this cave. At some point, it would have been a pleasant place to sleep for a night. The ceilings were above head height, and the view from the entrance was beautiful. There would have been a door, a fire, the smell of baking bread. The river, turquoise in the Winter light, wound its way through the valley below.
Exploring further along the thin ridge of rock that accessed the row of caves, we found other entrances. One, blackened by the smoke of cooking fires, was rough and seemingly untouched and unbeautified by humans. The entrance was low, and it was dark. It was difficult to see even a metre inside of it. Something, however, drew us into that cave. The fact of its mystery perhaps. We ducked inside, and soon had to crawl, our tiny torches on our phones sending hazy pools of orange only a few feet into the gloom. The floor was thick dust and littered with loose objects. The boy in front of me has picked something up and holds it behind him for me to take. My hand grasps it. It is light, and warmer than stone. The camera flashes and the space illuminates eerily, the shapes on the floor becoming undeniable. Soon, one of the boys finds what he has been looking for and passes it back. It is hard and smooth and round.
Once back in the daylight, we examine what we have found. We lay out the bones. Tibia, fibula, coccyx, phalange. These words come to mind, but I do not really know where they go or for sure which body part they refer to. Eventually there is something like a skeleton in front of us. A small skull, no trace of flesh, the jawbone missing. We take turns weighing it in our hands. I hold it before me and stare into it, something like a mimicry of Hamlet after picking up the skull of Yorick, but soon I felt something vertiginous supersede my silliness. A corpse stretched out in a cave. A man who came to lie down with the valley spread out before him. A priest who lived with snakes. The skull populates itself before my eyes, becomes flesh. Black hair cascades from it, a beard, skin stretches over the cheekbones, eyes soft and bright and black flicker open. But this projection of my imagination could never come close to the actual appearance of the flesh and skin and hair that had clung to it. Anything I imagined was merely that, my imagination. The skull was both presence and complete absence. I had never seen a dead human body, and I had started with the furthest point away from living flesh that was possible, the bare bones.
I suppose the question is why these places, these bones, these dark holes with fragments of the past littered on the floor, scratched onto walls, offered moments of such significance. You come away from such places slightly, unavoidably, changed. They were places that promised something, some hidden knowledge, some clue. A skeleton is a perfect representation of the past: we carry it inside of us always, and it is lasting; it is at our core, but it is unseen, mysterious and often disturbing. We recognize it, but it is exotic and strange. It is what is left of us when we are gone. Past is different from history: there were no dates or names attached to this cave and its bones. History is narrative, but this is more like wildness, or soul. For a moment we were seeing things as they were, crouched in the cave mouth. We were solemn but not sad, entirely engaged in our own personal reverences and fascinations. We were touching something, seeing something, of ourselves. We returned the bones to the cave when we were done, handling them carefully, ritualistically, ensuring they were interred in darkness.
Unlike the priest, the snakes would feast with abandon on their excursions down to the valley floor. They would stalk mice at night and swallow them whole, would wait in the grass for cicadas to appear in front of them, striking like a sprung trap. They would even eat the small translucent fish that inhabited the shallow pools in the gravel banks of the river. They were vibrant, scaled robes of being just below the surface of things. Whilst he lived, the snakes and the priest co-existed but interacted little. When he was asleep and the embers of his small fire that flickered at the cave mouth had died away, the snakes would linger on the warmed rock, briefly, feeding off its residual energy, pulling the grey ash outwards in serpentine meanders as they travelled. When the priest died and his flesh loosened so that they could feed upon it, his ribs filled with a pulsating, intertwined cartilage, luxuriant and hissing. He brimmed with snake, until he was more them than his own flesh, and then, when they were done with him, they went away; his white bones bared like poached ivory.
After we returned, and told of what we had found, the village priest was sent to bless the bones. His black robes are browned by dust and are snagged in places where they had caught on the thorn bushes; the hems brush over the remains before him when he bends to touch the forehead of the skull. The thurible he waves fills the air with scent, releasing a thin whisp of smoke that blurs the edges of things slightly. He mumbles incantations, his prayer beads clicking through his fingers.