Standing in a dark, metal box, hot sunlight streaming through the few small windows, dangling from a rusty cable 20 meters above the ground, I can see why these claustrophobic carriages were nicknamed metal coffins. I am in Chiatura, a manganese mining town in a Georgia, 113 miles from Tbilisi, and built around a deep gorge. Faced with such awkward topography, the Soviet authorities built a series of cable cars that swept from housing projects and industrial facilities on the cliff tops down to the town centre in the valley below.
The earliest of the cable cars were built in 1954 and only a few are still in service. The rest hang motionless, like monuments to an optimistic vision of an alternative future as imagined by Soviet engineers. Indeed, not all the carriages are simple metal boxes: one in particular has a curved glass roof and looks something like a hover car from a 1960s comic book.
I ride one of the dozen or so still in service and it lifts me silently to the top of the cliff from where I can see wonderful views of the city and also the cable car’s machinery – which looks so decrepit it’s amazing it still works. Presumably, when it eventually fails, that will be the end of the chair lifts.
Chiatura looks and feels as you’d expect a former Soviet mining town to, with run-down industrial buildings and stark concrete housing projects painted in pastel shades. This evocative scenery is what inspired Ariel Kleiman to shoot his film Partisan here, which is what drew me in the first place.
The Mghvimevi monastery was carved into the cliff a thousand years before the mines and the Soviets came along. And a short bus ride through beautiful countryside is Katskhi Pillar, a bizarre monolith of rock that ancient hermits somehow surmounted and left engravings which have been used to verify the age of the unique Georgian script. There is now a spindly ladder to the top of the monolith – but beware, only men are allowed to climb!
I savour some of the best food I’ve had in all of Georgia in Chiatura: hearty bowls of beans, cheesy breads and dumplings filled with soup. This is washed down with homemade white wine, which I am strongly encouraged to throw down in one gulp. Sometimes out of a ram’s horn.
