Day 6: Stepantsminda to Kutaisi via Gori

When we woke up this morning it was another lovely sunny day in the mountains. We had a relatively early start, getting to the breakfast buffet for 07.30 when it opened, because our driver from Tuesday was due to pick us up outside the hotel at 9am. Having an early breakfast actually turned out to be a good idea; we'd gone down more like 8am yesterday and found the buffet completely overwhelmed by a large tour group. This morning it seemed a lot calmer and we were able to enjoy the selection of pastries, coffee and hot food.

We were ready to depart slightly before 9am in the end and our driver was very punctual, already waiting for us outside the hotel doors. Before long we were on our way, retracing our steps down the Georgian Military Highway. Our first aim was to get as far as Mtskheta, the town which had been our first stop on Tuesday but where we hadn't been able to get inside the cathedral we wanted to see because of a service for Georgian Independence Day. 

Along the way we had a couple of other stops to admire the views.

The strange shape you can see on the mountain in the foreground is the Russia-Georgia Friendship Monument which we visited on Tuesday.

It was such a beautiful location, surrounded by snowy mountains.

The driver took a picture of all four of us

It must have taken around three hours to get back down the Georgian Military Highway. The other place we stopped was the reservoir, where we'd also been on Tuesday. It was really sunny today and the water was clear enough to see the reflections of the surrounding hills in it.

Dad and I attempted a selfie  

After that it wasn't actually very far to Mtskheta. This was the huge cathedral we wanted to visit.

Today we were more successful and managed to get inside. First of all into a large fortified courtyard...

...which was quite busy with organised tour groups.

The inside of the church was very busy too, with lots of people taking photos and selfies. It wasn't actually clear whether you were allowed to take photos or not - lots of the Orthodox churches we have been on so far on this trip have said photos are not permitted - but I managed to sneak a quick one to capture some of the impressive frescoes.

Once we'd finished admiring the icons and frescoes we had a bit of a stroll around the exterior of the church.

There was a fantastic view up towards the Jvari Monastery - the very windy church on top of a hill that we'd visited after Mtskheta on Tuesday.

There seemed to be a lot of children playing in the churchyard, so it was hard to take photos that they didn't appear in!

It was a lovely location though and well worth a second visit to Mtskheta to actually get inside.

After a quick coffee in Mtskheta we continued on our way towards a new destination: Gori. Gori is famous (or infamous!) for one thing: being the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. I spent quite a lot of time both in GCSE and A-Level history learning about Stalin - and one of the first things that we were taught was that he was Georgian - but I never thought I'd visit his birthplace one day so I was quite excited.

Our driver dropped us off in a car park just opposite the Joseph Stalin Museum.

We thought the town of Gori had relatively recently removed its statue of Stalin, but there appeared to still be one right in front of the museum. Admittedly, there wasn't any plaque to say who it was a statue of, but it seemed fairly obvious!

We paid 15 lari for tickets to enter the museum; around £4 each. The museum is somewhat controversial, as it essentially presents a positive picture of Stalin. Originally it had absolutely no mention of some of his less positive sides, like the estimated 700,000 people he had killed in his purges, the million people he sent to gulags, the famines he caused in places like Ukraine as a result of his forced collectivisation of agricultural policies...

Today, in response to these criticisms, the museum has been slightly amended. When I say slightly amended, I really do mean slightly amended. The main collection, which essentially still presents Stalin as a hero of the Soviet Union, is up a large marble staircase, decorated with another statue of Stalin. On the ground floor - and very easy to miss because there are no signs to it - is a small side room which presents a few photos and facts about the purges and other historical atrocities. But the criticism of Stalin is very, very limited; the exhibition starts with a quote from Stalin warning people that in the future, people will try to destroy his good name.

I honestly wasn't sure whether it was permitted to take photos in the museum or not, but I managed to get a few. This is one of the surprisingly many Stalin-carpets which adorned the walls of the main exhibition.

The museum started by presenting Stalin's early life in Gori. There were some genuinely interesting exhibits; textbooks from his school days, letters he had written as a young man etc. There were also some of his personal possessions in the exhibition; the below, for example, was his suitcase.

Later exhibits talked about Stalin's career as a revolutionary, which had started at age 15. He ended up in prison in Kutaisi and Batumi; both places we will be visiting on this trip. The boards also presented his relationship with Lenin, although seemed to gloss over how Stalin ultimately began leader after Lenin's death.

The museum building itself was very attractive, with high ceilings and stained glass windows.

As we progressed through the various rooms, we were presented with quotes about Stalin's greatness from world leaders such as Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle (the context was in the aftermath of the Second World War). The trophy displayed here was a "thank you" from the people of Hungary for their liberation by Stalin.

There was an extensive collection of the gifts which had been presented to Stalin by other countries around the world. Some of them were very elaborate.

There were lots of really interesting photos in the exhibition, showing pictures of both Stalin and Lenin which we'd never seen before in textbooks, as well as some of the very famous pictures which we did recognise. The picture below was particularly fascinating; a photo of Stalin as he really looked, complete with pock marks around his jaw. He had acquired these following a bout of smallpox as a child in Gori. However, in official Soviet photographs they were usually airbrushed out.

The end of the exhibition dealt with Stalin's death and the aftermath. The picture below shows people turning out in Wenceslas Square in Prague to mourn Stalin in 1953. There was a good turnout, but unclear whether attendance was optional!

It was a genuinely fascinating, if controversial, place and I lost all sense of time when we were in there. Once we eventually got to the end of the exhibits, we made our way back down the grand staircase.

We grabbed a quick bready snack in a nearby cafe for lunch, but there was one thing on our bucket list which we hadn't managed to do yet; get inside Stalin's train carriage.

Stalin didn't like flying, so he used this bulletproof train carriage to travel around. It took him to places as far afield as Potsdam and Tehran.

We thought our tickets ought to allow us to see inside, but when we tried the doors they were locked. After lunch we worked up the courage to go back to the museum and ask. Mom found a man who allowed us to join onto the back of a guided tour which would give us access.

It's genuinely quite unclear how this works, as there are no obvious signs explaining in the museum, but you can only access the train carriage with a member of staff. Once inside, you could see Stalin's bedroom and ensuite bathroom (he had an actual bath on his train!) as well as his conference room and some smaller bedrooms which looked like they might have been for staff. I didn't take any photos inside in case I got into trouble with the tour guide!

The other attraction in the garden outside the museum is the house Stalin was born in. Unfortunately, there was some construction work going on around it today so we didn't get a very clear view of it.

After that it was back to our very patient taxi driver, who drove us the remaining two hours to our ultimate destination for this evening: Kutaisi. We're staying in a hotel right next to the big river that flows through the town. And when I say right next to the river, this is the view from mine and Helen's balcony!

Unfortunately I've picked up a bit of a cold so I'm going to have an early night, in the hope of feeling a bit better tomorrow for a proper exploration of Kutaisi.