Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia

2. Walking a Ruined City

CHAPTER 2 Walking a Ruined City R uins encode a city with meaning, residing as they often do in a temporal space between abandonment and a potential future (Edensor 2005: 4). Rather than taking just one shape, they are manifold in form. In Batumi, some ruins were obvious, standing out in open spaces or partially hidden behind fences. Others had been absorbed partly by newer additions, and still others existed only in their complete absence— the knowledge that “something used to be here.” Ruins and fragments in the city pointed toward a range of pasts, from the early Roman presence and Ottoman influence over Russian tsarist constructions to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. As becomes clear in this chapter, the coming and going of peoples, empires, and ideologies were visible in the materiality of the city, bearing witness to the continuous processes of conflict, construction, and destruction that had taken place in its history. The various political power struggles that played out in and around the region had, inadvertently or deliberately, contributed a vast range of ruins. Mikhail Yampolsky (1995) reminds us that destruction and construction are both expressions of immortality. Writing about the iconoclastic practices of the early post-Soviet years, he notes how tearing down and building up are signs of a desire to affect the course of time in some kind of magical way, either to change it or to avoid its influence. For instance, tearing down statues of Lenin or Stalin in the early, post-Soviet 1990s was a public statement that the Soviet period was over (ibid.: 95). When one monument replaces another, Yampolsky writes, it becomes the signifier of two signified: itself and its demolished predecessor (ibid.: 101). He refers to this kind of material change as overwriting, a process involving official attempts to replace one historical period with another by covering or removing certain structures, making them “previous” rather than present WALkIng A RuInEd CITY • 31 and thus creating historical layers in the material surface of the city. In this chapter, I use the notion of overwriting as a trope to understand the historical layers of Batumi and how these were read by my informants as we walked the city. Walking is a social practice that connects us to others and the world in which we take our steps (Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Solnit 2001). Some of my walks in Batumi were random, guided by my curiosity; others were guided by the habits of those with whom I was walking. There is no particular sequence to the walks and excursions that I describe. They all took place during the initial months of my fieldwork, and I use them here as ethnographic snapshots that highlight certain aspects of the city’s history in order to explain them in terms of overwriting and how various pasts made themselves present during my fieldwork. Being on the street in Batumi was predominantly a male affair. Standing together or walking around, groups of males were to be seen almost everywhere . “The street” in urban areas of georgia is said to have a socializing function for boys and young men, in some instances serving as a “street academy” or “street code” often associated with urban street crime and the notion of birzha—assemblages of boys or young men in public squares and gardens or in front of residential buildings (Zakharova 2010: 350). Birzha was a commonly recognized term in Batumi and usually referred to “hanging around.” The negative connotations in terms of criminal activity were also present in the streets, a fact I describe further in Chapter 3. So far, it Ruins on the street. 32 • CHApTER 2 suffices to state that being on the street was common among men of most ages, although reasons for being there varied. Walking with someone at times means being guided. Hence, what follows is an account of not just what we randomly passed but also what my informants wanted me to see and what they were afraid that I might overlook as an outsider who could not necessarily read the layers of the city and did not necessarily recognize what was partly hidden but still significant. Besides describing the “pasts” of Batumi, this chapter thus also revolves around how walking with my informants and listening to the way they related to the city surrounding us focused my attention on particular “shadowy ” aspects of the city and my informants’ position...