Rediscovering the PDP-8

During my second summer at university, when I was 20, I worked for a local company that owned a DEC PDP-8 computer - in fact, two of them. The PDP-8 was the original minicomputer, sitting in just a single 19-inch rack as opposed to the whole building that our university ICL 1905 mainframe required. By today’s standards it was unimaginably constrained, with just 12K bytes of memory. Yet the company produced complex documents such as bills of materials on their PDP-8, for the architecture outfit that owned them.

They had started with a PDP8/I, and when I was there they had just acquired a newer PDP8/E, primarily as a way to get high-capacity disk storage using the RK05 removable disk. High capacity is a relative term. The disks held 2.5 megabytes of data - about a millionth of a modern hard disk, on a huge removable cartridge about 45 cm across.

My first job was to rewrite their existing sort program to use these new disks, which improved performance by a factor of about 100 due also to some moderately clever programming. My second job was my first taste of system level programming. DEC had supplied an interface between the two machines, allowing data to be passed both ways, but it came with no software at all. I wrote drivers allowing each machine to see the other’s peripherals as if they were directly attached. This meant that a program could access the new disks as well as the older peripherals on the PDP8/I, such as the lineprinter and high speed paper tape reader and punch.

Back at university, there was another PDP8/I, with a graphics display built around a Tektronix storage tube (the KV8I). I took advantage of that to implement Conway’s Game of Life, squeezing as much functionality and capacity as I could into the machine’s 8K 12-bit words. That became my final year project for my Computer Science degree. It really pushed to the limit what could be done with such a tiny machine. Many years later I rewrote my program in C++ for Windows as Winlife32, still available on the web and downloaded from time to time.

A Career at DEC

My summer vacation job turned out to have a big influence on my career and the rest of my life. I really enjoyed working with the DEC machines, and when it came time to look for a job a year later I applied to them. I had no idea what jobs might be available, so I pretty much said, “Do you have any jobs for a new graduate?”. As it turned out, the senior programmer at the vacation job had moved to DEC in the meantime, and gave me (I suppose) a glowing reference. DEC offered me a job, in their small European software development in Reading. It had the highest salary of the various jobs I’d applied for, and on that basis I went to work for them. I spent the following 20 years working at DEC, on the IAS operating system and several network products, and enjoyed nearly every day I worked there.

But the PDP-8 was at the end of its life. It had been replaced by the larger and much more capable PDP-11, and all my work was for that until it was in turn replaced by the VAX a few years later. We didn’t even have a PDP-8 in Reading. So that was the last I saw of it.

The PDP-8 had a very clever architecture. With a 12-bit word it could only find space for 6 different memory-access instructions. The two most basic memory-access instructions, from the 1950s until now, are LOAD and STORE, to move a value between memory and a register. The PDP-8 had neither. LOAD was replaced by ADD, which added the memory value to the accumulator. To load a value, you first had to make sure the accumulator was already zero. There was an instruction to do that, but the STORE instruction was replaced by DCA (Deposit and Clear Accumulator), which also left the accumulator clear. This substantially reduced the number of instructions which would otherwise be needed to clear it explicitly, though it can catch you out.

In addition to the 6 memory-access instructions, it had a bewildering variety of “microcoded” instructions, where setting various bits would do things in a well defined sequence. For example the sequence “CLA CLL CMA RAL” would clear the accumulator, complement it, and rotate it left without introducing a low order bit, leaving the octal value 7776, or -2. Others would skip the next instruction based on some condition, so for example to jump somewhere if the accumulator is zero, you would write SNA (skip if non zero) followed by an unconditional jump.

My project to connect the two PDP-8s led to an interesting discovery. The hardware involved wasn’t a standard product. It had been specially built for us by DEC’s custom hardware group (CSS) in Reading. Sometimes my code worked perfectly. Other times it would hang in mysterious ways. Finally I attacked the hardware itself, with the only equipment we had - an old-fashioned, huge Avo multimeter. Carefully following the schematics that had been supplied with it, I attached a probe to a pin to see whether it was on (5V) or off (0V). It showed about 3.5V, halfway in between. In a digital circuit, this is impossible. Further probing showed that the “5V” power supply rail was in fact at 3.5V. With a bit more tracing, I discovered that the unit had been built for 220V, but had been connected to the internal 110V transformer.

That explained why it worked sometimes and not others. If the mains voltage was high, for example mid-afternoon, then the “5V” supply reached just high enough to make things work. But at lunchtime or late afternoon, when the power demand was higher and the voltage was a bit lower, the poor thing just couldn’t quite get its logic circuits to work.

A call to DEC, and a visit from their very apologetic engineer, fixed things. After that my software worked perfectly.

A New PDP-8

My PDP-8 knowledge remained lurking in a back corner of my mind for 50 years. A few years ago someone produced the PiDP8, emulating the PDP-8 hardware on a Raspberry Pi and completing that with a 2/3 scale replica of a real PDP-8/I front panel, all 92 lamps and 21 switches of it. Later they did the same for the PDP-11/70, and just recently for the 36-bit PDP-10. A friend of mine has a PiDP11 running the IAS operating system that I worked on soon after joining DEC.

The emulation uses Bob Supnik’s SIMH system. He has been maintaining and extending this ever since long before demise of DEC in around 2000. It can emulate every system ever made by DEC, and dozens of others too. It also understands all the common peripherals, so you can connect simulated disks, tapes and paper tape.

And then a week ago, completely unexpectedly, a friend gave me a PiDP8. The panel comes in kit form, so every one of those 92 lamps and 21 switches has to be soldered into a board, along with a few auxiliary components. That took a couple of days to complete. Meanwhile, I already had a Raspberry Pi4 left over from another project. Amazingly, after 4 years in a cardboard box, it booted up and after a couple of hours was updated with all the latest software.

Installing the PiDP8 software package on the Pi was straightforward, and I got it running - without the unfinished front panel - with no difficulties. Later, though, when I did connect the panel, I ran into a problem. All the lights worked perfectly, but the switches showed a bogus value. This is mentioned in the instructions, which explain that a patch needs to be applied when using the Pi4. So far, so good.

However finding the patch was another story. A quick search found the instructions, but they involved a mysterious source management package called Fossil. Trying to run it showed that the PiDP8 software distribution includes all the sources, but not structured as a Fossil repository - so Fossil won’t run. I have no idea how to use Fossil, and zero interest in learning yet another alternative to Git. Luckily, more searching found the one file that needs to be updated, and it was easy enough to rebuild with the new file.

That done, I had a working PiDP8. The package includes not only the emulator, but also the OS/8 operating system and all associated utilities. Everything worked. But now the question was, what to do with it?  It comes with a few simple games written in Basic. They’re fun for a few minutes but the retro-novelty quickly wears off. The PDP-11 operating systems I worked on all rotated lights on the front panel to make a familiar pattern when the machine was idle, so in a bout of PDP-11 nostalgia I decided to make my PDP-8 do the same thing. (OS/8’s null job is a two-instruction loop that does nothing at all. Memory was much too precious to waste on frivolities).

Rediscovering PDP-8 Assembler

It has been a long time - well over 20 years - since I have written more than the odd line of assembler, for any machine, though I’m familiar with reading it for the x86. The first step was to figure out the logistics of programming the machine. Full nostalgia would have required me to use OS/8’s very primitive text editor. In the 1960s that was an enormous improvement on editing paper type using the ASR33, as we did for the computer I used at school. But that was a step too far

I would create code on the host Raspberry Pi using my regular editor, Emacs - itself pretty retro but I’m used to it and haven’t yet found anything significantly better. I could also assemble it there, using the Palabert port of the PDP-8 assembler. But then I had to move the binary file to the PiDP-8.

A bit of searching showed that the simulator allows you to turn a host file into a simulated paper tape. The PDP-8 PIP program can be used then to read the “paper tape” into a file. (PIP was the standard file management utility on all the DEC systems until VAX). But, as I quickly discovered, it will only transfer text files, not binary. The obvious solution was to transfer the text file, then assemble it with the native PAL assembler.

That still left one problem. In an age when Unicode can represent every known alphabet, thousands of emojis and other weird stuff like ⨔, it’s easy to forget that not so long ago even lower case letters were a rare luxury. The PDP-8’s 12-bit word could hold two 6-bit characters, permitting only upper-case letters. Writing code in upper case is painful, so instead I wrote a little Python program to convert to from lower case, and also to change the line ending to CR-LF. In the days of ASR33 teletypes, these characters physically instructed the machine to move the carriage and roll the paper up, and the PDP-8 utilities expect them.

Finally I could try my code out. It was surprisingly hard to get it to work correctly. Programming the PDP-8 requires a special mindset, which in my case had evaporated over the last 50 years. Numerous times I forgot to clear the accumulator before loading it with TAD, or tried to reuse it after a DCA. I had to re-learn use of the so-called microcoded instructions. For example, to negate the accumulator (often needed since there is no subtract instruction) requires CMA IAC - complement and then increment the accumulator, forming the twos-complement. The CLA element clears the accumulator at the start of one group, but at the end of another group. There’s a good reason for this - the PDP-8 instruction set is truly ingenious. But you have to get your head round it.

Surprisingly, I found my 1970 Small Computer Handbook, which was helpful. Despite the very generic name, it was a complete manual for the PDP-8, describing not only the instruction set in great detail, but also every single one of the numerous available peripherals.

Modern debuggers and IDEs are extremely powerful. The PDP-8 just had ODT (for Octal Debugging Technique), a simplification of the PDP-10's symbolic debugger DDT (a backronym for Decimal Debugging Technique, but really named after the then-universal insecticide, for getting rid of bugs). ODT lets you set a single breakpoint, and requires you to do everything using octal addresses, with an assembler listing in front of you. But for my simple light-twirler it was perfectly adequate.

There was one bug that took me a long time to track down, which turned out to be a function that returned to the wrong place. I’d completely forgotten that there are 8 memory locations (0010-0017) that autoincrement when you use them as index registers for an indirect memory access.  And I was using one to store the return address from a complicated function. So when it executed the usual return instruction - JMP I XXX - it first incremented the return address, then returned, thereby skipping the first instruction after the call. The fix was simple enough, don’t use those autoincrement locations for anything else. They’re there to reduce the amount of code needed to do, for example, a block memory copy - another ingenuity of the PDP-8.

A Working PiDP8/I

I couldn’t stop myself tweaking the program, to twirl the lights in various randomly chosen ways. That done, all I had to do was finish the assembly of the physical machine. Normally the Raspberry Pi is accessed through SSH or, if graphics are required, VNC. But it seems a good idea to be able to access it directly - networks are never to be trusted! So I added tails to the USB, HDMI and power connectors, bringing them out through a slot in the base of the case.

Indispensible tools: Panavise board vice, Antex
temperature controlled soldering iron, desoldering tool

I should add that the PiDP8 kit is really excellent. The instructions are very comprehensive, all the parts were present with even some spares, and everything is very high quality. It's a lot of soldering, 92 LEDs, 21 switches, and various other bits. It is much easier if you have a suitable board vice, and a powerful temperature-controlled soldering iron.

Now my PiDP8 sits on the corner of my desk, next to my 1950s-vintage Olivetti Divisumma and my Nixie tube clock. Its simulated incandescent light bulbs twirl gently in a constant reminder of a nearly-forgotten era of computing.

If you have a PiDP8 and want to see your own lights twirling, the program is available on github.

A retro-collection: my Nixie tube clock, the PiDP8, and my Olivetti Divisumma

Learning the Georgian Alphabet

Many years ago, in an English-language bookshop in Tokyo, I bought a book called Writing Systems of the World. It’s still one of my favourite books. It has a two-page spread for every writing system still in significant use. One that struck me most was the Georgian script. It looks like nothing else - it is completely unrelated to the Latin alphabet, or to the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian, or indeed to anything else. Neighbouring Armenia also has a unique script, but the two are unrelated.

The Georgian script is particularly beautiful, with complicated, elegantly shaped letters like ლ. It has intrigued me ever since I discovered it, but it is a lot of work to learn an alphabet for which you have no use, so I never got round to it.

Getting Started

Georgia is an interesting country for many reasons. It has managed to retain a unique language and culture despite having been invaded repeatedly over the centuries, from all sides. It is one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it is the birthplace of winemaking. It still has a unique technique for making wine, resulting in wines different from anything else in the world, in Europe or elsewhere. For all these reasons, I have been tempted to visit for several years. Finally, now that the Covid crisis is over, we were able to organise a trip there, which I’ve described here.

This at last gave me a reason to learn the Georgian alphabet. I find it really unpleasant if I can’t decipher signs and so on, even if they don’t mean anything to me.

The Georgian Mkhedruli Alphabet

The alphabet contains 33 letters. Faced with just a list of letters, it’s very hard to know where to start. Fortunately I found an excellent website which presents them in groups of 3 or 4, with exercises for each group. Using this, and working through each group three or four times, it took just a couple of days to memorise the letters to the point of being able to decipher and to write Georgian text.

The word “decipher” is important. A fluent reader, in any language, reads a whole sentence at a single glance. At the other extreme, when you first learn an alphabet, you go through letter by letter, decoding them individually. It’s slow and very frustrating, especially when you’re in a car or bus and you only manage the first few letters before you can no longer see what you are trying to read. It takes lots of practice, and knowledge of the language, to read faster than that.

One nice thing about Georgian is that the writing system is completely phonetic. Every letter is pronounced, and pronounced as written. Conversely, if you hear a word, you know exactly how to write it. This is very different from English, whose spelling is notoriously and horribly irregular, or French, where you never know how many letters at the end of a word not to pronounce.

On the other hand, several of the letters have variant shapes, some of which are not well documented. More on that later.

A lot of the letters are confusingly similar. For example კ and პ (/k’/ and /p’/ respectively) differ only in the presence of the tiny top bar of პ. This is true of the Latin alphabet too, but we get completely used to it and don’t notice for example the similarity between ’h’ and ‘b’ or ‘O’ and ‘Q’.

It's wrong to talk about the Georgian alphabet, because actually there are three of them. Here I've only talked about Mkhedruli. which is universal for everything written nowadays. There are also two historical alphabets, Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri. The former now appears only in inscriptions in churches, and the latter nowhere at all. There is little visual resemblance between the three. If you wanted to learn the two historical alphabets, it would be starting over. But there's little point anyway.

Phonetics

Most of the sounds in Georgian exist in English also. Those sounds are easy. Some are not so easy for an English speaker:

• ხ /χ/ - like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’
• ღ /ɣ/ or /ʁ/ - similar to the Parisian French pronunciation of ‘r’ or Spanish ‘ll’
• ყ /q/ - like Arabic ‘q’, similar to a ‘k’ but pronounced at the very back of the mouth

Then there are the so-called glottalized consonants. Many of the plosives have this variant. In the list below, each of the second letter is “glottalized” and the first one isn’t. 

Unglottalized	Glottalized	Sound
ქ	კ	/k/
ფ	პ	/p/
თ	ტ	/t/
ჱ	წ	/ts/
ჩ	ჭ	/ʧ/ (ch)

It’s very hard for a non-native to figure out the difference. I asked a few people to say the two letters, and in isolation they sound very different. The glottalized variant is forced out much harder, and the un-glottalized version sounds softer. In theory, to pronounce the glottalized form you make a glottal stop which you release forcefully as you articulate the plosive - hence the name. But it’s very hard to do this in connected speech, as opposed to a single isolated consonant. Listening carefully to people speaking - even though I didn’t understand anything - I couldn’t hear any distinction. I suspect that for a foreigner, unless you really want to try to sound like a native, you can just ignore the distinction completely.

The letter ვ is glossed as /v/, but I read somewhere that it often degenerates to /β/, the bilabial fricative - similar to /v/ but made by pressing your lips gently together rather than your top teeth and bottom lip. At one place we visited I heard the ვ in qvevri pronounced more like /w/, making it sound like “kwewri”.

When transcribing other languages into Georgian, there is no exact match for the /f/ sound. The letter ფ (/p/) is used in this case. That makes sense because there is very little difference between /p/ and /ɸ/, the voiceless bilabial fricative, which in turn is almost indistinguishable, audibly, from /f/.

Variations

A complication of the Georgian alphabet is that several of the letters have different variant forms. That’s not unique to Georgian - for example in the Latin script, ‘g’ can also be written as ‘g’, and ‘a’ can also be written as ‘ɑ’. We’re so used to this that we don’t even notice it, but to a foreigner learning the Latin alphabet for the first time, these appear as completely different symbols. We also have upper and lower case, meaning that there are actually 52 symbols to learn, not 26. And we have fonts with and without serifs - it’s not at all obvious to our foreigner that ‘I’ and ‘I’ are the same symbol.

Georgian takes variations a bit further, though. First, there are three letters that are generally simplified, and in print do not resemble the characters shown in the picture at the top. These are among the most spectacularly squiggly letters, and in normal type and handwriting are always simplified.

Next, there are letters that are routinely simplified, though not in most fonts. For example ლ (/l/) can be simplified to a single loop, carefully skipping the double-loop ღ which is a completely different letter. 

(These are hand-drawn because it's impossible to be sure of getting the right glyphs otherwise. There is only a single Unicode code-point for each character - which glyph you get depends entirely on the font).

There is no true upper case in Georgian - for example, sentences begin with normal letters. But there is an alphabet variation called Mtavruli that has been proposed as such in the past, and is still widely used in signs, adverts and the like. Mostly, the only difference is that the letters have a constant height, with no ascenders or descenders. Some letters, though, can be greatly simplified, as shown in the sketch above.

Just opposite our hotel was a shop with this sign. The first letter, and the last but two and last but one, don’t look anything like any “official” Georgian letter. In fact they are greatly-simplified versions of ლ რ დ respectively. So the whole name is ლომბარდი, “lombardi” (meaning pawnbroker). These characters very often appear on signs and such, but I’ve yet to find anything that describes them. I did find a font that shows them, below.

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Conclusion

It was a pleasure to be able to read signs - and especially bus destinations - while we were in Georgia. The next step would be to learn something of the language, but that would be a huge investment for very little reward. I'd like to return there some time, but it will only be for another short visit. So the language will have to be for another lifetime.

A Visit to Georgia - Part 2

 

This is the second part of my blog about our trip to Georgia. For the first part, see here . 

Mtskheta

Mtskheta, viewed from Jvari Monastery

Samtvaro Monastery, with
Wine Ice Cream

Bas-relief on the Samtvaro Monastery,
with inscription in Georgian

The next day saw us leave Tbilisi in the opposite direction, westwards to the town of Mtskheta. This was the capital of the region (confusingly called Iberia) around the second century AD. It had already been established as a town for a couple of thousand years - it claims to be the oldest continuously-inhabited town in the world, and is certainly way older than Tbilisi. It was the centre of the Christianisation of the country in the fourth century, so inevitably it has no shortage of monasteries and churches.

The most prominent is the Jvari Monastery, on a hilltop dominating the town and the confluence of the Aragvi and Mtkvari rivers, the latter continuing through Tbilisi and eventually draining into the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. The view is stunning. The monastery was built in the fourth century but soon proved to be too small. The current building dates from the 7th century. It was badly damaged by invaders - inevitable in Georgia - but survived with major repairs.

After Jvari we descended into town to admire the churches and monasteries to be found in the plain. The Samtvaro Monastery's associated church is huge. One of the striking features of Georgian churches is their bell towers. Unlike European ones, invisible from the interior, these rise high above the main part of the church, at the intersection of the nave and transept, supported by huge pillars integrated into the walls. They are very obvious from the outside, and truly awe-inspiring from the inside, as you gaze up into their heights. This church, being one of the biggest, has one of the most impressive.

As everywhere, this major tourist attraction is surrounded by gift-shops, cafés and so on. Everywhere sells something called wine ice-cream. I really meant to try it before we left, but never quite did.

Between monasteries we visited a very charming and interesting winery, in a private house a few kilometres from the town. We sat on a terrace overlooking the Mktvari river as we sampled the wines. The owner was a very interesting guy, a professor at the Technical University in Tbilisi who, very typically for Georgians, made small amounts of wine at his “country home”, where we were. He spoke good English although since we were supposed to be francophone, the conversation was a mixture of Georgian/French translation and just English.

This was our first taste of wine made using the Kisi grape, another unique Georgian varietal - in a qvevri, of course. The qvevri gives body to any white-grape wine, but Kisi takes it a step further. It has masses of body and mouthfeel, and will stand up cheerfully even to red meat, as we discovered later. Then it was time for the cha-cha. He gave a rather poetic speech about how drinking it daily kept men young, and then it was time to drink. It was 60% alcohol, so the only way to drink it was to pour it down your throat without letting it touch the sides. Even so it was pretty potent.

He asked us to guess his age. I replied 65, and he looked disappointed. So I added, “But if I didn’t know about the cha-cha, I would have said 50”. That got a smile, a big laugh and we were friends again.

There was one more church to go before we returned to Tbilisi. All of the churches were awe-inspiring but it’s impossible to go into the details of each of them, even if they hadn’t all got jumbled up in my head.

Tbilisi Solo

Tbilisi street scene, with
alarming enclosed terrace

It was only mid-afternoon when we got back to Tbilisi, so we had some free time to explore the town alone before dinner. Our hotel was too far from the town to walk, and even the metro station was quite a long way. But I had noticed the constant stream of modern green buses in front of our hotel, and had spent some time studying how they worked. We were dropped off at the central metro station, where we could buy “Metro-Mani” cards to access all public transport. This was also home to Tbilisi’s most upmarket shopping mall, imaginatively called the Tbilisi Mall. It had all the same up-market brands that you would find anywhere in Europe, full of well-dressed Tbilisi natives doing their shopping. It was impressive to see but of limited interest to us.

We walked back to what had become the “Edsel Place” and from there explored the old town. Soon we found ourselves back at the lemonade café, with a couple of glasses to quench our thirst. Then I put my knowledge of the bus system to good use, taking us to the National Gallery. There was an exhibition by Pirosmani, Georgia’s most famous artist. He lived in the late 1800s, completely unheard of - he only became famous, or even known, posthumously. His style was very naive yet captivating in the way it depicts every day scenes. My own personal favourite is a very simple profile of a boar.

Boar, by Pirosmani

Tbilisi street scene by Machavariani

Cat eating our cake at Prospero's bookshop

There were works by other Georgian artists too, some better than others. There was a big display of works by Machavariani, a late-20th century artist with some very vivid pictures of crumbling Tbilisi as it must have been under the Soviet Union. The museum isn’t very big, it just has four large exhibition rooms across two floors. We arrived less than an hour before closing, yet had time to enjoy everything and go back for a second look at our favourites. It’s a lot less overwhelming than the Louvre or London’s art museums.

Somehow I’d discovered that Tbilisi has an English-language bookshop, and that was only a short walk along Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s version of the Champs Elyses. It was a delightful place, arranged around a courtyard where you could sit and enjoy tea, coffee and pastries from the shop’s café. Inevitably I came out with a bag full of books, including a Georgian language primer which realistically I will never do anything with. But it seemed like a good idea at the time - it’s impossible to resist a language when you are constantly surrounded by it.

The tea was good but the pastry, advertised as a “milk scone”, was dry and unappetizing. Which was just as well because the cat which had been marauding around the courtyard suddenly leapt onto the table and stole it. He didn’t find it unappetizing at all, and steadily munched his way through about half of it before abandoning the resulting pile of crumbs. We supposed it must have really contained milk.

After that another short bus ride took us back to our hotel, and to that evening’s dinner. It was at a restaurant which we were assured was excellent - it was certainly very good - but which strangely was completely deserted when we arrived, and only had a couple of tables occupied when we left an hour later.

Troglodytes

Another westbound departure took us to the world-famous troglodyte village of Ouplistsikhe (just take my word for it and don’t try to pronounce it). But on the way we had to pass through the town of Gori. Gori is famous for exactly one thing: it was Stalin’s birthplace. His real name was Dzhugashvili, an unmistakably Georgian name. In Soviet times a museum to his life was established in the town square, and surprisingly it is still open and quite popular. It shouldn’t be thought that just because he was Georgian, he went out of his way to be nice to his native territory. Over 600,000 Georgians were killed uner his regime, between the war and various purges, getting on for half of the male population.

Georgia can be thoughts of as a rather montainous plain, sandwiched between two mountain ranges. To the north is the Great Caucausus reaching up to 5000 metres with Russian Chechnia on the other side. On the south, the mountains form the border with Armenia. They sound like the perfect natural boundaries, but that is reckoning without the Russians and their love for stirring up messes. Soon after Georgia became independent, the Russians funded separatists in Ossetia on the other side of the Caucasus, who somehow managed to take over a big chunk of Georgia, calling it South Ossetia. Our route to Gori took us within a kilometre or so of the invisible boundary, but it is out of the question to cross it. The only way from Georgia proper into South Ossetia is via Russia, North Ossetia and then across the mountains. The Russians pulled a similar stunt with Abkhazia, on the north-western side of the country, so now a fifth of Georgia’s area is inaccessible and practically speaking, under Russian control.

Huge rooms at Ouplistsikhe hewn from sandstone

Chapel at Ouplistsikhe, with rooms under

Apothecary, with storage shelves

Rooms at Ouplistsikhe

We didn’t stop there, though we did see his armoured railway carriage sitting outside the museum building. We went straight on to Ouplistsikhe. The story is simple enough: about two millennia before Christ, the locals discovered caves in the soft sandstone that overlooks the Mktvari river. Better, they discovered that it was soft enough to excavate with the limited tools available at the time. And excavate they did. At its height, around 0 AD, it had hundreds of rooms, a palace and a theatre, all hewn out of the sandstone. Some of the rooms are truly huge, ten metres or more on each side with correspondingly high ceilings. It must have taken decades to create each of them.

Of the theatre, all that is left now is the stage and the dressing rooms behind it. Originally there was a large tiered auditorium. For once it wasn’t invaders who wrought the destruction, but nature in the form of two serious earthquakes, the worst in 1920 which sent the whole auditorium crashing in to the valley below.

Invaders had played a part in the history of the town, inevitably. It resisted the Muslim attacks in the 8-10th centuries, but was finally abandoned during the Mongol invasions of the 14th century. Since then it has been uninhabited. While much of the sandstone remains, you just have to imagine everything that wasn’t made of stone. You can still the big holes in the cavern walls which supported huge roof beams. Archaeologists have done their best to understand the functions of what remains. For example there is a pharmacy, with little shelves for the potions and medications hewn out of the rock at the back.

To get to it from the car park and visitor centre is a long climb up some modern steel steps, with the original, heavily-worn sandstone steps underneath. The return down into the valley is through a rather daunting tunnel, built in antiquity as an emergency escape route, whose exit is right by the river.

That day we had a “proper” lunch, in a restaurant by the visitor centre. It was completely predictable: salad followed by khachapuri, vegetable stew and fruit. I also has a beef stew, which had the toughest beef I have ever tried to eat in my life. The knife made no impact on it, and neither did chewing, except to flatten it a bit. Truly a dish to remember, but not for the right reasons.

From there we drove into a long, mostly empty mountain valley, to the settlement of Ateni. Now it is a small and very scattered village, but in medieval times it was an important city, surrounded by fortresses. It is still worth visiting because of the church that remains from that time, the Ateni Sioni. Built in the 7th century, it has amazingly remained unchanged ever since. Like all the churches we visited, its exterior is covered in interesting bas-reliefs. The one that caught my attention is a saint who became a curer of animals, extracting a tooth from a lion. I wonder how much he paid for professional insurance? It makes even deep-sea fishing seem safe.

Our final stop was at the most unusual winery of all that we visited. It started with a kilometre hike along the valley from the church, crossing the river on a rickety timber bridge just wide enough to walk across. Cars have to use a ford, a manouevre which would have been tricky in our much-missed Toyota FJ, never mind a normal car.

Ateni Sioni church

Fresco at Ateni Sioni

Lion-healer extracting a tooth, bas-relief
at Ateni Sioni

Wines at Nika Vacheishvili's Marani

 Despite the difficult access, you can go and stay there, at Nika Vacheishvili’s Guest House. In addition to the main house, guests are accomodated in a modern building, with eight rooms on two floors. Our tasting took place in a terrace overlooking the river, with fantastic views into the mountains. The wine came in unlabelled bottles, with just some markings in white ink. The first one, an amber kvevri wine, was extraordinary. Unfortunately we didn’t note the grape varieties, but they weren’t the usual Georgian ones. It was full of body, with masses of fruit yet not “fruity”. The second wine was the same grapes, but a different year. It was good, but not as good as the first.

Once the owner realised we were interested and taking his wines seriously, they came without stopping. We stayed at least an hour longer than we were supposed to, including an interesting chat with a German couple who were staying there for a couple of nights. We bought a bottle of the first wine to bring back with us. Then as we were hiking back to the car, the owner passed us in his car and insisted on giving us another bottle because, he said, he had got the year wrong. We gave the “wrong” bottle to our guide, keeping the one we were supposed to have all along.

Since we had lingered so long, there was no time to go back to our hotel. We went straight to that evening’s dinner, which also included a demonstration of traditional Georgian folk dancing. This was entertaining, as these things go, in a restaurant which evidently did nothing but these “folklore evenings”. Naturally all the guests were foreign, I noticed American, English, Chinese and Russian. We were most impressed by the master of ceremonies, who looked exactly like a bouncer and no doubt doubled as such should it ever be necessary.

Second Tbilisi Solo

On Saturday we were on our own all day. The tour proper had finished on Friday, but we stayed an extra day so we could catch the Air France flight home. We decided to spend the day exploring Tbilisi, which really meant just wandering around. As soon as you get even a few metres from the main tourist streets, it’s a fascinating and delightful place. Buildings are in varying states of disrepair, but mostly evidently in use. One striking feature is the balconies. Nearly every building has several balconies, some of them already collapsing, others that you certainly wouldn’t walk on, and others furnished and in daily use.

We found a quiet place, Gudiashvili Square, with just a few locals walking their dogs or sitting chatting. In the centre is a fountain made from a charming statue of two lovers under an umbrella.

From there our random walkabout led us to the Jvaris Mamas church. Unlike all th eother churches we visited, this one has had its frescoes restored, meaning that they are complete and in vivid colours, covering nearly all of the interior walls.

From there we returned to the baths district, which we’d seen with Lali on our first day. The baths are all fed from a hot spring which also feeds into a stream running down a steep and picturesque valley. In the end we decided just to sit and drink tea watching the valley and the people in it, rather than trying to take a bath. Thanks to the online bus map and guide, I was able to find a bus which took us from there straight back to our hotel.

One very striking thing everywhere in Georgia is the presence of vending machines in the street, selling beer, soft drinks, snacks and so on. The only other place we’ve seen this is in famously crime-free Japan. In France, Britain or the US they would be vandalised and robbed within hours. It tells you a lot about Georgia. During our strolls around Tbilisi, sometimes in narrow, deserted streets, we never felt in any danger.

As we walked the short distance from the bus to our hotel, we passed what seemed to be a combined hotel and up-market shopping mall. We went in to explore, and found a huge courtyard full of people, mostly students. Following the example of someone emerging from a side door, we found a wine bar run, improbably, by a Dane. We spent a very pleasant half hour sitting on the terraced staircase in the cool evening air. Apparently the place used to be a huge printing works, in Soviet times, which has now become a hotel, and art gallery, and some wine bars and restaurants.

For our last dinner we wanted something a bit different from the standard classic Georgian food we’d eaten all week. But we still wanted something with a Georgian touch - it seems silly to visit Georgia to eat pizza or sushi, even though these were readily available. We found a highly-rated restaurant called Shavi Lomi, billed as Georgian/European fusion. Our first impression was not great. We took a Bolt to get there, since the bus ride, though possible, looked a bit adventurous. At first we went along busy streets lined with shops and restaurants, on the north side of the river. But then we turned into a series of deserted back alleys, and in the middle of one the car stopped and the driver made it clear we were there. We saw the sign for the restaurant, but a heavy steel door was firmly closed and locked. Just as we were wondering what to do next, the door opened and a very apologetic woman beckoned us inside. The transition from the deserted, dirty street to the busy, well-lit courtyard was a bit Tardis-like.

The food was excellent. I had a beef stew and Isabelle had a lamb dish. We decided to drink a “white” wine with this, an amber Kisi qvevri wine. It sounds improbable, but they went perfectly together. It made a pleasant complement to all the classic food we had eaten.

Tbilisi Street Scenes

The Romantic Fountain, Gudiashvili Square Restored Frescoes, Jvaris Mamas

Return

The next morning, it was time to return. Many years ago we boarded an Air France flight in St Petersburg, with great of relief that we had survived and even enjoyed our week in Russia. We had no such feeling this time. I would happily go back to Georgia any time, and there is still a lot we have to discover - the high mountains of the Caucasus, the Black Sea coast at Batumi, and no doubt others too.

Air France did nothing to make us feel welcome. The crew was interested only in hiding in the galley, and the food was truly awful - such a shame when you consider what Georgia is capable of producing.

A Visit to Georgia - Part 1

Many years ago I discovered the beautiful and unique Georgian script. Since then I’ve been intrigued by this small Caucasian country. More recently, pre-Covid, we talked to some friends about going there together. Thanks to Covid that never happened, but we did buy the Lonely Planet guide-book which got me a lot more interested. It’s one of the oldest surviving civilizations in the world, despite the best efforts of all of its neighbours to invade and destroy it, packed with ancient monasteries and churches going back to the 4th century AD. It is also the birthplace of winemaking, with its own grape varieties and a unique technique that makes especially well-flavoured wines.

We found a company that organizes wine-oriented tours there, and at short notice booked a one-week trip. We were very lucky to be the only two people on the tour - we could have been in a larger group, which would have made the most interesting parts of our trip impossible. Air France flies to Tbilisi (the capital) a few times a week, so we organised things around that. We had little idea what to expect. I used the intervening time to learn the Georgian alphabet, since I hate going somewhere and being unable to read anything at all.

This blog is in two parts. The story of the second part of our trip is here.

Arrival

Our flight managed to leave over two hours late from Paris, so with the two-hour time difference we arrived at about 1.30 am. We were met by our guide, Lali, and our driver for the week, Misho. The streets were still quite full as we drove into town. Our hotel could have been anywhere in the world, with a decent-sized room and all the usual amenities. So far, so good.

Gold jewelry at the National Museum

The next morning, a bit sleepy, we were taken on a walking tour of the city. Our first stop was the National Museum. In the time available all we saw was the collection of ancient gold jewelry. Georgians were amazing goldsmiths when Europe was still in the stone age, using techniques which cannot be reproduced even today.

We saw the first of many thousand-plus year old churches. It wasn’t as hot as we’d feared, but it was still very hot and tiring in the sun. The church interiors make a very welcome relief. Our guide had an extraordinary depth of knowledge about the history of the churches and monasteries, which impressed us throughout the trip.

Tbilisi is built in a narrow valley, surmounted by hills either side. We took a modern cable car to the top, with spectacular views, though the monastery which is the real target of the cable car is closed for restoration. After that we had our first meal in Georgia. When we lived in the US, there was a Georgian restaurant nearby which left us fairly underwhelmed. We hoped that the real thing would be better. One of the universal staples of Georgian food is khinkali, a large dumpling generally filled with minced meat, and liquid broth. Done properly, as we discovered later, they are delicious. But at the tourist-trap by the river that we visited this time, they were a disappointment, dry and tasteless.

Tbilisi's baths with their characteristic
domed roofs

The afternoon took us on the classic tourist trail through Tbilisi. We started at the hot sulphur baths, which were discovered by king Vakhtang Gorgasali around 500 AD. According to legend, he decided on the spot to move the capital there, thus creating Tbilisi. From there we walked along a café-lined street to the Sioni Cathedral, another ancient church. By then we were exhausted from the heat, and delighted when Lali steered us into a beautifully decorated café and ordered a jug of home-made lemonade, augmented with finely chopped mint that gave it an extra delicious tang as we savoured it in the air-conditioned cool.

At the end of the tourist street, where we waited for our driver to collect us, was a very unusual car - a 1959 Edsel, in perfect condition. The name has become a synonym for huge commercial failure - very few were sold even in the US, and to find one in Georgia is just so improbable. I discovered later that Georgia is a busy marketplace for cars making their way from Europe and the US to central Asia - our driver’s car was a US-model Ford Fusion, its speedometer calibrated in MPH. We also saw a 1950s Ford Falcon and a 1960s Cadillac, both being used as wedding cars.

A 1959 Edsel parked in central Tbilisi

After a rest at the hotel, we went for our first dinner in Georgia. The meal was bracketed by a tomato-and-cucumber salad, and a huge platter of fresh fruit. Nearly every meal had some variant of the other Georgian staple, khachapuri. This is a bit like an enclosed pizza, two very thin layers of dough filled with cheesy stuff of some kind. The best are delicious, and even mediocre ones are pleasantly filling. The rest of the meal set a pattern which was repeated, with minor variations, throughout the trip - a vegetable stew, tasty little walnut-based dumpling things called pkhali, often some barbecued meat. And always the brackets of salad and fruit.

We had our first Georgian wine of the trip, a qvevri saperavi - more on the wines later. This one was the least good of all we had, but luckily they improved after that.

Travels, and Wine

Our first wine-tasting, in Sighnaghi

Making Kakheti-style bread

The following morning we left for Kakheti, the eastern part of the country where most of the wine is made. After a long drive we arrived in the hilltop town of Sighnaghi (if you speak standard French, it’s pronounced as if it was written Sirnari, though most foreigners say Signagi), and to our first wine tasting. This was a private house, adapted as a small tourist restaurant. We went down several floors into the tasting room, where our hostess explained everything. She was about 30 and spoke reverently about her grandfather and his traditions, from whom she was evidently taking over as winemaker. Later we saw her making traditional Kakheti bread. It looks a bit like a squashed baguette, and it is absolutely delicious. It’s made from unleavened (no yeast) dough, which is wrapped around the inside of a cylinder about 80 cm across. Then wood is placed in the middle and ignited. When the wood has burned out, the bread is cooked to perfection, crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle.

We were constantly surprised on our trip by how good people’s English was. Our tour was in French and our guide spoke fluent, almost unaccented French. But at Sighnaghi, and elsewhere, it was simpler to let the local person talk to us in English. Our host there was completely fluent, even though she had only visited the US a few times.

Traditional Georgian winemaking uses a qvevri. This is a large clay vessel, which can hold anything from a few hundred litres up to 2000, or even more. They are roughly the shape of a rugby ball, pointed at the bottom and open at the top, and buried in the ground so all you can see is the hole at the top. The grapes are crushed, traditionally by foot but nowadays by machine, and then everything is poured into the qvevri - juice, skins, pulp, and even sometimes the stems - and left to ferment for a few days. Being buried in the ground keeps the temperature under control, an important concern since the fermentation produces a lot of heat.

Traditionally, once the fermentation has stopped, the qvevri would be sealed and the wine stored there until required. The wines were for home consumption, so not kept for very long. Nowadays the liquid is removed and placed into another qvevri, which is topped up and sealed. The wine-soaked solids at the bottom of the qvevri, called cha-cha, are retrieved and distilled to make a strong alcohol also called cha-cha.

Qvevri, before they are buried

Especially for white wines, this is very different from Western methods, where the juice is separated from the skins and pulp almost immediately. It makes the characteristic “amber wine”, strongly coloured and with a taste and mouth-feel intermediate between red and white wine - though nothing like a rosé. On our last night we drank a qvevri white wine with beef and lamb, which it accompanied perfectly.

Georgia has its own grape varieties, which are unknown in Europe and the US. The most common (by far) red grape is Saperavi, which can make a delicious, full-bodied, well-rounded red. My description is that it is what Merlot really wants to be. The most common white grape is Rkatskeli (the natives almost omit the initial R, and you can too). There are 102 others, carefully preserved at the Alaverdi monastery, of which maybe 30 are commonly used to some extent. There have also been attempts at growing classic western grapes, in particular Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. This is probably more about name recognition in western markets than it is about improving the wines - which they don’t need.

For a long time the principal market for Georgian wine was (the rest of) the Soviet Union, which wanted sweet-ish red wines, and most of all lots and lots of it. Since its collapse, Georgia has turned to other markets and to improved quality. Even so, Russia still takes about 50% of wine exports, with the rest going mainly to Eastern Europe and to a fast-growing market in China.

Sighnaghi, with one of its signature towers

After the tasting we strolled around the town, built mainly in the 18th century so practically brand new by Georgian standards. The old town is surrounded by a wall, with over 30 watchtowers along its length. We bought a big bag of delicious fresh figs from a black-clad old lady sitting beside the road, for next to nothing - 5 Georgian Lari (GEL or ₾), or about €1.50. The town sits and the end of a ridge between the two principal valleys of eastern Georgia, with spectacular views over both of them.

Monasteries and Invaders

Georgia converted to Christianity in the 4th century AD. There followed a spate of building monasteries and associated churches. Lali, our guide, has an encyclopedic knowledge not just of individual sites but of the history of the architecture, and how the construction of the churches evolved over time. This was fascinating to listen to, though sometimes a bit overwhelming.

To understand Georgia (even a little), you have to start with geography. It’s a small and very rich country, agriculturally, surrounded on all sides by other countries that would like to own or control it: Russia to north, Turkey to the west, Iran/Persia to the south, and the Mongol hordes to the East. Over the centuries they, and others, have all invaded, with the usual genocide, pillaging and general destruction. The Russians and later the Soviet Union were the most recent, starting in 1806, but by no means the worst. Amazingly, the Georgians managed to retain their language and culture through all of this.

Despite this repeated destruction, and the passing of a couple of millennia, many of the monasteries and churches survive. Our first was at Bodbe, close to Sighnaghi. It’s still an active convent, in addition to the church. It’s one of “the” go-to places, so it was very crowded, with a lot of Russians. Georgia is one of the few countries they can still visit readily, so they show up everywhere. Which is ironic, because this church, like all of the others we saw, had been vandalized under the Soviet Union. All of the frescoes, which had survived for centuries, were smothered in whitewash or concrete. It’s practically impossible to remove without destroying the fresco underneath, so the churches just have a few patches here and there which have either been restored, or which the Russians missed. It’s incomprehensible really - my theory is that the Russians are so inherently miserable that they deliberately wreck anything that might give anyone any kind of pleasure.

Bodbe is famous as the resting place of St Nino, the person behind the country’s transformation to Christianity. It seems incredible that one woman can have had so much influence.

Telavi's famous 900-year-old plane tree

Telavi fort, and statue of King Erekle II

The Monastery at Alaverdi

Qvevri installed in the ground at Chubini

From there we went to our night-stop at Telavi, the major town in the Kakheti region. It’s a sleepy little town, which we explored completely on foot. Its main attraction is a 900-year old plane tree, which is absolutely enormous as you could imagine. It’s surprising that the Russians didn’t chop it down, I guess they couldn’t get their chainsaws to work for long enough. Dinner followed the familiar pattern, outdoors with great views over the countryside at a very pleasant restaurant. It was right next to our hotel, which surprisingly was a Holiday Inn, just like any other Holiday Inn anywhere in the world.

Our morning started with the Alaverdi Monastery. It was built in the 6th century, though the current buildings are from the 11th century. It is considered one of the four great monasteries of the Georgian Orthodox church. Unfortunately it had been hit by a very localized tornado just a few weeks before, badly damaging all the roofs, so it was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

The monastery is still home to the bishop - the modern air-conditioner attached to the 11th century walls is a dead give-away. It is still active as a monastery as well, though there are only three resident monks.

Alaverdi has a long tradition of winemaking and is the most famous winery in the country. At the monastery is a tiny vineyard with every one of Georgia’s 104 grape varieties. We’d read about the winery in a book about the history of wine and winemaking, which dedicated a whole chapter to a visit there. Normally it is not accessible, but we asked Lali if there was any chance of a tour. She made a few phone calls and to our amazement, we were all set for a visit the next morning - more on that later.

Our next stop was at a winery that is also a museum. It was the first time we saw how qvevri are actually used, with only their top visible. While the fermentation is in progress, they are left open, and pushed down every three hours or so. The carbon dioxide from the fermentation protects the wine from the air. Once the fermentation is complete, the liquid wine is usually moved to another qvevri, which is then sealed completely using wax, and covered in gravel until they decide to remove it for bottling.

Next came the fortress at Gremi. This used to be a major town, the capital of the Kakheti region. But the Persians had wanted to take control of Kakheti for a long time, and finally in 1615 Shah Abbas succeeded. The town was completely razed, only the hilltop fortress remaining together with a modern museum showing the history of the region. He also forced everyone to convert from Christianity to Islam, except the Queen, Ketevan. She was tortured horribly to death, but never renounced her religion.

The next winery was very different. Called Chubini, it was all the work of one young couple, mostly with their own bare hands. They started with a maize field, a few years ago, and built themselves a tiny house in one corner. They planted grapes, a mixture of mainly saperavi and rkatskeli, and built a very impressive winery, with a dozen or so qvevri at one end and a tasting room at the other. To make some extra cash, they built half a dozen holiday chalets. It was a very personal experience, learning about their experience and their wine from the young woman of the couple - who incidentally spoke near-perfect English.

Dinner that night at first site appeared to be at an abandoned house, but it turned out to be an excellent restaurant with a very pleasant garden. They served the best khachapuri of our trip.

More Travels in Khaketi

The next morning saw us back at Alaverdi, but this time for a tour of the winery that Lali miraculously managed to organise for us. The monastery has been making wine for ten centuries, using the traditional qvervi method. Nowadays it belongs to the Bagadoni company, who produce a stunning total of 33 million bottles of wine per year. Alaverdi is just their very exclusive top end. The cellars were the most impressive that we visited. Apart from the qvevri where the wine is made, there were many, many barrels of French oak for developing the wine, and large storage areas full of bottled wine. There were also a couple of special barrels on display, one of them being kept for - and labelled for - Viktor Orban, the unpleasant far-right prime minister of Hungary.

Alaverdi Wines

After the winery tour we crossed the road to the tasting room. This works differently from most of them. You pay an eye-watering upfront fee - ₾300 or about €100 for two people - but for that you get two whole bottles of wine, a red saperavi and a white rkatsiteli. We weren’t quite sure what we’d do with two opened bottles, but we solved the problem for the saperavi by finishing it between the three of us before we left. It was excellent, saperavi at its best, rounded, full-bodied, smooth and generally delicious. The rkatsiteli was excellent too, amber rather than white from the qvevri method. We took it back to the hotel with us and finished it off over three evenings sitting on our minimal terrace.

If I haven’t mentioned lunch so far, it’s because we never got round to having any. Every tasting was accompanied by delicious Georgian flat bread, and the excellent, salty Georgian cheese. Walnuts were another universal feature. They grow all over the country, the trees constantly visible as we drove around. These snacks were enough for us and saved wasting time as well as calories.

Qvevri under construction

After Alaverdi we visited a qvevri “factory”. I put the word in quotes because it was just a shed behind somebody’s house, containing eight enormous qvevri under construction. They were each about 3 metres tall, and nearly finished. They are made completely by hand, starting with the base which is turned on a potters’ wheel. After that, the shell is added about 10 cm at a time, rolled out from clay and attached to what is already there. It’s amazing that such a perfect and symmetrical shape can be created in such a simple way.

Finally, when the shape is complete, it has to be fired, just like any other pottery. But it’s enormous, much too big to fit in any conventional oven. They’re moved, very carefully, to another building, made of stone. And that is the oven. They set a large fire, seal it up apart from a small opening in the roof, and leave it to burn. Firing clay requires a temperature of over 1000°C, and I really don’t know how they get this in such a large space, but they do.

The completed qvevri still have to be moved to their final site, and buried in the ground with only the top showing. The whole process is very laborious, and even more so before you could just hire a back-hoe to dig the hole. It’s not surprising that most Georgian wine these days is made in stainless steel tanks, just like anywhere else.

The Mansion at Tsinandale

Our final call of the day was something different again. The Tsinandale Estate is a European-style mansion originally built in 1812 by Chavchavadze, a Russian nobleman. After that things get complicated. In 1854 the North Caucasians burned it down and took Chavchavadze’s family hostage. He borrowed a lot of money from the Russian throne to get them back, and to rebuild the house, but he never paid it back and eventually the Tsar claimed the house, which slowly fell into dereliction.

Whatever the history, it is a spectacular house and garden which seems completely out of place in Georgia. In fact it reminded us a lot of the Villa Arnaga in Cambo-les-Bains, in the French Basque country. It is furnished with authentic antiques and full of paintings of the family. It looks as though they have just popped out for a couple of days. 

Return to Tbilisi

Our route back to Tbilisi took us over the Gombori Pass, a spectacular mountain road which crosses the mountains at 1600m. It also cuts 60km and 40 minutes off the journey, though it turned out to be in the middle of major reconstruction. From there we returned to the same hotel in Tbilisi, where we stayed for the rest of our journey.

The next day we travelled west to Mtskheta. But for that you will have to read Part 2.