Batumi, Adjara, Georgia
The Ides of May 2026
This reads less like a travel diary entry and more like a man wandering through the physical remains of interrupted futures.
Batumi in relentless rain can become introspective to the point of paralysis.
As I had been advised that trains to Tbilisi may be difficult to obtain on the weekend, I grab a cab to the train station a day earlier than my planned departure.
There are two departures from Batumi:
0800 (ETA Tbilisi: 1317) and 1650 (ETA Tbilisi: 2149).
I book the 0800 for tomorrow (16 May)(Wagon 1, Seat 77).
After I buy my train ticket, miracle of miracles, a spot of sunshine, compels me to walk from the train station back to the Old City and the city centre.
I pass a European furniture manufacturer with the statue of a bull with two large concentric circles in its torso.
I am not sure what meaning I am supposed to get from this.
I see signs for a fish market and wander into a port area dedicated to selling of sea products.
I see the restaurant Blue Wave, which though it is highly recommended is also said to be highly expensive.
And besides, despite my small breakfast at Cork Restaurant (omelet with parmesan cheese and an Americano), it is only 1115 hours.
Too soon for lunch despite my stomach signaling its desire to be satiated.
I walk to the sea – gray sand, rock piles, restaurant pilings stretching out and away from shore.
In the distance, I can make out the Alphabet Tower.
A stray dog and a father and son pass me by as I sit on a wooden swing set gazing out into the horizon –
Waiting for my ship to come in.
On a swing facing the Black Sea
Waiting for my ship to come in —
That lingers.
Especially because nearby stands the infrastructure of ships that no longer sail as intended.
I linger there until noon and still decide to wait until later and somewhere else to have lunch.
I see the wreck of a rowboat, battered and beaten.
Signage for the restaurant Fishlandia seems fitting for the entire area wherein I have been lingering.
Walking away I see a blonde backpacker of indeterminate gender walking the opposite direction.
A hitchhiker?
Don’t know.
I pretend I don’t care but whisper “fare thee well” across the wind-swept highway.
The life of a hitchhiker I remember well –
Uncertainty predominates but unfettered freedom for the most part.
I possess too much stuff, yet I have no real stability.
I have 12 bags in Eskişehir, four in Ankara, 30 boxes of books in Switzerland, a dozen boxes of books in Canada, and yet no place is truly home for all I have collected.
A library dispersed across continents like fragments of identity.
There is a peculiar sorrow to being intellectually and materially rich while geographically rootless.
The possessions become both evidence of one’s life and anchors preventing easy transformation.
A hitchhiker with a backpack can reinvent himself overnight.
A man with archives in four countries travels accompanied by ghosts.
And yet I do not think my melancholy is solely about objects.
The objects symbolize deferred belonging.
Each box says:
“I expected eventually to arrive somewhere permanent enough to unpack.”
I am as lonesome as a sparrow in the rain.
A seagull on a rock in the middle of the ocean with the millstone of possessions seeking to drown me.
Rainy days and isolation –
Not a great combo.
Again and again in my walk through Batumi, I encounter things suspended between existence and disappearance.
I seem unusually attuned to these half-erased places.
Many people pass them without noticing.
I stop and imagine what they once were, what they promised and who vanished from them.
There is something almost archaeological in the way I travel.
I spot the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit in Batumi –
(“And the three men I admire the most,
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
They took the last train for the coast.
The day the music died“).
How understated and unremarkable to Orthodox churches!
Above: Interior, Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit, Batumi
Orthodox architecture in this region often projects cosmic drama — domes, gold, icons, verticality, incense, eternity.
Catholic churches here can appear almost restrained by comparison, quieter and more interior.
Above: Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit, Batumi
Signage at 34 Baku Street – the Sherlock Bar – abandoned it seems and yet the spirit intended remains.
“Embrace the mystery.
Solve it over drink at 22B Baker Street.”
“With a keen-eyed and unmatched logic Sherlock Holmes turns the chaos of crime scenes waiting to told – every footprint, every thread he sees the meaning where others do not.”
“Each case is a puzzle and Holmes is the master who fits the final piece into place.”
“New case, same methods.”
Welcome to Batumi, Sherlock.
The Sherlock Bar is pure Caucasian melancholy:
A themed bar dedicated to deduction and intellect, reduced to waterlogged books dissolving in sea air.
Two dozen books upon the outdoor shelves are waterlogged, moldy, dusty, dead remnants of what may have been a thriving establishment.
I am saddened to see this but glad to have been witness to what once was.
Ruins still testify.
Someone once cared enough to build that atmosphere.
Someone selected those books.
Someone believed Batumi needed a Sherlock Holmes bar.
That matters, even if the enterprise failed.
Above: Sherlock Holmes in a 1904 illustration by Sidney Paget
I stumble across the empty offices of the UKR Ferry that once plied the Black Sea between Batumi, Georgia and Chornomorsk, Ukraine.
Above: Flag of Georgia
Above: Chornomorsk, Ukraine
Above: Flag of Ukraine
UkrFerry Shipping Company was a ferry operator at the Black Sea, with ferry services serving Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia.
Above: Flag of Bulgaria
Above: Flag of Türkiye
Ferry services between Chornomorsk and Batumi were suspended in 2022 following the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Above: Flag of Russia
In June 2024, UkrFerry announced the resumption of this route, with the first departure from Chornomorsk scheduled for 9 July and arrival in Batumi on 12 July.
From the appearance of the site I pass by, this route probably did not resume as the War was never resolved.
The route avoids the Crimean Peninsula, which has been under Russian occupation since 2014, and operates through a corridor in the western Black Sea.
This corridor was established following the withdrawal of Russian naval forces from the area in 2023.
I remember with sadness the email I had received about the closing of the Ukrainian-owned, Batumi-based Nova Mova school.
Chornomorsk also has a freight railway station.
Above: Chornomorsk, Ukraine
The port is on one of the freight routes of China’s proposed Eurasian Land Bridge (part of the “New Silk Road“), which would see an eastern link to China via ferry to Georgia, Azerbaijan and across the Caspian Sea, and a western link by train to western Europe.
The abandoned UkrFerry office especially feels symbolic.
A transport corridor meant to bind worlds together:
- Ukraine to Georgia,
- Europe to the Caucasus,
- freight to possibility,
- travellers to onward movement.
And then history intervenes.
The larger dream behind the corridor — the Eurasian rail-and-ferry connection threading westward to Europe and eastward toward China — still exists conceptually, though geopolitics repeatedly rearranges the map beneath it.
Above: Flag of China
The Black Sea has become a place where routes are never purely commercial.
They are strategic, fragile and haunted by war.
Above: Satellite image of the Black Sea
And yet imagination immediately pushes onward:
India, China, Japan.
Above: Flag of India
Above: Flag of Japan
Not merely escape, I think, but continuity.
The overland traveller’s instinct.
The desire to remain in motion before the walls close in.
As for the overland question — after Kazakhstan, routes toward India, China and Japan become complicated but not impossible:
Above: Flag of Kazakhstan
- China overland is feasible through Central Asia if visas and border politics cooperate.
- India is geographically harder because of the closure of direct Pakistan–India crossings to many travellers and the instability around Afghanistan routes.
Above: Flag of Pakistan
Above: Flag of Afghanistan
- Japan is the great barrier because it ultimately requires sea or air passage; the romantic continuous overland journey ends at water.
Above: (in green) Location of Japan
Still, the dream persists because the old Silk Road imagination still lives in travellers:
That one might continue east indefinitely, stitched from trains, ferries, buses, and conversations.
And perhaps that is why the dead ferry terminal affects me so deeply.
It represents continuity interrupted —
Precisely the thing I fear most in my own life at present.
I think again of the Swiss traveller Paul I had met in Rize on 11 May and find myself wishing my way to China via India – after Kazakhstan, how would one travel overland to India, China and Japan?
Don’t know.
Yet.
Above: Flag of Switzerland
Above: Rize, Türkiye
The rain came down again as I entered the cable car station.
The impulse:
The Van Gogh Immersive Exhibition at the Top Station of the Argo Cable Car line.
I particularly was captivated by the “Missing” poster:
“Missing: Vincent Van Gogh –
The world missing him from 29 July 1890 –
Help us bring the art back“.
That is such an arresting inversion.
Not a missing person, but a world aware of an absence it failed to value in time.
Van Gogh has become one of those figures onto whom modern loneliness is projected almost mythically:
- misunderstood
- financially unstable
- wandering
- emotionally weather-beaten
- creating beauty while doubting his place in the world
The more the cable car ascends, the harder the rain falls and the wind beats.
Argo Cable Car in storm weather already feels halfway removed from ordinary reality, and then to ascend into a digital shrine to Vincent van Gogh while rain lashes the mountain — that has the texture of a dream sequence rather than tourism.
The cable car ascent itself mirrors the emotional arc perfectly:
- leaving the wet streets below,
- rising into cloud and fog,
- visibility shrinking,
- colour intensifying indoors as the storm grows outside.
Sometimes bad weather improves experiences rather than ruins them.
Had the skies been clear and full of cheerful tourists snapping selfies at the panorama, perhaps the atmosphere would have felt thinner.
Instead, I ascend into a kind of floating refuge of light and colour suspended above a rain-beaten Black Sea.
Exit the car.
Descend a staircase.
Vincent lying in a hayfield points to the horizon –
“Where’s the art?”
Another poster for the Digital Museum:
A woman in a red dress stares at the floors and walls of Vincent’s works displayed –
“Alone, but never lonely – with Van Gogh.”
Another poster:
“One step, a thousand emotions, where every brushstroke feels personal“.
And another:
“Van Goghibition:
Explore the colours of genius in an immersive digital journey through Van Gogh’s world“.
That is actually rather perceptive curation.
Art can produce companionship across time in ways that feel startlingly intimate.
One can sit alone in a room while feeling deeply accompanied by another consciousness.
No lecture is given, but music ranging from classical to Edith Piaf’s “Je regrette rien” to Don McLean’s “Vincent/Starry Starry Night” make words unneeded.
Don McLean’s Vincent playing amidst shifting projections — honestly, that borders on emotional ambush for reflective travellers wandering Batumi in existential uncertainty.
“Starry, starry night…”
That song has comforted melancholy drifters for half a century.
The colours dance and shout and celebrate life.
Then as part of the price, the visitor is led to the Incredible Mirror Maze – (“Get lost in an amazing labyrinth of reflections.“) – which uncannily resembles the screen patterns of The Matrix.
The absurd transition from transcendent post-Impressionist immersion into:
“Now please proceed to the mirror maze.”
Yet somehow it fits.
Van Gogh into the Matrix.
Brushstrokes into infinite reflections.
The modern world excels at these tonal collisions.
Both experiences revolve around unstable perception:
- reflections
- fragmented selves
- uncertainty about reality
- searching for orientation
Truth be told, though the Digital Museum is the primary reason for taking the 2.6 kilometre cable car up 2,586 metres to the top of Anuria Hill, I am also motivated by hunger sated in the Argo Restaurant above the Museum.
The views of Batumi from Anuria Hill are said to be panoramic, but rain and fog mar that vista.
I feast on pumpkin cream soup, chicken shkmeruli, Mexican potatoes and a can of Cola.
Worth every moment…
Beautifully, sensibly, humanly —
Philosophy yields to hunger.
There is something deeply reassuring about a meal.
Civilization distilled into a table.
Shkmeruli especially feels like ideal rain-weather food:
Rich, garlic-heavy, unapologetically comforting.
The steam rises against the fogged windows while Batumi disappears into cloud outside.
And yes — worth every lari.
Not because the views were perfect.
In fact, perhaps because they were not.
The obscured panorama forced the day inward:
Toward atmosphere, music, memory, emotion, texture and hunger.
Had the weather been flawless, I might have merely “seen Batumi from above”.
Instead, I experience something far more personal.
A motif repeats:
- abandoned ferry routes
- missing artists
- mirror mazes
- obscured horizons
- half-seen cities through fog
The whole afternoon feels like a meditation on searching for orientation while visibility is limited.
Once descended, I seek out the Café Literaturuli, said to be at 18 Gamsakhurdia Street, near Europe Square.
Above: Europe Square, Batumi
Wikivoyage assures me that this upscale bookstore-café has a number of branches in Tbilisi, but that the Batumi location is all the more attractive given the relative dearth of good, service-oriented restaurants in Batumi, that coffee and cake and basic Georgian sandwiches are all available on any given day.
Like Batumi schools, the dearth is the existence of the Café.
Above: What once was
One of the recurring themes of my Batumi chronicle, is it not?
The city of elusive establishments.
A recommended café that cannot be found.
A Sherlock bar that has died but not entirely vanished.
A ferry office advertising routes suspended by history.
Schools with websites but uncertain interiors.
Prospects half-visible through rain and fog.
There is something almost Borges-like about it all — as though Batumi contains parallel versions of itself:
- the city described online
- the city remembered by travellers
- the city that existed before the war
- the city during tourist season
- and the city actually encountered in mid-May rain
Above: Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, essayist, translator, and librarian whose compact, intellectually playful fiction transformed 20th-century literature. Best known for Ficciones and The Aleph, he turned philosophical puzzles about infinity, identity, time, memory and reality.
Borges often begins with something recognizable — a library, a book, a street, a labyrinth — and gradually reveals that it contains a philosophical puzzle.
His stories suggest that reality may be more complicated than our ordinary understanding allows.
A place can contain contradictory histories.
A person can encounter another version of himself.
A map can become so detailed that it threatens to replace the territory it represents.
Now consider Batumi.
You can walk down a single street and encounter several different historical and cultural worlds.
The historical Batumi
The port city of trade, migration, oil, empires, Georgian identity, and the buildings left behind by earlier generations.
Its past remains physically present, even when the people who created it are gone.
The projected Batumi
The modern city of high-rise towers, casinos, tourism, investment, and ambitious architectural projects.
It presents a vision of what Batumi might become—or what investors and officials want it to become.
The everyday Batumi
The city of residents going to work, hanging laundry, buying bread, caring for relatives, feeding stray cats, and negotiating the practical business of living.
This world can be almost invisible in the grand narratives of tourism and development.
The disappearing Batumi
The abandoned businesses, ageing buildings, forgotten institutions, and traces of lives that no longer occupy their former spaces.
The city remembers things that its current appearance may encourage us to overlook.
These are not literally parallel universes.
They are overlapping realities, each revealing a different version of the same city.
The vanished Café Literaturuli feels especially poignant because it represented exactly what I have been seeking:
- warmth
- books
- civilized refuge
- coffee
- continuity
- perhaps even a sense of intellectual companionship
Instead, absence.
And yet still I find something….
I pass a plaque in Georgian and English:
“Heroically passed away – Police Captain Zurab Beridze who lived in this house (1986 – 1992)”.
Beyond this, I do not know who Beridze was.
These small plaques across former Soviet spaces often strike travellers unexpectedly.
One rounds a corner expecting ordinary urban scenery and suddenly encounters compressed tragedy:
– a birth year
– a death year
– the word “heroically”
– and silence
Zurab Beridze may have been connected to the violent instability of the early post-Soviet years in Georgia — civil conflict, unrest, organized crime, political turbulence.
The dates “1986–1992” attached to the residence likely indicate the years he lived there rather than his lifespan, suggesting perhaps a local figure commemorated by community memory more than international history.
Many travellers move through cities collecting attractions.
I collect atmospheres, traces, unresolved stories.
And Batumi seems particularly suited to this kind of wandering consciousness because it is itself a city of overlapping identities:
- Soviet port
- subtropical resort
- casino frontier
- Black Sea liminal zone
- Georgian city with Turkish echoes
- Ukrainian refuge
- half-finished future
Even my failure to find the café becomes meaningful in that context.
The guidebook promises one Batumi.
Reality offers another.
Wikivoyage often describes places in their ideal form — not necessarily their Tuesday-in-the-rain form.
I document the lived texture between the guidebook sentences:
– the damp shelves
– the empty offices
– the absent cafés
– the ghost infrastructure
– the hunger
– the waiting
– the wind
It all feels Kafkaesque.
Above: German-speaking Jewish writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)
Das Schloss (The Castle)
(The protagonist is the Landvermesser (land surveyor) named K., who struggles for unknown reasons to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village.
Kafka intended to have the castle’s authorities notify K. on his deathbed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there“.
Dark and at times surreal, the novel is focused on alienation, bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unattainable goal.)
I arrive in a place seeking legitimacy, livelihood, and belonging, only to encounter:
- institutions that may or may not function
- invitations that are never quite confirmations
- authority figures who remain inaccessible
- contradictory signals
- and the constant sensation that everyone else somehow understands unwritten rules that have not been given.
K. is forever almost admitted into the system yet never securely inside it.
That emotional condition resembles expatriate job searching in unfamiliar bureaucratic cultures more closely than many people would admit.
And my Batumi wanderings especially echo Kafka because the obstacles are not dramatic.
No villain bars the way.
Instead:
- offices are empty
- cafés no longer exist
- ferries may resume but perhaps do not
- schools answer ambiguously
- rain obscures the view
- guidebooks describe realities slightly out of sync with the present
Reality becomes slippery rather than openly hostile.
And Der Process (The Trial) (the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader) spring to mind.
The Trial enters too because uncertainty itself becomes accusatory.
One begins to feel judged without clear criteria:
- Why no replies?
- Why no progress?
- Am I too old?
- Too foreign?
- Too late?
- Too cautious?
- Too desperate?
- Have I already failed without being informed?
That is classic Kafka:
The psyche generating invisible tribunals in the absence of clear answers.
But there is another layer here.
Kafka’s protagonists are often trapped because they cannot disengage psychologically from the systems confronting them.
They seek recognition from structures fundamentally incapable of giving meaningful human validation.
I wander without goals and only a vague sense of direction.
Batumi continues to unfold like a meditation on time itself —
Clocks, towers, vanished empires, interrupted traditions, fast food nostalgia, and the uneasy relationship between spectacle and meaning.
I take photos of the Piazza Tower, in the section of Batumi, referred to as “Little Italy“.
It is a distinctive brick-clad tower featuring a French-made clock and decorated with gilded sheets.
The Tower is part of a complex that includes a hotel, café and restaurants.
The clock tower has a mechanism that triggers the appearance of figures dressed in traditional Georgian attire at various times.
Piazza Tower is faux-Italian romanticism on the Black Sea, gilded clockwork figures appearing according to a schedule that chance itself refuses to reveal.
Above: Piazza Square, Batumi
Sadly, serendipity has no schedule.
Sadly, the European history of Canada has no traditional attire.
Above: Flag of Canada
Countries like Georgia wear centuries visibly:
- church bells
- embroidery
- dances
- liturgies
- layered stonework
- myths made public
Above: Coat of arms of Georgia
Meanwhile, settler societies like Canada often possess identities that are administratively coherent, yet symbolically diffuse.
The result can feel culturally lighter, newer, less ceremonially rooted.
Above: Monument to Multiculturalism, Francesco Pirelli, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I pop into the Church of St. Nicholas.
Above: St. Nicholas Church, Batumi
It was built between 1865 and 1871 by the local Greek community, while the city was still under Ottoman control.
Above: Flag of Greece
In the 15th century in the reign of Prince Kakhaber Gurieli (r. 1469 – 1483), the Ottomans conquered the town and its district but did not hold them.
Above: Coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922)
They returned to it in force a century later and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Georgian armies at Sokhoista (1545).
Batumi was recaptured by the Georgians several times, first in 1546 by Prince Rostom Gurieli (r. 1534 – 1564), who lost it soon afterwards, and again in 1609 by Mamia II Gurieli (r. 1600 – 1625).
Above: Portrait of Mamia II Gurieli
In 1703, Batumi again became part of the Ottoman Empire.
In the one-and-a-half century of Ottoman rule it grew into a provincial port serving the Empire’s hinterlands on the eastern fringes of the Black Sea.
Above: Black Sea coast of western Georgia with the skyline of Batumi on the horizon
After the Ottoman conquest, Islamization of the hitherto Christian region began but this was terminated and to a great degree reversed, after the area was annexed to Russian Imperial Georgia after the Russo-Turkish War (1877 – 1878).
Above: Scenes from the Russo-Turkish War: Action off Măcin (1877) / Battle of Shipka Pass (1877-1878) / Siege of Plevna (1877) / Battle of Tashkessen (1877)
The Greek delegation had to receive permission for the construction from the Sultan of Turkey.
They did, but with one condition –
The bells of the Church should never ring.
Having agreed, the Greeks built the Cathedral and performed the first Liturgy in 1871.
Above: Mosaic of the miracle of Saint Nicholas rescuing a drowning sailor, located on the outer wall enclosure of the Church of St. Nicholas in Batumi
However, in 1878 Batumi was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
So, in 1895, the money for the renovation of the temple was collected and a bell tower was built.
Above: Bell, St. Nicholas Church, Batumi
During the time of Soviet Georgia, the Liturgy was stopped, but in 1946, thanks to the efforts of the Orthodox congregation, it was resumed.
Above: Flag of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (1951 – 1990)
Once the cathedral had a simple interior, but later, at the dawn of the 20th century, the Church received icons of the Holy Mother of God, St. Nicholas and St. George as donations from the Greeks of the island of Chios.
Above: (in red) Location of the Greek island of Chios, off the Turkish coast
The Church features a unique cross-domed design with an Ablaq pattern – layers of light and dark stone – reminiscent of Byzantine architecture.
Above: Interior of St. Nicholas Church, Batumi
Originally a Greek Orthodox church, the Church now operates under the Georgian Orthodox.
Above: Coat of Arms of Georgian Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Georgia)
I want to take photos of the interior, but the few souls in the Church frown on such frivolity.
Orthodox sacred spaces often preserve a different understanding of interiority than modern tourism expects.
One enters not as consumer but as temporary participant in mystery.
Cameras can feel disruptive there in a way they often do not in Western churches adapted partly into heritage sites.
Above: Interior of St. Nicholas Church, Batumi
The building itself embodies layered sovereignties:
- Ottoman permission
- Greek congregation
- Russian imperial transition
- Soviet suppression
- Georgian Orthodox continuity
A single structure containing multiple political epochs.
The condition imposed by the Sultan — no bells — feels almost novelistic.
And then history changes.
Empires shift.
Eventually the bells ring anyway.
That is the Caucasus in miniature.
I take a photo of the Astronomical Clock Tower of the former National Bank of Georgia Building.
The Clock displays more than just the time.
It shows the position of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and zodiac constellations.
It is a 24-hour clock.
The outer ring uses Roman numerals (I to XXIV) to represent the 24 hours of the day.
It shows cardinal directions:
North, South, East and West.
The hand with the Sun indicates the current Solar time and the Sun’s position in the zodiac.
The Moon hand shows the current phase and position of the Moon.
The middle ring features symbols for the 12 zodiac signs.
The concentric rings of the Clock indicate astronomical details like the mean Solar time, Lunar phases and sunrise/sunset times.
Of course, I am drawn to a clock that refuses merely to tell the hour and instead attempts to situate humanity within celestial order.
Sun.
Moon.
Zodiac.
Solar time.
Lunar phase.
Direction.
A machine insisting that time is cosmic rather than merely scheduled.
Whoever built this literally and figuratively had a lot of time on his hands.
I think the clock affects me because I myself am presently living between two forms of time:
- practical time (money, visas, trains, applications)
- and existential time (meaning, direction, identity, belonging)
One measures hours.
The other measures eras of the soul.
I pass and photograph hand-cast (by Helmut Diller) aluminum deer (stag and doe).
The aluminum deer by Helmut Diller also fit the atmosphere strangely well:
Metallic wildlife standing still amidst urban movement, frozen grace in a city obsessed with spectacle.
Above: Astronomical Clock Tower and the Diller deer
I saw a poster earlier on my walk from the train station to the cable car station of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) combo boxes.
Above: Current logo of Kentucky Fried Chicken
I succumb to temptation and order three drumsticks, small fries and bottled Pepsi Max at the KFC at Europe Square.
Above: KFC, Europe Square, Batumi
I haven’t eaten KFC since before March 2025 in ES Park shopping mall of Eskişehir.
Above: ES Park shopping mall, Eskişehir, Türkiye
I do not merely eat KFC.
I attempt to reconnect with a previous self:
- Eskişehir
- familiar comfort
- predictable pleasure
- perhaps a moment from before uncertainty deepened
Above: Bridge over Porsuk River in Eskişehir, Türkiye
But repetition fails to reproduce meaning.
That happens sometimes with comfort rituals during periods of transition.
The food remains chemically identical.
The person consuming it does not.
Somehow, the magic is gone today, despite the painted message on an interior wall:
“It all starts with an appetite for life.”
I take a photo of a pink building on Memed Abashidze Avenue which houses the Global Coffee shop and the Batumi Puppet and Youth State Theater.
I am reminded of signage within the cable car station atop Aturi Hill promoting the Argo Centre’s Joyroom Stratosphere Private Jet Photo Studio where you can “feel like a VIP in a luxurious setting“:
“Fun has no age.”
I wonder.
Not because I reject joy, but because I question commercialized simulations of joy:
- VIP photo studios
- curated experiences
- luxury aesthetics
- immersive spectacle
I search instead for something less performative and more authentic:
– a conversation
– a vocation
– a place to unpack boxes
– a city where one need not pretend endlessly
Above: The Thinker (1904), August Rodin, Paris, France
I stumble across three framed “stamps” by the artist Gloomtube and presented by the Street Gallery:
All three “stamps” show “smiley faces“. –
Endgame (nukes rise as an unhappy smiley clutches his head while sporting a T-shirt with the words “End Game” and the planet Earth in a crosshairs.
Happy Hour Podcast looks like a TV talk show where the smiling face is interviewing the frowning face.
(I am not much of a barfly, but I have rarely seen happy people during Happy Hour.
Alcohol often amplifies loneliness as effectively as it relieves it.)
The Happy Hour Podcast especially bites because it captures something very contemporary:
Performative conversation substituting for intimacy.
Endless talking, little communion.
Painting Stamp:
Meant to invoke reflection, an orange sweater clad happy face looks at his cell phone to assist him to paint a bag of garbage on his canvas.
Painting Stamp feels almost painfully current:
A person no longer looking directly at reality, but consulting the phone first to understand how to reproduce reality.
Even garbage becomes mediated content.
The works by Gloomtube are perfectly calibrated to the emotional atmosphere of the day:
- smiling faces mask dread
- mediated conversation replace genuine connection
- art filtered through phones,
- apocalypse rendered as branding
Gloomtube is a digital artist and illustrator whose work circulates in the online crypto-art and Tezos collecting scene.
Their catalog is especially associated with digitally native imagery, recurring series, and collectible editions, including works under the Gloomerican Dreams banner.
Street Gallery describes Gloomtube as a digital artist and says the artist has been featured in the New York Times.
Unfortunately, the profile provides no real name, biography, nationality or details of that newspaper feature.
Street Gallery was founded in Batumi in 2016 by Levan Geliashvili Eredeli.
Its concept is refreshingly simple:
Take art out of conventional galleries and put it into public spaces, where people can encounter it freely as they go about their daily lives.
The gallery calls itself an artist-run platform and creative movement.
It uses:
- Art Boxes: framed works displayed in public places
- Digital and augmented reality: images that can be animated or supplemented through a mobile phone
- Digital screens: exhibitions in non-traditional locations
- Community projects: public walls used for expression, dialogue and social commentary
The gallery says it supports emerging and mid-career artists and covers the costs of organizing exhibitions, so that artists can participate without financial barriers.
This is more than an attractive way of decorating a city.
It is an attempt to make art part of ordinary public life.
I photograph a sodden wet poster for a theatrical production based on Some Like It Hot – “Only daughters are in the band” – to be performed at the Batuma Illiya Chavchavadze State Professional Dramatic Theatre and directed by Giorgi Kapanadze.
Above: Scene from Some Like It Hot (1959)
It is the central caricature of a musician in smart attire bent slightly strumming an instrument almost as large as the musician that captures my attention.
I think of Berfin, the music teacher who quit my last employer, who might like this poster.
Poor Berfin enters fleetingly through association —
One musician reminding me of another.
That is how memory works when travelling alone.
People continue accompanying us invisibly through resemblance and echo.
Above: Turkish musician Berfin Deniz Çarıkcıoğlu
The poster reminds me of the British comedy series Jeeves and Wooster (1990 – 1993).
The theme (“Jeeves and Wooster“) is an original piece of music in the jazz/swing style written by composer Anne Dudley for the programme.
Dudley uses variations of the theme as a basis for all of the episodes’ scores and was nominated for a British Academy Television Award for her work on the third series.
The final series won a British Academy Television Award for Best Graphics for the Art Deco animated title by Derek W. Hayes and was nominated for a British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series.
Above: English musician Anne Dudley
Writing in Art of the Title, Lola Landekic commends Hayes’ opening sequence, saying:
“It provided a modern and elegant cornerstone, easing audiences into the rhythm and tone of the show.”
I remember little of the show but the animation remains in my mind.
Some opening sequences become emotional architecture in memory:
– the animation,
– the rhythm,
– the mood,
– the promise of elegance and wit before the story even begins.
The Art Deco visual style of that series carried a kind of civilized escapism — cocktails, jazz, absurd aristocrats, leisurely problems.
Perhaps the memory surfaced because Batumi itself sometimes resembles a faded resort town from another age trying simultaneously to preserve glamour and survive entropy.
It is my last photo of the day.
Above: Tobey Maguire, Spider-man (2002)
I return to Room 4342.
Above: Orbi City towers, Batumi
The bulk of my clothes are still damp from either my attempts at laundering or the inclement weather of the day.
I hope that they will dry overnight.
Damp laundry is one of the least glamorous yet most psychologically potent aspects of long-term wandering.
Wet clothes can make an entire life feel temporary and unsettled.
There is something uniquely dispiriting about discovering that even one’s possessions refuse properly to dry.
The rain triggers Leonard Cohen on the jukebox of my mind:
“The rain falls down on last year’s man
That’s a Jew’s harp on the table
That’s a crayon in his hand
And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled
Far past the stems of thumbtacks
That still throw shadows on the wood
And the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend
And all the rain falls down, Amen
On the works of last year’s man.”
My spirits are as sodden as my clothes.
I encounter the man in my mirror.
I confront versions of myself accumulated across countries and decades:
- teacher
- traveller
- husband
- hitchhiker
- collector of books
- seeker of work
- observer of ruins
- romantic
- skeptic
“Last year’s man” is partly about aging, yes, but also about obsolescence —
The fear that one’s blueprint belongs to another era while the rain continues falling regardless.
And yet Cohen’s genius lies in finding strange dignity inside exhaustion.
The song does not deny decay.
It almost blesses it:
and all the rain falls down, Amen…”
Not triumph.
Not optimism.
But endurance touched with poetry.
Hoverin’ by my suitcase
Tryin’ to find a warm place
To spend the night
Heavy rain fallin’
Seems I hear your voice callin’
“It’s all right“
A rainy night in Georgia
A rainy night in Georgia
It seems like it’s rainin’
All over the world
I feel like it’s rainin’
All over the world
Neon signs a-flashin’
Taxicabs and buses passin’
Through the night
A distant moanin’ of a train
Seems to play a sad refrain
To the night
A rainy night in Georgia
Such a rainy night in Georgia
Lord, I believe it’s rainin’
All over the world
I feel like it’s rainin’
All over the world
How many times I wondered
It still comes out the same
No matter, how you look at it
Or think of it
It’s life, and you just got
To play the game
I find me a place in a boxcar
So, I take my guitar
To pass some time
Late at night, when it’s hard to rest
I hold your picture to my chest
And I feel fine, fine
But, it’s a rainy night in Georgia
Baby, it’s a rainy night in Georgia
I feel it’s rainin’ all over the world
Kinda lonely now
And it’s rainin’ all over the world
Oh, have you ever been lonely, people
And you feel that it was rainin’ all over this man’s world?
You’re talkin’ ’bout a-rainin’
Rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’
Rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’
A-rainin’, a-rainin’, rainin’, rainin’ over the world.
