If you are planning your trip to Georgia and are looking for advices and recommendations, you will rarely get an advice to visit Chiatura, a small town in north west part of Georgia, which belongs to Imereti region. The thing is, there is almost nothing mainstream tourist attractions, at least in the city itself. But it is one of my most favourite towns in Georgia. I’ll tell you why:
I am a journalist and I travel a lot within the country. I’ve been reporting from Chiatura since 2009 and it hasn’t changed a lot. Chiatura is a mining town. Manganese ore is extracted here. It’s being processed in special plants and sent to another small town Zestaponi in a smelter plant. The town was really blooming during soviet union. Industrial town, where people had everything enough to live, to work, study, have fun. However as the time passed some cities and towns of course continued to develop, while Chiatura remained the same.
Let me show you one of the processing plants, which is functioning:
No windows, holes in the walls, this dark creepy abandoned-looking building is still a place full of life where hundreds of employees spent hours and hours working. Obviously, labour conditions here are terrible. It is just starting to slightly improve, but there is a long way to go. However it is very interesting town to observe and take photos.
Travelling to Chiatura takes about 3 hours from the auto-station Okriba, in Tbilisi. Minibus (marshutka) ticket is just 10 GEL (4 USD). You mainly travel through the main motorway and then there is 70km from the main road to Chiatura. Now, before entering the town every village you pass looks ‘normal’, landscapes are beautiful, especially during spring.
At some point you will reach a small town Sachkhere, where most of the people will leave but the drive continues. You will be taken to a town which is built between rock-mountains, among those are lots of cable cars. Those cable cars are either for humans, or for transporting ore. Everything is old, black and rusty. It’s like an image from Tim Burton movies.
Strangely for me a lot of journalists have travelled in Chiatura and reported only about cable cars, which of course are quite interesting. Those cable cars have never been replaced since soviet union, just like plants or any equipment here. Some people believe it is dangerous to take them and it has become sort of extreme thing to take it, but in reality those cable cars are in full order and take ordinary citizens or workers from one to another mountain or down to the town center and back.
So if you decide to go to Chiatura, you can definitely take one of the cable cars overlooking the city or the mountains. You can see some old mines which are now out of order and if you will have a local person assisting you, you may be lucky to get into one of the mines or plants for unusual photography.
At the end of the day there are a few good Georgian restaurants where you can enjoy tranditional food for extremely cheap prices and the next day absolutely go to Katskhi Pillar one of the most unusual things you can see in this country and not only and it is super close to Chiatura.
p.s all photos are mine.
As for Chiatura, yes, definitely it’s not a place to rest or spend vacation there, but I think it still could be interesting for photographers, especially those who are hunting for traces of soviet union, as you said dying town, portraits of hard-working people, etc.
