Batumi – Between Towers of Glass and Echoes of Empire

Batumi woke us not with the silence of the mountains, but with the restless murmur of a port city—ship horns in the distance, the clatter of early traffic, gulls hovering over the Black Sea. The air was thick, almost tropical, clinging to the skin like a second shirt. After the thin clarity of Mestia’s summits, this felt like another world entirely: lush, humid, brimming with commerce and chaos.

Batumi is Georgia’s second city, capital of Adjara, a place where geography and history have been wrestling for millennia. Its very name comes from the Greek bathýs limēn—“deep harbour”—and indeed the harbour has always been its destiny. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russians—each left their boot prints here, their forts, their taxes, their soldiers. Walking along Gogebashvili Street, I could almost hear the layered voices of this lineage: a Byzantine officer grumbling about supplies, an Ottoman trader reciting prayers, a Russian engineer sketching the blueprint of a pipeline.

We gave ourselves to the city slowly, following its seven-kilometre seafront boulevard, where monuments rise like eccentric punctuation marks against the horizon. The most poignant of them is the Ali & Nino statue: two giant figures of metal slats, a man and a woman, who move towards each other until they merge—only to separate again, endlessly. The piece embodies the tragic love story of Ali, a Muslim boy, and Nino, a Christian girl, drawn from Kurban Said’s novel. Watching them dissolve into each other and then drift apart, I felt something of the impossibility and persistence of love across borders, faiths, and histories.

Further along the promenade, humour breaks through the pathos. We stumbled upon a curious installation: flip-flops balanced precariously on eggs. It looked like a surrealist joke left behind by some whimsical god of beach culture—half absurd, half profound. Lorena laughed aloud, the kind of laughter that lightens fatigue, and we stood photographing it as though the meaning might reveal itself later.

The idea for the day had been simple: to do nothing, to surrender to relaxation, and let the beach consume us. And so, for a while, we did exactly that. We swam in the Black Sea, the water warmer than expected, the horizon smeared with container ships and light. Floating on my back, I thought of how many centuries of traders, soldiers, and wanderers had arrived here, and how the sea itself carried all their traces.

But we are not wired for idleness. By afternoon, restlessness won, and we found ourselves trekking in the Batumi Botanical Garden, where paths thread improbably between sea and mountains. It is a place of improbable juxtapositions: eucalyptus beside magnolia, bamboo beside pine, palms framed by snow peaks in the distance. Sweat and salt mingled on my skin, and with each ascent the city below grew smaller, replaced by birdsong and the slow percussion of cicadas. Lorena walked ahead, her pace light, as though the garden itself was leading her into its secrets.

By evening, hunger returned, sharp and unnegotiable. Near our hotel, tucked in the old city’s narrow lanes, we found the Acharuli Khachapuri House. There, steaming and golden, came Batumi’s most famous dish: the Adjarian khachapuri. A bread boat cradling molten cheese, butter, and an egg yolk—its shape echoing the Black Sea’s waves, its sunlit centre evoking the solar heart of the region. We tore it apart with our fingers, the cheese stretching, our hands greasy and happy. It was messy, decadent, and utterly right.

Later, in the Hotel Elegant Garden, with its magnolia courtyard and echoes of another era, we rested at last. The city hummed outside—neon, ferris wheels, casinos—but we stayed inside the thick walls, hearing only the cicadas and our own exhaustion.

That night, before sleep, Lorena said: “Strange city—half empire, half amusement park, and somewhere in between, something we can’t name.” I thought of Ali and Nino, always moving together, always apart, and of us—two travellers drifting through Georgia, trying to hold the fragments of history, sea, and mountain in a single embrace.