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My Georgian adventures with Rapsodia. From Kamchia to Kutaisi.

This story begins in 1999 with getting acquainted to one of the most fascinating people in my life, Moldovan choir conductor from Chisinau, Natalia Barabanscicova. Years passed, we’ve been travelling together and making a lot of great, inspiring, sometimes very difficult cultural projects, supporting one another in efforts, and now time has come to go in a small, 21-people bus from Bulgarian Kamchia near Varna (where we attended the most extraordinary multicultural festival I know), through Istanbul, and the whole Turkey on the way around the Black Sea, to my beloved Georgia.

Natalia with her “Rapsodia” vocal ensemble has planned the route further, through Russian North Osetia, Rostov-na-Donu, Ukrainian Charkov (the way through Crimea or Donbas is not possible because of political reasons), Odessa and back to Chisinau. We had to use variant B, because we started to make Russian visas too late and we finally didn’t get it. Thus, we planned to fly home from Georgia in due time.

The “Together in XXI century” festival deserves its own story, this one will be just about the journey after it. We left wonderful Kamchia and made towards Istanbul, with the awareness, that we don’t have an overnight there, and the long, over 1700 km journey is before us.

Wonders started at Bulgarian-Turkish border. I crossed this border year before in opposite direction and it wasn’t anything worth remembering. This time the story was similar: rude Turkish border guard with no language but Turkish, unable to explain what we shall do with our bus, chaos and long waiting for our passports (people with passports from Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Poland travelling together in one small minibus must have been very supicious to him).

An hour later, in the lazy atmosphere Masha, one of our companions, spotted a strange car, all decorated with beautiful, blue-violet paintings. After a short while a talk begun with the lady inside: it turned out that she’s been also waiting for her friends, they are all Americans who hired a car in Germany and are in their way from some Euopean countries through Turkey, Georgia, Azerbeidjhan, Kazakhstan and Mongolia to Russian Ulan-Ude with their project “Art of migration”. We quickly found a common language, as their mission was somehow similar to ours: in the shortest way it can be described as “make peace, not war”. We exchanged contacts and gifted our CD’s with choral music from Europe and Armenia. Rapsodia sang Moldovan piece, and we were ready to say goodbye to one another, while Natalia suddenly asked: “Maybe you could help us find the overnight in Istanbul?” And you know what? They did it. With a remote help of their friends from Turkey and USA they found us a hostel who agreed to accept group of 21 people for 200 dollars for one night with breakfast. Moreover — their friends took care about us and were sending us detailed hints how we should have got there, because the hostel turned out to be placed in Sultanahmet, the oldest quarter of Istanbul, where all main historic monuments of this ancient city are placed. For me it was the first great feeling in this journey, that world is full of wonderful people who are eager to help strangers.

If you want to know the whole story, go to the link below. Enjoy your reading!

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2018-08-21 · Justyna Dziuma

Natalia, bolshoe spasibo za perevod!

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