Baghdati — Mayakovsky House-Museum

The loudest poet of the Russian avant-garde was born in an Imeretian village. Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Baghdati on 19 July 1893, where his father worked as a forester. The family spoke Russian at home, but the boy spoke Georgian in the street and at school. He later wrote: "I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. My mother tongue is Georgian."

In 1906 his father died suddenly of blood poisoning and the family moved to Moscow. From there begins the biography that is in the textbooks: Futurism, the 1913 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A Cloud in Trousers, the revolutionary posters, the theatre, and his suicide in 1930.

The town has its own story. The name Baghdati has a Persian root meaning "God-given". In 1940 it was renamed Mayakovsky, and it kept that name until 1991, when the historical form was restored.

The museum was set up in the Soviet period. It is the wooden house with its balcony, holding the interiors of the poet's childhood, family photographs, first editions, avant-garde posters and personal belongings. The display is small but well chosen, and it covers the part of his life that Russian museums tend to skip: the Georgian childhood.

Baghdati itself is a town of about three thousand people on the Khanistsqali at the edge of the Ajameti forest. This is wine country, and the road up to Sairme starts here, so the museum fits neatly into a day's route.

If you are making a day of this corner, Baghdati works as the hinge. North of the town is the Ajameti oak forest; south, the road climbs thirty kilometres up a wooded gorge to the mineral springs at Sairme; west lie Vani and its excavations. The town itself has a market, a couple of cafes around the square and exactly the ordinary provincial calm that Mayakovsky spent his life shouting at.