Skhvitori — Akaki Tsereteli House-Museum

Skhvitori is the village where Akaki Tsereteli was born on 9 June 1840. His father was Prince Rostom Tsereteli; his mother Ekaterine descended from Solomon I, king of Imereti. The family house and the park around it are now a house-museum.

One detail of his childhood explains much of the life that followed. By an old Imeretian custom he was sent as an infant to be brought up by a peasant family in the village of Savane. It gave him a knowledge of village life that no other nobleman of his generation had, and it shows in the plain register of his verse.

After that came the Kutaisi classical gymnasium and, in 1863, the Faculty of Oriental Languages at the University of St Petersburg. With Ilia Chavchavadze he stood at the head of the generation that shaped the Georgian national movement in the second half of the 19th century. He wrote hundreds of poems, narrative works, satires and memoirs; the words of Suliko, long since absorbed into folk singing, are his.

A less familiar fact: it was Tsereteli who in 1879 publicised the industrial value of the manganese at Chiatura. The mining town forty kilometres away effectively begins here.

The museum holds the wooden Imeretian house with its balcony, furniture, manuscripts, photographs and personal belongings. The park is large and shaded, with a view down the valley. The display is modest and mostly in Georgian — come if the Georgian 19th century interests you, or if you are going to Sachkhere anyway.

Akaki's place in Georgian culture is hard to see from outside. With Ilia Chavchavadze he was a public figure first and a writer second: he lectured, edited, travelled the provinces and read his verse aloud to whoever gathered. His funeral in 1915 turned into a national demonstration. The modest house at Skhvitori is where that career is anchored, and Georgian school groups still come here every spring.