Tsalka Reservoir

Tsalka reservoir is a place where the horizon sits further away than you expect in Georgia. The Trialeti plateau lies at 1,500 metres, almost treeless and open grassland — closer in feel to Javakheti than to the plains of Kvemo Kartli. A dam built on the Ktsia river in 1946 put a large, windy sheet of water across it.

The reservoir also carries archaeological value, and archaeological loss. It was immediately before and during its construction that the Trialeti kurgans were excavated: Middle Bronze Age burial mounds of the second millennium BC, which produced gold and silver vessels of exceptional quality. The famous Trialeti silver goblet is now in the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. Some of the mounds ended up under water.

The villages are a second layer. In the 19th century Pontic Greeks and Armenians were settled here, and the flat-roofed stone houses are theirs. In the 1990s most of the Greek population left for Greece and the villages half emptied. Later, Svans and Adjarians displaced by landslides in their own regions were resettled here. The result is villages where Greek gravestones and Svan surnames stand side by side.

Practically: this is not a swimming lake. The water is cold, the shore muddy and infrastructure almost nonexistent. It is worth the drive for the landscape, for fishing, and for the sensation of being in a completely different country ninety minutes from Tbilisi.