The Real Tbilisi

The true story behind "Georgia After the Coma: How I Ended Up Speaking Georgian in Tbilisi." The story is pure fiction, the coma, the bilingual aphasia, the grandmother, the whole reverse-migration, none of it happened. But the city is real, my trip was real, and the strange way the premise came together is the most real thing about it. Here's where an invented coma actually came from.

A Bucket-List Country I Finally Reached

Georgia, the country, not the Bulldogs, sat on my list for years, through a couple of failed attempts and one pandemic that erased travel entirely. I finally got there by way of a long, happy Munich layover (beer, bratwurst, and an hour in the Bayern Munich store trying on merchandise that looked wrong on me, which is its own quiet kind of defeat).

Tbilisi more than made up for it, easily one of my top ten cities on Earth, a verdict I reached despite spending my first evening unable to cross the street. The big avenues have almost no crosswalks; you're meant to descend into an underpass and resurface on the far side, and until someone tells you that, you just stand on a curb in the capital of Georgia feeling like the dumbest person in the Caucasus.

Where the Story Actually Came From

Here's the part worth the whole piece.

I took a city tour with a wonderful Georgian woman, and between churches we got to talking about the language. She told me Georgian is considered one of the hardest in the world, its own alphabet, its own everything. That snagged on a memory: an Estonian friend who once told me most Estonians learn English because otherwise they can never leave Estonia. The language is the border.

I kept turning it over. Small countries, hard languages, Georgia, Estonia, Finland. If that were the only tongue you had, you'd be, quietly, trapped. Then it collided with something I'd heard weeks earlier on a podcast: the rare, real cases of people emerging from a coma speaking a language that isn't their native one. The famous one is Ben McMahon, an Australian who crashed his car, spent days in a coma, and woke up fluent in Mandarin, a language he'd studied in school but never mastered. His English came back slowly; in the meantime he worked in Chinese-language television.

Put those two real things together, a language that traps you, and a coma that hands you one you never chose, and you get my story: a woman who wakes speaking only Georgian and has no real option but to move to the one place on Earth it fits. I didn't invent the premise so much as collide two things I overheard. That's usually how it works.

What Actually Made It Into the Story

Two real Tbilisi places did the heavy lifting in the fiction. Fabrika, an old Soviet sewing factory turned into a sprawl of bars, cafés, and studios, heavy with international crowds and some of the best street art in the city, is the direct lineage of Budapest's ruin bars and Kraków's reclaimed industrial districts, and it's exactly where my narrator finds her expat friends, because it's exactly where you'd actually find them.

The Dry Bridge Flea Market, Tbilisi's open-air sprawl of Soviet medals, old cameras, and beautiful junk, went straight in too, and handed me a heavy silver ring I've worn every day since.

The Wine and the Soup

Georgia more or less invented wine, eight thousand years of it, fermented in buried clay qvevri, and the maddening part is how hard it is to drink outside Georgia. You almost have to go. So my first night I went straight to a wine bar and worked through whites and reds that rearranged my expectations; the standout was a bottle from Trilogy I still think about. I also dropped a glob of chimichurri on my good grey jeans, a stain that lasted months and that I maintain I can still see, like a small Georgian scar. Back at the hotel, the restaurant made kharcho, rich, beefy, thickened with walnuts, that I ordered every single night. If the wine is why you go, the kharcho is why I'd move.

Into the Caucasus

North of the city, the mountains do something the comedy never prepares you for. At Kazbegi, the fourteenth-century Gergeti Trinity Church stands alone at about 2,170 meters with Mount Kazbek looming behind it, and the wind is so violent I gave up on my hair, pulled my hood up, and accidentally took the most rugged-looking photo of my life. For the record: I was cold and slightly terrified. The terror was a theme. I'm afraid of heights, which made the cable car to the Mother of Georgia statue a quiet ordeal my guide watched with real concern, and which made the creaking adventure swing at the Soviet-era Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument, the one that flings you out over a cliff, an immediate and permanent no. A woman I'd met on the tour asked me to photograph her on it. I did, from solid ground, gratefully.

The Part That Didn't Make It

One real thing was simply too pleasant to be useful: a Georgian cooking class, where I learned that khinkali (the soup dumplings) and khachapuri (the cheese bread) are, frankly, not hard to make, you wrap, you twist, you pinch, which left me feeling like a chef under entirely false pretenses. "Man discovers dumplings are easy" is not a story. It is, however, exactly the kind of afternoon that ends with a grown man buying khachapuri socks.

Why I'd Go Back

Here's the irony I only noticed later. I built my narrator a cage: a language that leaves her no choice but to stay in Tbilisi forever. Then I spent the flight home realizing I'd fallen for the same city from the opposite direction, free to leave, and unable to stop wanting to return.

I'm not someone who repeats cities; the world is big and mostly unseen. Tbilisi is my exception. I still wear the ring, I can still see the stain, and I'd fly back tomorrow for the soup alone. My narrator ends her story telling her mother she's "already home." I gave her that line from the outside, as the one tourist who left, and kept looking back.