Principal Club at Tiflis
Wherever you see a group of dark crimson roofs you may know that they cover Russian soldiers, for that is the colour of their barracks, selected, a cynical friend remarked, by accident and not by design—although it is very appropriate to the business upon which the garrisons are engaged. The Armenians paint their roofs a copper green or silver gilt, similar to the steeples on their churches, which are ugly-looking cylinders with tin caps shaped like a cartridge, although the cross that springs from the top of each sanctifies it. They are in striking contrast with the Byzantine domes of the orthodox Greek church. There are two sects, the Russian and the Georgian, who disagree more from racial than from theological incompatibility. The Greek domes are of the shape of an inverted turnip and are painted blue, which adds to the picturesqueness of the scene.
You can see several mosques patronized by the Persian Mohammedans, but they are shabby, dirty places, without the slightest attractive feature, and very poor places for any respectable person to pray in. Judging from their houses of worship, the Persians have not much respect for their own religion, although they look thoughtful and earnest and sincere, and pray aloud like the Pharisees of the Bible, regardless of others, and the sounds from a mosque are often like a hubbub.
We went into a mosque in the tailors’ quarter one morning and saw an old Persian priest with whiskers dyed a vivid scarlet. I asked Naskidoff, our dragoman, why the old man made himself look so ridiculous, and he explained that it is the fashion—that is all. As the priest is the only man in Tiflis I had seen so decorated, he must be introducing the style and is not receiving much encouragement.
There are several other cities in the Caucasus, but none of any importance, and Tiflis, being the political capital, with a viceroy; the military headquarters, with a force of 135,000 men; and the centre of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, there is much beside commercial business and agriculture to draw the people there. The city is divided almost equally by the river Kur, a swift, muddy stream about the colour of strong coffee, which is confined to a narrow cañon, with steep walls of stone, where it dashes through the town. There is a great waste of manufacturing power, which might be profitably utilized, but, with the exception of some curious floating flour mills, I did not see any mechanical industries.
These flour mills are built of wood, and at first glance look like bath houses. Each of them has a big water wheel, which turns the stones. The houses are supported on the water by a sort of catamaran, a wide float being underneath the mill and a narrow one on the other side of the power wheel. They are anchored near the banks, and their position can be shifted according to the will of the owner. Usually each of them has a little warehouse barge attached, where the raw material and the finished product are stored, and if you will watch you can see men going back and forth between the sawmill ship and the shore carrying bags upon their backs.
At the eastern end of the town is a narrow pass between two rocky hills, which seems to have been cut by the water. The walls are precipitous—one hundred feet or more above the river. On one side the bluff is crowned by a citadel strongly fortified. It commands the entire city. A few shells from one of the guns could utterly destroy both the business and the residence sections. Within these fortifications is a repulsive looking prison, said to be crowded with political offenders. Strangers are not invited to visit the place, and they are likely to make themselves unpopular by discussing it.
The Russian section is new and modern, with wide, clean streets, good sidewalks, an opera house, a theatre, a club, and a military museum or “Temple of Glory,” as they call it. There trophies won by Russian arms, battle flags, portraits and relics of military heroes and other interesting mementoes, have been collected, with several battle pictures and other representations of war. One of the pictures, painted on a mammoth canvas, represents the entrance of the Russian army into Tiflis in 1808, when the king of Georgia asked Alexander I to come down and protect him against the Persians; another represents a treaty being negotiated in a forest between a native chief and a Russian general; but the most interesting of all is a relief map of the Caucasus which shows you at a glance the extraordinary configuration of this part of the earth. Bronze tablets inscribed with records of all the battles fought by the Russian soldiers in the Caucasus from 1567 to 1878 have been embedded in panels in the outer walls of the museum, which are of great historical value. They give the number of men engaged and the casualties.
The principal street of the town is called Golovinski Prospekt, in imitation of the Nevsky Prospekt of St. Petersburg, and it is a fashionable promenade.