Photography Series. Tskaltubo – Paradise Lost

The abandoned house shuddered on the hill, wishing the morning light would come all the sooner to warm its weary walls.

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Tskaltubo is a spa resort in west-central Georgia. It was especially popular in the Soviet era, but since 1993 many of the sanatorium complexes have been devoted to housing some 9000 refugees agter the ethnic conflict in Abkhazia. They thought it was just a temporary but then it continiued for 26 years.

An old bath in the central park of Tskaltubo, which really looks like a shack.

The streets are almost empty, even you can see few cars in the streets. When you enter the main park in the centre of the city you can feel that there are two seasons mixed: autumn (because you can see many yellow leaves falling down) and summer, but trust me temperature is already quite high at the end of June.

I have always wanted to visit this place because it’s interesting to see the contrast of time, the time which after losing can’t be found again. Recently it has started to sell these buildings and make hotels inside these rooms. So soon it will be hard to get inside and it will be harder to find them as they look today, cause everyone wants to give a new life to a building so they modernise them and change the look at all.

Old Judo house with an amazing glass floor

Some of these sanatoriums were settled by the people 26 years ago, mostly with refugees from Abkhazia, so they still give a little bit of sparkle to these buildings. When you enter inside you can see hundreds of people living together, with the shared bathroom, shared happiness and sorrow, know each other and are just like one family. But you can feel from the atmosphere that they are not happy at all and don’t have any kinds of sentiments with the place where they were forced to live. When we entered inside we saw children in the pool had some fun and inspite of the bitter past of these people I felt freedom and calmness in that moment. At least they live with the hope of future, that they will be back to their houses soon.

Seeing this places in this condition, you feel sadness, but at the same time it’s fascinating to see how some things that used to belong to people are slowly being reclaimed by nature again. That’s just the natural circle of life and existence. This gigantic buildings makes you to feel yourself as a small person, who analyzes that you can’t escape the time.

A window to the Paradise

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