Tsalka and the Tsalka Reservoir

Tsalka is a small town on the high, windswept Tsalka plateau in the west of Kvemo Kartli, about 60 km south-west of Tbilisi as the crow flies and around 90 km by road. Its landscape is unlike anything else near the capital: open grassland, dark volcanic rock, huge skies and a large reservoir close to the town. Most visitors come for Dashbashi Canyon and its glass bridge, 3 km away, but the town and its villages deserve a slower look for their unusual history, written in their churches, cemeteries and the languages you hear in the street.

Before 1990 the Tsalka district had about 55,000 inhabitants, more than 90 percent of them Greeks, and 44 of its 49 villages were Greek; most families have since emigrated to Greece. Armenians now form a large share of the population, and between 1997 and 2006 several thousand Georgians from Svaneti whose homes were hit by landslides were resettled here. The town has a Greek Orthodox church, and the reservoir shore is a quiet place for a walk on a summer evening.

The Tsalka plateau is part of historic Trialeti. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829, Greek families from eastern Anatolia, many of them Turkish-speaking, settled its villages, and Greek remained the dominant community for over 150 years. Older layers survive too: the church of St George in Dashbashi dates from the 10th–11th centuries, and the ruined Kldekari fortress nearby goes back to the 9th century. Large-scale emigration to Greece after 1990 emptied many villages.