The Minister’s talking points
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Mr Minister, Dear Gela (Bezjuasjvili), Mr Ambassador, Dear friends,

• In preparing for your visit, I refreshed my knowledge of a famous – at least in Norway – traveller’s account: the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun travelled through the Caucasus towards the end of the nineteenth century and published his observations and reflections on that trip in 1903 in a book entitled I Æventyrland, or In Wonderland, which is the title of the English translation.
• Hamsun and his (first) wife (whom he rarely refers to and then only as his “travelling companion”) travelled by train from St Petersburg to Baku, passing through Moscow, which impressed him enormously, on their way. A large portion of the account is devoted to his experiences in the Caucasus, and Georgia in particular. Here are some of his observations:
• That the people of the Caucasus never sleep. Hamsun observed that there was always some kind of activity going on, whatever the time of day. [Have things changed, Gela? I doubt you would have been able to complete your gruelling schedule across the continent over the last few weeks if you had needed sleep.]
• Another observation: Tbilisi – or Tiflis as it was called then – had a fascinating Asian quarter, with “people from all over the world”. “Georgians, mountain people, Ural-Altaic tribes, all kinds of Tatars, Indo-Europeans such as Persians, Kurds, Armenians, people from Arabia in the south to Turkestan in the north, from Palestine to Tibet. And everything went peacefully, no one was in a hurry, the people were imbued with the calm of the Orient.” But, “the Caucasians, Kurds and Armenians carried weapons.”
• Hamsun and his wife returned to the Asian quarter time and time again, obviously intrigued. But he complained that the area was “surrounded by the modern American noise of a commercial center”. It seems he found the rest of Tbilisi not only too American, but also too European and too modern. Hamsun was a romantic, and he had some pretty strong racial and other prejudices, which I shall not share with you here. Suffice it to say that his complaint about Tbilisi’s American character in 1899 probably says more about Hamsun than about the Georgian capital at that time. Our great writer made no secret of his contempt for the cultural standards of the United States of America. [It would be interesting to go to Tbilisi to compare Hamsun’s description with the reality of today].
• The wine grapes of the region were the most delicious Hamsun had ever tasted. So superior were they that he felt “ashamed” of having earlier enjoyed French, German, Hungarian and Greek grapes. They literally melted in his mouth. [From what I have heard from the tasting of Georgian wine this afternoon, these compliments can also be applied to bottled Georgian grapes].
• Hamsun and his wife also visited Batumi, on the Black Sea coast. The voyage from Tbilisi, in a horse driven carriage, impressed him: “The vegetation is so luxurious, I have never seen anything like it.”
• Despite Hamsun’s obsession with the practical problems of his trip, his deep fascination with the Caucasus runs through the whole of his account. After realising that drinking beer in the heat has its disadvantages, he tried tea and then water. Not just any water, but water from the Kura River, and with excellent results. I quote again: “For once someone has drunk from the Kura River, he will always long to back to Caucasus.”
• In 2003, exactly one hundred years after Hamsun published the account of his travels in the Caucasus, an English translation appeared – in New York. It is a pleasure for me to present to you, Gela, a copy of this book, In Wonderland, translated by Sverre Lyngstad. I will leave it to you to decide whether any of its observations and reflections are still valid today.