Prometheus underground

The Prometheus Cave near Kutaisi was only discovered in 1984, and hasn’t been open to visitors very long. I suppose it took the authorities a wee while to pimp that cave, since although it is very pretty, it definitely doesn’t go for a naturalistic look. Legend has it that Prometheus, tortured by the gods for bringing fire to mankind, was imprisoned here, or nearby, or confusingly, on Mt Kazbek, a four-hour drive away near the Russian border. Maybe he’s the inspiration for the trippy lighting scheme inside the caves. I think we can safely say he wasn’t imprisoned anywhere, but the scale and variety of the stalagmites and tites etc on display don’t really need a legend to make them something special.

The cave visit takes about an hour, made up of a 1060 meter walk through the cave followed by a small boat trip. Tours are offered in Georgian, English and Russian, which would have been great except it turned out they combined the tour for English speakers (about half a dozen of us) with Russian speakers (a good 60 or so of them). Yes, we had to hurry a bit to keep up with the guide, but they basically treated it as though it was a race to get through the place as fast as possible and woe betide you if you stop to take a photo on the way. One woman, instead of walking around me (which there was room to do) stood behind me shouting “idyotye! idyotye!” (Russian for go! go! - surely mere coincidence that it sounds a lot like you’re being called an idiot). It reminded me of when I visited Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow. The rule there is no stopping - you just walk around his body in a circle and out. I tried to get around this by walking extra slowly but the woman behind me there yelled idyotye at me too. Whatever happened to stopping to smell the roses/examine crusty old corpses? I think I still managed to get some cool shots though, helped out by that psychedelic lighting. (#nofilter)

A lot of the cave looked like it wanted to eat me