Let’s get started. Tell me about your first book, Thomas Goltz’s Georgia Diary.

That’s a real war correspondent’s chronicle of the war in the early 90s ,when Georgia lost Abkhazia, the republic that later, in 2008, finally seceded formally and was recognised by Russia. But, in reality, Georgia had lost it already in the war in 1992-3 and, of course, there was at that time chaos both in Georgia and in Russia. I was in Georgia and Russia more or less at the time it happened – but I had no chance to go to Abkhazia, unfortunately.

Thomas Goltz was there, though, and he has written a fantastic chronicle of the events that really illustrates the fact that this was a tough war. He is pretty even-handed, and that’s what’s interesting; he states clearly that the Georgians tried to conquer Abkhazia, which is awkward in a way because Abkhazia was an autonomous republic inside Georgia, but after the fall of the Soviet Union everything was in chaos and Abkhazia wanted some kind of independence. So the Georgians went in there, but it wasn’t the real Georgian army. Goltz describes it as plunderers and convicts released from prison, and some honest people – a real mixture. When they went into Abkhazia they behaved very, very cruelly – like thieves, killers, murderers. That is true, but it’s also true that Abkhazia was supported by lots of funny Russian forces from the Northern Caucasus, people who said they were going to form a new Caucasian state. It was all very chaotic, and Goltz gives a perfect picture and succeeds in not being partisan. 

Tell me about the Peter Nasmyth book. I don’t know this one.

This is quite a different type of book. It’s a description of the land and the people of Georgia – not so much about the conflicts, but about the different parts of Georgia, their fantastic food and how they use grapes in funny ways that we don’t do in our part of the world.

How do they use grapes in funny ways?

They make a kind of sausage from grapes. Well, it looks like a sausage, but it doesn’t taste at all like a sausage. I don’t know really how they manage to do it. They are pretty long sausages, and grapes are not very long. This is the kind of thing he talks about in the book. But apart from the well-known provinces that have now seceded, like Abkhazia, he also tells about the special languages and people. There is a large Armenian minority, a large Azerbaijani minority and you also have, inside Georgia away from the borders, peoples who speak other kinds of languages or dialects, like the Mingrelian people over on the west coast by the Black Sea.

The first president of independent Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, came from that province. He fought the civil war and later committed suicide. He was a fanatic. He said, for instance, that the Georgian language is the mother of all languages and all other languages are developed from Georgian. The Georgian language even has its own script. There is no language that has those letters – not Russian or even Armenian.

There’s another province called Svaneti up in the north where they have very specific systems for agriculture that nobody uses in any other part of the world. He gives a feeling for the country in a way that no other book does. It’s a very agricultural country still. Most people still live rather primitively, and that is not good from a purely economic point of view, but it’s very charming and the food is wonderful.

What’s your favourite Georgian food?

They have a kind of smorgasbord like we have in Scandinavia with lots of small dishes, but they are completely different dishes to ours, of course. There is some kind of big mushrooms that they cook and fry in a special way with some spices and I always take a lot of them. It’s a specific mushroom to Georgia. And khachapuri of course [Georgian bread stuffed with melted cheese] – but you get fed up with that after a time.

I would never get fed up!

It’s like a hot dog or a kebab: it’s very common, and you get it too often. 

Tell me about Thomas de Waal’s book, The Caucasus.

He’s a good journalist too. Not the same as Goltz – perhaps more analytical. He’s been at it a long time around the Caucasus, and doing a newsletter that still appears on the web every week about Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.