Makhachkala: 2&3

Our second day started off with more running errands around Makhachkala, picking up equipment and trying to avoid the cavalcade that escorts the President of Dagestan to his office everyday, and in the process stoping the traffic along the central road of the city for half an hour. It is difficult to gauge the reality of threats to safety in a place that is on the red list of the Foreign Office website, but with Shamil and Gennady as hosts the question rarely poses itself. It is the first place I’ve ever been to that people have never (or say they have never) met a foreigner. At first Alex and I thought that people saying they were happy to meet ‘real’ Englishmen was a joke at our expense, but it turns out that we are indeed the stuff of BBC exports to Russia. The recent adaptation of War and Peace made it here which was a nice point of, if not conversation, then at least acknowledgement of shared TV experience. It was unclear whether they thought Alex or I should play Prince André or Pierre in a hypothetical Dagestani adaptation.

One of the questions that I haven’t yet satisfactorily answered is the relationship with Dagestan’s Communist past. Unlike Moscow, where most of the Soviet urban paraphernalia has been removed to one park in the outskirts, there are a number of statues of Communist era figures still erect – including a picture of Stalin in a bread shop. The day before I arrived, the 9th of May, is Russia’s Victory in Europe day and the evidence of the commemorations were very strongly in evidence in both Moscow and Makhachkala. There is a strong sense that the military might of Soviet Russia remains a hugely important source of national pride.

Back at the Museum, the scanning has been following the usual routine of a sense of crisis whilst the exact settings for the surface are calculated, followed by the extreme relief of when the results start to come together. Reporting on the process of taking hundreds of photographs of a carved door is of fairly specialised interest, so I can focus on lunch and dinner. Gennady took Eva and I to sample one of the most famous Dagestani delicacies: Chudu (phonetically spelt). This dish is somewhere in between a crepe and a pizza, a thin circular doughy pastry that is fried with a number of different fillings in the middle (a minced lamb, a puffy cheese and a spinach variety were all sampled) and a ground powder of toasted rye seeds on top. Its hot and greasy and is eaten rolled up. The soup that preceded it was a sorrel borsch that the waitress was convinced I needed in a full rather than half portion as I look so thin… Hopefully this is still the case at the end of the trip, though it seems increasingly unlikely!

We didn’t visit Ratatouille and Friends but I enjoyed imagining the story that led to its being named. Instead we had dinner at another Dagestani restaurant, this time seated within a ‘Kabinka’ – a little cabin within the restaurant that we all piled into for more chudu followed by a slightly more intimidating looking dish. Rectangular bars of dumpling topped with beef sausages and mutton and washed down with cognac, the picture says all.

This post having unintentionally becoming dedicated to our culinary experiences, I’m going to skip the majority of the events of day 3 (more mechanical taking of photographs) to tonight’s dinner, at an enormous Georgian restaurant serving Hachapuri (again, phonetically interpreted spelling) another doughy circle, but this time topped with cheese and a fried egg.  Tomorrow is the last day (for now) in MK. then on to the mountains!

Makhachkala: 1

 

The following records of my month in Dagestan will be very much limited to personal impressions. I’m ashamed to admit that until six months ago I had no idea that such a place even existed, an absence of knowledge that seems to be shared by the majority of people in England – or, at least those I told of my trip. Having been here for two days I am still struggling to establish the country on the scale of cultural difference. So, it seems best to start with the basics. I am here working on a project organised between the company I work for, Factum Arte (or, in its cultural heritage form: Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation) and the Peri Foundation, a Russian centre for cultural heritage that has a particular focus on promoting the arts of Dagestan. From Factum, the current team consists of myself, Alex Peck and Eva Rosenthal (our Russian speaker and the organiser of the project), and from the Peri Foundation, Svetlana Nikiforova. From Dagestan, we are working with two photographers, Shamil Gadzhidadaev and Gennady Viktorov, both of whom spent the previous month at Factum’s headquarters in Madrid familiarising themselves with Factum’s approach to 3D scanning.

Arriving after a long night of travel in the airport of Makhachkala, the regional capital, we were met by the very reassuring sight of Shamil with the equally reassuring sight of his top of the range Land Rover (it makes a lot of sense in a place where a two lane crossroads has no traffic lights – a knot that somehow works itself out). Our Hotel – the Hotel Djami (appropriately pronounced ‘Jammy’) is next to an old KGB compound which I’ve been advised to not photograph, but it looks like what it is: half a kilometre perimeter of layered green corrugated iron, 100m high. In contrast, the Djami compound has much that is reminiscent of Teletubby land about it, with enormous plastic flowers and psychedelic plastic cows wandering around the grounds and leading onto a fenced in stretch of the Caspian Sea.

Having arrived we soon set out for the Museum of Art and Architecture of Makhachkala, the only pre-20^th century building that I have seen so far, and were met by the at-first intimidating matriarchy who run it. Thankfully, they soon melted into being incredibly friendly and accommodating. Apparently smiling in the street at strangers isn’t the done thing as the assumption is that you are stupid, but as we’ve experienced it doesn’t take long for friends to be made once introductions have been made.

Our objective in the Museum is the 3D scanning, using photogrammetry, of four carved doors that had once hung in the Mosque of Kala-Koreysh, the main site that our project is focusing on that is located a few hours south of Makhachkala in the mountains. The doors, as with the whole Museum’s collection, are in storage as the entire place is being renovated. The Museum is located near the Caspian in an area that feels like a destination for Makhachkalans, a jolly park with a welcoming statue of Lenin with bird-shit on his head and ‘Green-Sleeves’ being piped through a speaker. Apparently the last couple of years have seen the opening up of more and more internationally conscious restaurants, with Burgers and Sushi (the instinct is to say ‘not together’, but I’m not so sure) on offer. Also near the park is a sobering memorial of the Dagestanis who bravely went out and lost their lives helping in the Chernobyl disaster, but the children who played on it didn’t seem put-off.

Opposite the museum we are working in is another of traditional crafts that we had a flying visit around after making some initial tests on the doors. In it we saw in the flesh a taster of some of the extraordinary objects that we had previously only seen in the format of tantalising-but-dreary black and white pixel images in the handful of books on Dagestani arts and crafts. Each of the rooms was looked after by a series of proud ladies who competitively ushered us inside to admire the treasures inside: carpets, silverware and woodcarving.

Other errands called and we rushed on to Shamil’s brother’s flat to trial the processing computer, eat a delicious Dagestani spin on chicken with gratin-dauphinoise, courtesy of Shamil’s brother’s wife, and play with Sari, Shamil’s brother’s daughter, probably the most cheerful two-and-a-half year olds I’ve ever met. Our first day finished back near the museum with drinks above the Caspian and meeting some more of Shamil and Gennady’s circle – two of whom run a Dagestani restaurant in Moscow and are starting up a gastronomic tour of the region. After a long day, I somehow feel like I know less about the place that, until a few months ago, I knew nothing about.