Dar es Salaam , Tanzania , July, 31st, 2005
In Memory of Zaal Kikodze

We met Zaal Kikodze in the final stage of the elaboration of our Georgia Outdoor Guide Book "Under Eagles' Wings". He liked our text in the advert to the book, and consequently was interested to put an advert of Erbotravel, to which he was a mountain guide partner. We soon would be quite proud of this compliment, as we realized that Zaal was not too easy to be pleased when it came to words on mountains, mountain people and mountaineering - he simply was too knowledgeable and too experienced to go with anything superficial or incorrect.

He was like a walking encyclopaedia, and when we had the honour to be invited into his family's house in a little side street high above Rustaveli in Tbilisi, we had a feeling to enter something like a museum, an incredibly rich collection of items, books, maps and photos devoted to the mountains. Yet it was a living museum, constantly enriched by new findings and visitors, in and outgoing contacts, and ideas developed around the big old table with excellent food prepared by Zaal and his brother themselves, and a glass of wine from their family estate in Kakheti.

One night Zaal showed us the photographs he took on a funeral of a young man in Khevsureti. Zaal was a gifted photographer and his photos were not only superb from a technically point of view. Thanks to the trust he had with mountain people, he documented moments and traditions no one else would ever have been allowed to do so, and he created a true ethnographical treasure in pictures. The Khevsuretian family and neighbouring villagers sent the horse of the late person into a race with other village horses, symbolically exercising and thus protecting the journey of its late master to heaven. The photos were fantastic.

It was our plan to again do part of the Classic Summer Haute Route along the Georgian-Russian border when next time we visited the Caucasus , this time in the company of Zaal. There is no more time to do so. With Zaal we have lost a great friend on the flanks of Ushba. True to character, Zaal had personally helped save lives on this same mountain over the years; where now help for him came too late. All we can do is to wish him a good horse that will carry him to a place from where he has a good view over the mountains, the people that miss him in Georgia and all over the world.

Katharina Haeberli
Andrew Harker