“Ah, as long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last but when the piles of gold begin to grow… that’s when the trouble starts.” –The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
We walk into Kazreti town.
Houses of stone. Tin roofs. Narrow lanes of black mud. Cracked and ugly apartment blocks of Soviet vintage. “Three-five-nines,” explains my walking guide, Dima Bit-Suleiman. “Under the Russians, you lived in buildings with a standardized number of floors. Three. Five. Nine.”
It is hard to believe: Here is the El Dorado—the Klondike, the pot of gold, the sparkling treasure—of the Republic of Georgia.
Even the light is gold in the mining region of southern Georgia.
Lela Mepharishvili
Kazreti is a company town. A Russian gold mining conglomerate, RMG, extracts a fortune in gold from its scarred hillsides. It employs 3,000 people. It provides 85 percent of the local government budget. It deposits $300 million a year in revenues into Georgia’s national bank account. For years, RMG has been battling in the courts to scrape away a small, grassy knoll outside the town. Gold lies under the hill. But this trivial bump—this knot called Sakdrisi—also holds the remnants of what many scientists call the oldest known gold mine in the world, a Bronze Age archaeological site that dates back 5,400 years. Or held. In December, after protests, after infinite controversy, the company dynamited the hill. Gold eats everything. Even its own grandparents.
The allure of gold has an immensely old history in the Caucasus.
Where exactly the dark magic of metallurgy actually began is still debated—either in the Near East or in the Balkans. But because of its rich mineral resources, and because it straddles an ancient crossroads of trade, this human art form, the making of jewelry, of glittering finery, reached a stunning degree of beauty and sophistication in what is today modern Georgia.
Sakdrisi hill was a primal source for that achievement.
The Kura-Araxes miners worked 150 feet underground, following the richest veins of gold. They toiled slowly, laboriously, at tremendous expense of time and energy. For 600 years, between 3,400 B.C. and 2,800 B.C., they bored into bedrock with stone chisels and antler picks. Gold from Sakdrisi probably lies buried within the mound tombs of prehistoric chieftans all across the Caucasus. Gold does this. At the time, in the early Bronze Age, an older human world of small, rural settlements was slowly coalescing into a epochal experiment: into towns, into cities, into history’s first states. How to spur this revolution? How to symbolize who leads and who follows? How to show political power? How to demonstrate the might of new gods? Social hierarchy? A primal answer: gold.
Spoil from the gold mining operation scars the hillside around Kazreti.
Lela Mepharishvili
“I like the past as much as anyone else,” says Nodar Giorgadze, 56, a gravelly-voiced truck driver for the mine in Kazreti. “The past is important. But our young people will leave Georgia to work in Europe if there are no jobs here. They already have left the rest of Georgia. You can’t eat history.”
Nodar Giorgadze, a truck driver with the mining company, values history—as long as there are jobs.
Lela Mepharishvili
I once worked in a gold mine. I was 18. The place: a drab western Australian town much like Kazreti. My task: scrub gigantic steel vats crusted in sodium cyanide, a toxin used to leach gold from ore. Gold mining is a young person’s job—the job of someone who still believes he will live forever.
I am struck, in Kazreti, by the youthful faces of the miners. Hairless chins. Smooth, pasty faces. Post-adolescent grins. They hunch in their muddy gumboots at one of the two cafes, smoking, drinking. The walls of one café glow hallucinogenic pink. Being inside a womb must be like this.
The scientific literature describes Sakdrisi in dense, predictably technical language. But this is what Bit-Suleiman tells me: Its tunnels, old beyond imagining, drilling down to the bedrock of civilization, were incredibly small. The first gold miners may have been children.
