Seasonal life in the remote villages strung through valleys close to Turkey’s border with Georgia has changed little since the days a 14th-century Castilian diplomat pondered that ‘here is so rocky and steep that burdened horses cannot travel’. The old Ottoman records described this southern spine of the Black Sea as ‘land betwixt river and cloud’. When the crocuses bloom overnight, summer has ended and the clusters of wooden houses and stilted barns are embalmed in an eiderdown of snow. Shut off from the outside world for many months of the year, the local culture has remained intact.
We drive along a river lined with alder trees and wild roses, passing under a Medieval stone arch built by Queen Tamar of Georgia and dipping into an ancient cemetery, its stones topped with carved Ottoman turbans. A wooden building with a diminutive minaret is our first sighting of one of several uniquely hand-painted mosques. Pushing open the weathered narrow door, with its motifs of entwined daisies and crown leaves, and blinking in the dim light, is to stumble into a symbolic realm. From the richly carved minbar to the domed ceiling, a profusion of colours and pattern evokes the mountain monasteries of Tibet or Bhutan, only the invocations to Allah intoning its purpose.
Hailing down a passing local wielding a scythe proves serendipitous as it turns out that he is, in fact, the local imam in pastoral guise. Sitting cross-legged on a garnet-coloured carpet, Imam Ismail speaks of the mosque, Imeri Camlii, being moved from its more remote location into the heart of the village in the 1850s. No mean feat in this landscape and illustrative of the local piety and, perhaps even more, desire for a tangible pulse for the community. With many of the menfolk strewn across the empire in the 19th century, every town in Russia had a Turkish bakery; the mosques would have been places of welcome chatter and gathering for the women and children living lives so removed from any metropolis. ‘Nothing has changed within these walls,’ he tells me. ‘The villagers come for prayer, yes, but also for succour from isolation, these tiny mosques are our beating hearts still, like lighthouses in the pitch darkness of the valleys in winter.’
Built between five and six centuries ago, it features folk-like pigments and intaglio designs that were inspired by the flora of the surrounding Artvin valleys. Paint made of madder colours every surface. A turquoise qubba, or dome, flowing into a risen sun, which feels almost Japanese, draws the eye across to the carved gallery, swirling with spirals and swirls below spindle balustrades in shades of oat, fern green, cerulean and teal. Awaiting the namaaz prostrations, the mihrab niche striped with onyx and turquoise is redolent of a Circassian tent. Sailing up the side of the minbar is the first ship we see; a much-repeated carving in the valley mosque, it depicts both the Arc of Nuh and nods to the thriving riverine life in these parts.
Further along the valley, Maral Camii is a sea of blues, like an Art Deco swimming pool imagined by Ludolf Liberts. Built in 1919, it has geometric motifs and clean lines in striking contrast to other mosques in the valley. The interior has been kept mercifully spare, allowing the layered blues to envelop the visitor. Next to the entrance, a framed declaration in Russian with an imperial eagle is a jarringly pompous remnant of a time when the Tsarist Empire stretched down even to these isolated glens.
At the timber-minareted Düzköy Camii in nearby Borcka Artvin, richly patterned doors open on to a ligneous Eden of carving, every surface peeling with patina and faded colours. Here, mellowed with age, earthy elements are woven into the sacred. The minbar is a swell of waves, while the gallery is strewn with stars and Ottoman tulips (symbols of the divine in Islamic tradition) and daisies dance across the pulpit. Islamic symbolism in mosques, from this far-flung pavilion to Paolo Portoghesi’s Postmodernist Mosque of Rome, deftly engages the senses, to convey that which is impossible to depict; the universe, or prisms of God Himself, distilled into a petal or a hue of colour.
The spell splinters into the mountain sunlight as we follow another imam to drink strong coffee, made on a gas canister covered in Iznik motifs. As we sit cross-legged under a waterside pavilion next to his mosque, he speaks of the ancient trading up the river that flows past the mosque, depictions of which dance across the wooden panelling inside the sanctuary. He gently bestows on us a traditional blessing to return to this lofty frontier – one that I hope may be prophetic.
