Ajara

A greenhouse. A hummingbird city. A city of palm trees in tubs. A city of malaria and gentle Japanese hills. A city resembling the European quarter in any colonial country, ringing with mosquitoes in the summer and offering fresh tangerines in December. Osip Mandelstam, describing Batumi, the seaside capital of Ajara in his book, Mensheviks in Georgia, published a few years after Menshevik independent Georgia was retaken by the Bolshevik Red Army in 1921.