Bahar Güneş Bilici

Hello — I'm Bahar. I grew up in Istanbul, trained as a journalist, and spent the better part of a decade writing about food, culture and slow travel for Turkish and international magazines. I always assumed my big obsession would be somewhere far and dramatic — Japan, maybe, or Patagonia. Georgia had other plans.

My first visit was in the autumn of 2018. A long weekend in Tbilisi that was supposed to scratch an itch. I walked up to the Narikala fortress at dusk, ordered my first glass of amber wine in a candlelit marani, and ate khinkali so good I nearly cried. I extended the trip by a week. I came back four months later. I have now returned twelve times — through blistering summers in Kakheti, snowbound winters in Svaneti, and the lilac-coloured shoulder seasons that most tourists never see.

What keeps pulling me back is something I struggle to put simply into words, which is probably why I started this blog. Georgia is one of the oldest winemaking civilisations on earth, a country whose alphabet, cuisine and polyphonic music exist nowhere else, wedged between mountains that feel genuinely mythological. It is also a place changing fast — new cafés opening beside Soviet-era bread shops, ancient monasteries drawing both pilgrims and hikers, and a local culture that is fiercely proud and warmly generous in equal measure.

I write because I want you to experience Georgia the way I did: not through a checklist of sights, but through the texture of a morning market in Ozurgeti, the weight of a proper churchkhela in your hand, the surreal silence of a dirt road in Tusheti. Every story on this blog is first-person, researched on the ground, and honest about the difficult parts too — the language barrier, the roads, the moments when nothing goes to plan and everything becomes the story.

If you are thinking about visiting Georgia, planning to go deeper than Tbilisi, or simply curious about a country that somehow remains one of Europe's best-kept secrets — you are in exactly the right place. Pull up a chair. Let's talk wine, mountains and the art of getting wonderfully, productively lost.