Georgia: Prometheus Cave – Georgia’s Underground World

I’ll admit, when someone first mentioned “Prometheus Cave” to me, my mind went straight to Greek mythology and some vague memory of a chap having his liver pecked out by an eagle for eternity, which seemed a bit much for a tourist attraction. As it turned out, the connection was rather more tenuous than that — the cave simply borrowed the name, presumably because “Big Hole In The Ground Near Kutaisi” doesn’t sell many tickets. It sits in the Imereti region of western Georgia, not far from the city of Kutaisi, which is itself one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, though that’s a story for another day.

The cave was only discovered in 1984, which rather surprised me — I’d assumed, given the scale of the thing, that someone would have stumbled across it centuries ago, possibly while out looking for a lost goat. But no. It took until the 1980s for a team of Georgian speleologists to find it, and it was opened to the public as a proper tourist attraction in 2011, with a fairly hefty Millennium Challenge Corporation-funded renovation that put in the walkways, the lighting, and presumably the gift shop, though I didn’t linger there long enough to check.

The numbers alone are enough to make you feel rather small. The full cave system runs to around 22 kilometres, snaking about beneath the Georgian countryside, of which the public gets to see roughly 1.4 kilometres, organised sensibly as a one-way walk so nobody has to do that awkward cave-corridor shuffle past people coming the other way. I was grateful for this. I have strong views about queuing, most of them unprintable.

💧 How It All Got Made (Very, Very Slowly)

Before going in, I had a vague schoolboy notion that caves were just empty spaces where rock used to be, and that stalactites and stalagmites were something to do with icicles. This is broadly wrong, though in my defence I left school a very long time ago. What actually happens, as our guide explained with the patience of someone who has clearly explained it eleven thousand times before, is that rainwater picks up carbon dioxide as it falls and seeps through soil, turning very slightly acidic. This mildly acidic water then works its way down through limestone, dissolving calcium carbonate as it goes. When that mineral-laden water finally drips into an open cave space, the water evaporates and leaves the calcium carbonate behind as a tiny deposit of calcite. Do this every day for several thousand years and you get a stalactite.

The going rate, apparently, is about one cubic centimetre a year. I did the sum in my head while standing there feeling thoroughly inadequate, and worked out that some of the larger formations in Prometheus Cave have been quietly building themselves since long before anyone had invented the wheel, writing, or the concept of queuing. It’s a proper lesson in patience, cave formation. Rather puts your average British builder’s quote of “two weeks, tops” into perspective.

🏛️ The Hall of Marble and the General Business of Being Underground

We went in through a broad tunnel mouth and the temperature dropped almost immediately — caves keep a steady temperature year-round, somewhere around 13 or 14 degrees Celsius whatever the weather’s doing up top, which on the day I went was considerably warmer and considerably more pleasant. I’d brought a jumper. I did not need the jumper until approximately four minutes in, at which point I needed it rather a lot.

The first proper chamber is called the Hall of Marble, on account of the pale cream and grey limestone walls, which under the lighting looked remarkably like the inside of a rather grand, if slightly damp, Victorian municipal building. What struck me straight away was the sheer size of the place. I’d gone in expecting the sort of cave where you duck and shuffle and apologise to strangers for your rucksack, the kind you get in parts of Britain where everything is cramped out of some ancient national instinct for discomfort. This was nothing like that. The ceilings soared up eight or ten metres in places, and the floor spread out wide enough that our whole group could stand about without anyone’s elbow ending up in anyone else’s ribs, which, speaking as an Englishman, I consider the single most important feature of any enclosed space.

🎭 Curtains, Theatrically Lit

From the Hall of Marble we moved on into what’s called the Curtain Hall, named for thin sheets of flowstone draped down from the ceiling in rippling folds that do genuinely look, with a bit of squinting and a generous imagination, like heavy stage curtains. These are properly called cave draperies, a term I rather enjoyed, and they form when water runs in a thin, continuous film down a sloping surface, laying down calcite in rippled lines as it travels. When the light caught them at the right angle, you could see straight through the thinner edges, like looking through a very old, very patient piece of alabaster.

Now, the lighting throughout the whole cave is what I’d call theatrical, verging on the nightclub. Blues, greens, warm ambers, the works, shifting from chamber to chamber and throwing shadows about in a way that some visitors apparently find a bit much, a bit Vegas, a bit “we get it, it’s a cave, calm down with the lasers.” I did wonder, briefly, whether the Georgian Tourism Board had perhaps got a job lot of coloured bulbs going cheap. But on balance I rather liked it. You’re standing in a limestone chamber that’s been quietly assembling itself for several million years without asking anyone’s permission — I think it’s entitled to a bit of drama by way of a send-off.

💑 The Hall of Love, and a Very Slow Romance Indeed

Next along was the Hall of Love, which is where the cave really starts showing off. This chamber has some of the most elaborate formations in the whole system — stalactites reaching down, stalagmites reaching up, and in several places the two having finally met in the middle after what must have been an extraordinarily long engagement, forming solid columns from floor to ceiling. I worked out, roughly, that a column of any real size represents several hundred thousand years of two mineral deposits slowly, slowly closing the gap between them. It’s the longest courtship I’ve ever heard of, and I include my Uncle Trevor and Auntie Pam in that, who took eleven years to get engaged and are still, forty years on, bringing it up at every family gathering as though it were a personal triumph.

Our guide pointed out various formations that locals have, over the years, decided resemble things — a Christmas tree here, a frozen waterfall there. This is a tradition in show caves the world over, and it mostly involves everybody nodding politely and agreeing that yes, that does rather look like a Christmas tree, when in fact it looks exactly like what it is, which is a lump of calcite. Still, it gives the tour a narrative, and I’m not such a miserable old git that I can’t play along.

🐚 Fossils, and a Sea That Isn’t There Any More

After that came the Hall of Shells, which is where the geology properly took over from the showmanship. The cave walls here are marked with ancient marine fossils — shells, essentially, embedded in the limestone — because this whole stretch of rock was once the floor of the Tethys Sea, a vast ocean that covered much of present-day Georgia somewhere between 35 and 50 million years ago, long before the Caucasus mountains had even bothered to push themselves up out of the ground. Standing there, looking at shells on the wall of a cave in landlocked western Georgia, gave me a proper jolt of the sort of vertigo you get from actually grasping, even for a second, how long the planet has been quietly getting on with things without consulting us. It rather puts a bad commute into perspective.

🎹 The Organ Pipes of the Hall of Stalactites

The Hall of Stalactites does exactly what it says on the tin — an enormous gathering of downward-pointing formations in every stage of development, from thin, pale, still-dripping needles to vast ancient columns that genuinely resemble the pipes of some colossal underground church organ. I understand some caves charge you extra to point this comparison out, presumably via a laminated sign and a small donation box. Prometheus Cave just gives it to you for free, which I appreciated, being naturally suspicious of anywhere that charges you twice for the same joke.

🚣 A Lake, a Boat I Didn’t Get On, and Daylight

Towards the end, the path slopes gently down and brings you out at an underground lake — one of six scattered through the wider cave system — where you can see formations continuing on beneath the surface of the water, blurred and ghostly through the clear depths. This lake connects to a subterranean river that eventually makes its way out to join the Kumistavi River up on the surface. There’s an option, for the more adventurous visitor, to leave the cave not on foot but by boat, drifting out along this underground river in the dark.

I did not do this. I’d already used up my full daily allowance of adventurousness getting to the cave in the first place, along a road that had clearly had a disagreement with a recent landslide and come off worse, and I didn’t fancy pushing my luck twice in one afternoon. I watched two considerably younger and considerably braver members of our group clamber into a small boat and vanish off round a bend with a guide, looking thoroughly pleased with themselves, and I stood on dry land feeling entirely at peace with my own cowardice.

The whole walking tour took about an hour and a half, after which we emerged back out into the daylight rather suddenly, and I stood there blinking like a mole that had taken a seriously wrong turn, adjusting to the ordinary grey light of an ordinary Georgian afternoon after ninety minutes inside something that had been quietly building itself since before humans existed. It’s an odd feeling, that. Not bad. Just odd.

🤔 Reflections

What I came away with, more than anything, was a fairly stiff reminder of how little any of us actually matter in the longer scheme of things, which isn’t the cheeriest conclusion for a Tuesday but there it is. These formations had been growing, drip by patient drip, for longer than there have been people around to admire them, and they’ll carry on long after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil complaining about the price of a cup of tea. There’s something rather calming in that, if you let it be, rather than something depressing.

I also came away thinking that Georgia does caves rather well, and does them without a great deal of fuss or self-importance about it — a proper bit of infrastructure built into a genuinely spectacular natural site, rather than the sort of over-polished, over-signposted nonsense you sometimes get at attractions that know exactly how impressive they are and won’t let you forget it for a second. Prometheus Cave knows it’s impressive and mostly just gets on with being impressive, coloured lighting notwithstanding.

Would I recommend it? Yes, unreservedly, boat ride optional. Would I do the boat ride if I went again? Almost certainly still not. Some things, like my relationship with deep water in confined underground spaces, are simply not going to change at this stage of life, and I’ve made my peace with that, much as the stalactites and stalagmites in the Hall of Love eventually made peace with each other, if considerably more quickly.