Terme Borjomi — Likani

Terme Borjomi Likani draws bicarbonated mineral springs in the Borjomi valley of the Lesser Caucasus in south-central Georgia, where the famous Borjomi mineral water, slightly alkaline and naturally carbonated, was bottled from these sources and distributed as the official sparkling water of the Soviet Union, exported to fifty countries and becoming the most widely recognised Georgian product throughout the USSR and the Eastern Bloc during the decades of socialist rule. The Likani palace and gardens above the springs were the summer residence of the Romanov viceroys of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, then of Stalin himself after the Soviet annexation, and the forested hillside park with its mineral spring pavilions, its thermal baths, and its ornamental pools remains one of the most atmospherically layered spa parks in the Caucasus, its tsarist and Soviet strata overlaid on a much older Georgian royal bathing tradition. Drinking directly from the Borjomi spring in the town's elegant public park, from the same source that fills the green glass bottle recognised on every former Soviet table, is a small act of reconnection to a collective sensory memory shared by hundreds of millions of people across the post-Soviet world.