Around the world in 106 years

Within relatively short order, two remarkable men emerged from the remote, ancient town of Gori in central Georgia. One was Joseph Stalin. The other is sitting opposite me, aged 106, and still conspicuously chuffed to have escaped his ex-neighbour’s clutches.

Last month, when Alexandre Bestavachvili and his wife Thora, 98, held a joint birthday party in their south London home, there were toasts and singing. But the real celebration will be a trip back to Georgia, where Alex enjoys such rock-star status that TV crews meet his plane and the crowds turn up to see him.

The celebrity, though, has been hard-earned. Alex’s astounding life has taken him across great, often painful, swaths of European history, and even today, bright-eyed and full of vigour, he is loath to slow down. “Keeping going is what keeps us going,” says Thora, who met him 71 years ago at a wartime tea dance at the Royal Opera House.

The pair continue to travel all over the world, visiting Egypt and France in the past year alone, and regularly returning to Gori, where they have recently bought a house. “I love England very much,” Alex says, sunk into an armchair, with Thora at his side, “but I am very proud to be a Georgian, and I hope I am a link between the countries.”

The link was forged by largely unforeseen circumstances. Alex’s family owned vineyards in the countryside around Gori, and life in culturally sedate central Georgia seems to have been comfortable enough. Yet even as a schoolboy, he felt restless and stirred by a sense of curiosity about the world beyond. “I am a nature’s child,” he says, brightly. “Right from the beginning, I knew that I was different. I wasn’t satisfied with what the teachers were telling me. I read the books they gave me, but they only made me ask more questions.”

In 1927, he went to university in the country’s capital, Tbilisi, to study building construction, but also to discover that ominous political developments were afoot. Long under the shadow of its giant neighbour, Russia, Georgia had enjoyed only nominal and temporary periods of autonomy, and following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Moscow was slowly tightening its grip. The effects were painful. Even if the grip was now being exerted by local boy-made-bad, the Communist Party general secretary, Joseph Stalin.

Alex wasn’t impressed by the Bolsheviks’ attentions to his country, particularly Stalin’s supposed aim of “modernising” it. “We were an ancient culture,” he says. “Our own society, our own history. We are a different people. I didn’t want to stay, under that system.”

In 1929, with three friends, he set out on foot to make the lengthy, dangerous mountain crossing into Turkey. “It was November 7,” he remembers, “a big festival in Georgia. Everyone was celebrating, and we chose that night to slip away.” Travelling under cover of darkness, the exhausted group lay down one night to sleep. When dawn came, says Alex, they found they were on the very edge of a precipice. A few more steps and they would have been dead. The Turkish border guards were impressed enough to let the raggedy students through, and they set off for Istanbul.

For weeks they walked, eventually arriving in the capital in 1930, where a group of fellow Georgian refugees advised Alex to travel on by steamer to Paraguay, where there was good work to be found. He signed up for the voyage, but jumped ship in Marseille, laid low for a few days, and headed on to Paris.

“I thought, ‘I’m not going to Paraguay’,” he huffs. “I didn’t even know where it was. But I knew there was culture and art and libraries in Paris. I said, ‘That’s for me.’”

He stayed in France for seven years, variously studying and working to keep himself afloat, before taking what seemed like a secure job as a water and gas installation specialist in Brussels. In May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium. The Royal Navy was sent in to perform emergency evacuations, and while Alex was hardly an urgent case, his plea for a passage was persuasive enough for him to reach Folkestone on May 17.

“I told the captain of the ship, ‘If you leave me here, the Germans will make me fight on their side, and kill British soldiers, and maybe one day kill you.’ He thought for a moment and let me on board.”

He was sent to a refugee centre at Crystal Palace, and then put to work repairing war damage. Wartime London tried hard to keep its spirits up, and one evening in 1942, Alex decided to go dancing in Covent Garden. On the floor of the Opera House – temporarily converted into a dance hall – he met Thora Edwards, from Ashford, Kent, who worked as a broker at Lloyd’s of London.

“I thought he was extremely good-looking,” recalls Thora. “So when he asked me to dance I said yes straight away, but then I realised that he didn’t know any English, so we had to speak in French. It was really rather romantic to be wooed in French, and when he grasped this, he tried to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t. So he then claimed he was a Belgian, which obviously wasn’t true, either. I didn’t find out where he was from until later when I met all these Georgians that he knew.

“I’d gone to the dance with friends. You couldn’t possibly go on your own as a young woman in those days. Everything was very proper, but Alex seemed nice, and so we started seeing each other.”

It was a precarious courtship, heavy with the resolution that would see them through the next 70 years. One evening, Alex and Thora went to a cinema in the Elephant and Castle. “There was an air-raid warning during the film,” she recalls, “and we were all advised to leave immediately. But Alex and I decided to stick it out, and when we left, every other building around us had been flattened.”

In 1944, the couple were married at the Russian Orthodox Church in London. Three children, Mary, Goggi and Christine, followed. Alex started what would be a successful career as a builder, and in 1952 – a year before Uncle Joe died – he was elected president of the Georgian Association of England.

Today, he and Thora live in a comfortable three-storey house in Lee, south London, filled with books, paintings, travel mementos and the Georgian-influenced pottery Alex began crafting in the Sixties. Both take regular walks in the local park, do their own shopping, and, although their children help out, continue to be largely independent. In 2006, they bought a bungalow in Gori, surrounded by vines and fruit trees, which they have restored for use during their visits.

The country’s economy came close to collapse after the break-up of the Soviet Union, but in recent years has been one of the top performers, and prices have soared to near Western European levels.

Happy as Alex was in London, the itch to revisit the old homeland grew as the years passed. But Georgia was now firmly and forbiddingly behind the Iron Curtain, émigrés were considered suspect, and visas were difficult to obtain. After months of lobbying, the couple were given permission in 1963 to travel to Tbilisi via Moscow. The train stopped briefly in Gori, which, as Stalin’s birthplace, was effectively closed for security reasons, and Alex was allowed out to meet his family.

“It was an amazing thing to go home,” he recalls. “The word had travelled all around, and at the stations, people had come out to wave. There were hundreds of them.” For all the enthusiasm of the welcome, the Bestavachvilis felt it best to leave their children back in Britain. It was not until the following year, reassured that they would be allowed out again, that the whole family made the trip.

Alex’s celebrity arose from him being, almost certainly, the first Georgian refugee from the dark days of the Bolshevik takeover to return home. “It was a huge event,” says his daughter, Christine, 62. “The country had been pretty much sealed off for decades, and the idea of Daddy returning from the West caught people’s imaginations.” There was, too, the added attraction of Alex bringing home an English wife.

“I felt I needed to go, to see what I had actually married into,” says Thora. “I didn’t know anything about Georgia. I thought it was in America until I met my husband. Everybody wanted to see us. They brought huge armfuls of flowers. There couldn’t have been any flowers left in the fields. They all had a very clear idea of what I should be. They said, ‘You are now a Georgian woman, and your job is to look after your husband and his home.’ Alex’s mother was a very sweet little old lady, but I couldn’t help feeling I was under investigation.”

Going home had triggered a travel bug, that possesses them still. Even in advanced old age they see the world as a challenge to be explored. “If you told my parents they were going off to some faraway place tomorrow,” says Christine, “they wouldn’t bat an eyelid. In fact, they’d be thrilled.” This year alone they flew to a wedding in Grenoble and – unbothered by reports of chaos and danger – took a holiday in Egypt.

In their nineties, they toured China, Kenya and the US. Next year, they will head back to Gori, where Alex – since Stalin’s statue was pulled down three years ago – is considered the town’s greatest son. On their last visit, at the invitation of the government, the pair were feted by Georgia’s then President, Mikhail Saakashvili, who presented Alex with the Order of Excellence medal.

“I don’t think age has anything to do with how much you can travel,” says Thora. “Sometimes I need a bit of help, but we can organise that, and I’ve never really had a problem.”

Trips of a lifetime

1963 Alex and Thora make their first trip together to Georgia. The train journey, via Moscow, takes five days. Large crowds greet them.

1964 They return to Gori, with their three children. So great is the family’s celebrity that the train makes an impromptu stop by the Black Sea for the children to swim.

1967/ 1969/ 1981 Further trips to Georgia.

1982 Alex visits Israel with his eldest daughter Mary.

1985 Alex visits Georgia.

1986 Alex travels to USA with younger daughter Christine. They tour Utah and Arizona, visiting landscapes from the cowboy films Alex likes watching. Thora spends five weeks in China.

1987 Thora returns to China and Hong Kong.

1997 To Georgia with Thora and son Goggi.

1998 To Georgia with Thora and Mary.

2006 Alex’s Georgian citizenship is restored. To celebrate he buys a house in Gori.

2007 Revisits Georgia with Thora, Christine and Mary. The same year travels to Egypt to visit the ancient sites on the Nile.

2008 Return to Egypt for a second Nile cruise.

2009 Visits Mombasa, Kenya.

2010 Two trips to Georgia. Another to Mombasa.

2011 Thora travels to the north of Scotland.

2013 The pair fly to Grenoble for a wedding, and later take a beach holiday in Egypt.