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Lika Megreladze
(Komli)

Location

Tsitelmta village, Guria region

Lika Megreladze sitting at a table with a teapot and glass jar.

Contact Information

Lika and her guesthouse Komli stand at the forefront of tea tourism in Georgia. While they only have a small handful of ancestral tea bushes on their property, Komli offers an unparalleled experience for guests to experience the history and tradition of Georgian tea. It's best to get in touch with them through their social media on Instagram or Facebook, or by phone/WhatsApp on +995 599 260 402 (Lika) or +995 571 510 019 (Lika's daughter Mariam), in English or Georgian. You can also check out their website for further details!

Tea Tourism

Lika's tea garden is small and cozy, just a few short rows of bushes on the back side of her property. Although it's not enough to supply the demands of the guesthouse (Lika serves Tenieshvili tea for that!), it makes the perfect backdrop for her famous educational tour, taking participants through the whole history of Georgian tea, interleaved with the story of her own family. Thanks to a lifetime of diligent collecting and documentation, Lika has transformed her family's historical oda house into a history museum, making it one of the most complete presentations of tea-related facts and artifacts in all of Georgia.

Besides being a museum, Komli functions as both a guesthouse and restaurant. At the moment, guest accommodation is in the form of three comfortably renovated antique wine barrels which stand in the yard, functioning as independent guest rooms, although with all the ingenious projects underway, this is likely to be updated in the future. For food, Lika offers perhaps the most complete and authentic menu of Gurian cuisine in all of Georgia, reconstructed from old recipes of her mother and neighbors and sourced from local organic ingredients. Lika also makes wine from a collection of rare regional grape varieties.

Komli is a space of spaces, and Lika is a master of creating space. Tea tastings seem all the more special on the spacious veranda, the historical oda rooms give a particular atmosphere to the stories and artifacts contained there, and the Diogenes barrels are one of the quirkier ways to get a night's rest that one might encounter. In the upcoming seasons, Lika plans to carve out yet more spaces: a tea house will be built by the tea garden, which will host tastings, workshops, masterclasses, and more.

Images 2-5 provided by Komli. Image 1 by Tom Pinnegar, image 6 by Timothy Merkel.

The Story of Komli

Lika's family has lived on this property for generations, and their small tea garden by the Kikvata brook had already been planted long before Lika's mother, Meri, went to work as a technologist for the Anaseuli Tea Research Institute. There, Meri would be a part of one of the Soviet Union's top research teams for tropical agriculture, improving the tea crop and that of many other products vital to village life in western Georgia.

Lika left Guria to go to university and eventually settled in the capital, Tbilisi, where she would raise her daughters, Nini and Mariam, amidst the turmoil of the 1990s which would bring a practical end to the Georgian tea industry – but they would return to Tsitelmta frequently for Easter and New Year holidays, and for the languid Gurian summers. By the 2010s, with kids grown up and grandkids on the way, Lika was starting to feel like she had spent enough time in the big city. Inspired by organic agriculture texts like The One Straw Revolution and her mother's memories of old Gurian recipes, she began transforming her ancestral home into the unique community called Komli.

Komli, in Georgian, means "a place where smoke is coming from" – a lit hearth, a living house with its hosts at home. While the place has come to have many functions – guesthouse, museum, educational project – more than anything else Komli is a hub of life. Four generations live on the property, from grandmother Meri to Lika's five grandchildren, guests and friends are a constant presence, and the grounds shelter a rotating team of international volunteers who have helped Lika and her family realize many projects, including a new family house at the back of the property built with natural techniques and local materials, which will allow their original, historic Gurian oda house to be transformed into its final form as a museum to the history of the family and of Georgian tea.

In 2019, Lika co-founded the "Tea Route" association, a collective of Gurian businesses involved in tea tourism and production, together with Davit Tenieshvili, Giorgi Maisuradze, the Zhgenti sisters, and the Anaseuli laboratory (now an experimental factory and distillery). Their mission – to provide a space for guests to experience the Gurian tea revival. All the locations are quite close to each other in the Ozurgeti area, an ideal situation for those interested in visiting a lot of tea sites in a short time.

Images provided by Komli; Lika's profile image courtesy of Emily Lush.

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