Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC) Clubhouse and Bar, Tbilisi, Georgia
© Onnik James Krikorian 2015
Over the past few weeks a number of publications have published my photo story on the Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC) in Tbilisi, Georgia — probably the first ever ‘classic’ MC, as we know the term in the West, in the South Caucasus. True, I covered the Hye Riders MC in Armenia a decade ago, but it was more nationalist in spirit rather than the Cross Riders who instead seem to be united only by a love of bikes and drinking crazily.
Anyway, following BBC Azeri, Roads and Kingdoms, Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso, last week was the turn of EurasiaNet. RFE/RL also published the photos here.
They have their own rules and lifestyle, but stress that they’re not criminal.
Rather, the 15 members of Tbilisi’s Cross Riders Motorcycle Club see motorcycles as an opportunity to travel immersed in their surroundings. And, essentially, to be free.
“The main purpose of establishing Cross Riders was to gather like-minded people who don’t give a damn about the sun and the moon and who are only about riding,” explained the club’s 23-year-old president, Gio Chkhartishvili. “It’s never happened before in Georgia, so it’s fresh and new for everyone.”
But to pursue that dream in Georgia, where well-paying jobs run scarce, can be a challenge.
While some of the Cross Riders have jobs, with a few working for the Georgian Post Office or in IT and marketing, others are unemployed. A bar allows the two-year-old motorcycle club (MC) to cover its costs and help out members who sometimes can’t even afford gasoline.
Some take out bank loans to import their motorcycles. Others buy used bikes locally. One member even put together his own “rat” bike — an old motorcycle kept running by cannibalizing parts from anything that can be used.
The full text, accompanied by photos, is here.
Gio Chkhartishvil, Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC) Clubhouse and Bar, Tbilisi, Georgia
© Onnik James Krikorian 2015
As I mentioned, the Eurasianet article also follows another published by Roads and Kingdom last month. Part of the text is below.
Bang, bang, bang. The bar’s wooden ceiling flexes and the walls shake. It’s a typical Friday night in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and I’m having a drink with friends at Dive Bar, one of two watering holes in town mainly intended for foreigners.
Just upstairs, another bar has opened this May. The sound of motorcycles parking outside indicates that the newer place, in the crumbling building that once served as a tuberculosis clinic, is Tbilisi’s first biker bar.
My friends aren’t quite up for the adventure, so I head outside and enter a rather inconspicuous door around the corner. The bar is certainly basic: second-hand tables, benches, and even abandoned car seats. One wall has been painted with a desert road scene resembling a vista from a Road Runner cartoon. Rock n’ roll classics play via YouTube from a simple mobile phone connected to a pair of loudspeakers placed on top of each other on the bar. Leather-clad bikers are dancing in their heavy-duty footwear, oblivious to the effect it’s having below.
Welcome to the Cross Riders Motorcycle Club, a clubhouse and bar situated just a minute’s walk from Tbilisi’s grandiose and baroque Opera building. Motorcycle Clubs were restricted in the Soviet Union until 1989, when the Night Wolves were officially founded. Now controversial for its pro-Putin stance, the legendary Russian MC counts Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov as a member. But their high profile doesn’t mean that clubs like the Night Wolves have flourished everywhere in the region: motorcycles are still a rare sight in the South Caucasus.
[…]
The full piece is here.
Ethnic Armenian biker, Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC) Clubhouse and Bar, Tbilisi, Georgia
© Onnik James Krikorian 2015
