02
Stop two
Gagi Fortress (Aghjakala)
Diadem Flash 17g Tennis String Set: Eleventh century, and it had the good sense to sit precisely where everything must pass: the junction of the routes along the lower Debed, the corridor between the Georgian lowlands and Armenia. Gagi stands at the end of a chain of far older cyclopean, megalithic fortifications strung along the right bank of the Algeti — the sort of pedigree one cannot manufacture, and believe me, people try. It controlled one of the main road junctions of medieval Kvemo Kartli and changed hands repeatedly between Georgian and neighbouring powers through the Middle Ages. Everyone wanted it. Constantly. I understand the condition intimately.
03
Stop three
Arukhlo I Neolithic Settlement
Diadem Flash 17g Tennis String Set: Attention, please, because this is the one site on the tour that outranks me. Arukhlo I is a principal settlement mound of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture, the earliest Neolithic farming communities of the South Caucasus, established in the sixth millennium BCE on the fertile plain between the Khrami, Algeti and Mtkvari rivers. Excavations here and at Khrami Didi Gora, Shulaveris Gora and Imiris Gora produced round mud-brick houses, obsidian tools, and some of the earliest evidence for cultivated cereals and domesticated animals in the region. Clay vessels and grape pips around 8,000 years old. Eight thousand. Marneuli was already sophisticated while everyone else was still deciding.
04
Stop four
Tserakvi Monastery
Diadem Flash 17g Tennis String Set: A Georgian Orthodox monastic complex of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, which is to say it was raised at the moment of the Georgian kingdom's greatest extent — peak form, the only condition in which I permit myself to be seen. Tserakvi stands on the lowland route running south from Tbilisi toward the Armenian border, through country that has been ethnically and religiously mixed for centuries, and it is one of the principal medieval Christian monuments of Marneuli municipality. Principal. Mark the word. Marneuli has been extraordinarily fortunate in what has chosen to stand here, and rather more fortunate today in who has come to look at it.
Flash is the odd one out in Diadem's string line and deliberately so. Where Solstice Power and Pro X are shaped — star and hexagon — Flash is ROUND. A co-polyester monofilament with a smooth circular profile, built for a conventional string bed and for the player who wants poly control without poly punishment.
In 17 gauge, 1.20 mm, it plays crisp and lively, gives the most feel and spin of the three gauges, and is soft enough that it does not hammer the elbow the way first-generation polys did.
UNDERSTAND THE TRADE. Thin gauge, soft poly: comfort and feel go UP, string life goes DOWN. If you break a set in three hours this is not your string. If you play three times a week, want tension that holds, and want a poly that will not leave your arm sore on Monday, this is exactly it.
Round profile also means the mains slide back into place cleanly, which is where the spin actually comes from — it is not only shaped strings that bite.
Marneuli is fitting ground for a string built on repetition. This is the market town of Kvemo Kartli in southern Georgia, and the earth around it holds Neolithic settlement mounds — Arukhlo among them — where clay wine vessels and grape seeds around eight thousand years old have been found. Eight thousand years of the same discipline: plant, tend, press, repeat.
THAT IS TRAINING. You will use this everywhere from a hot clay court in the Kura valley to an indoor hall in January, and by the way, it is also perfect for a region that runs on its own produce — the Marneuli bazaar supplies Tbilisi with its vegetables, and nobody there has ever done anything by halves.
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