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Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel

Pitsunda, Georgia · Strings > 16g

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel

This corned, plainest reel on the rack. A solid nylon centre under thin wraps at 1.30 mm, 200 metres, no weaknesses and no theatrics. It wants you round Pitsunda first, and warns you now that it will compare a rusting iron lighthouse to a cathedral, and mean it kindly.

↓ Tour Pitsunda, Georgia

Four stops before the checkout

Pitsunda, Georgia

Stop one

Pitsunda Cathedral

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel: Let me ask you something. What do you build on a site that history has already knocked about? Because Bagrat III, the first king of a united Georgia, stood on this cape around the turn of the eleventh century and raised THIS — a great cross-in-square church of stone and brick, dedicated to the Apostle Andrew, who by tradition preached on this very coast. And he was not starting from nothing. The Christian history here reaches back to late antiquity, when Pityus was an early bishopric; it was on the road to this place, in 407, that the exiled church father John Chrysostom died. For centuries afterwards the cathedral served as the seat of the Catholicos of Abkhazia, head of the church in western Georgia, until the see lapsed in the Ottoman era. Fragments of the medieval frescoes survive in the dome and the apse — look up, they held on. It was restored in the nineteenth century, and today it is renowned for its acoustics and houses a famous German-built organ installed in 1975, hosting concerts inside those ancient walls. A thousand years old and still performing to a full house. When did you last say that about yourself? You could.

Stop two

Pitsunda Pine Grove

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel: Breathe in. Properly. THAT is what refusing to disappear smells like. These are Pitsunda pines, a long-needled subspecies of the Calabrian pine, and they are a relict of the Tertiary flora of the Black Sea coast — a forest still standing from a world that has otherwise closed. It is the largest remaining stand of its kind: about two hundred hectares, running roughly four kilometers along the cape's beaches toward the village of Ldzaa, with some trees two centuries old and a companion grove of ancient boxwood growing nearby. Protected since the early Soviet period, and part of the Pitsunda-Miusera reserve today. And here is what I want you to take home. That resinous air was not a pleasant extra — it was central to Pitsunda's development as a premier Soviet resort, where Khrushchev kept a state dacha and, in the 1960s, a line of modernist sanatorium towers rose beside the grove. The trees built the town. So what is your resinous air? Find the thing you already have. The scent of sun-warmed pine over a pebble-and-sand shore is still the signature of this cape, and nobody charges for it.

Stop three

Great Pitiunt Archaeological Site

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel: Has anyone here ever been posted somewhere they did not want to be? Then this site is yours. The 'Great Pitiunt' museum-reserve preserves the excavated remains of ancient Pityus, founded as a Greek trading post over two and a half millennia ago and developed by Rome from the first and second centuries AD into a fortified garrison town — the empire's farthest stronghold on this coast, guarded by cohorts against the mountain tribes and later a place of exile on the empire's edge. The far end of the map. And what did they do out there? Dig inside those walls and you find the foundations of a Roman castellum, baths, wine cellars, and a sequence of early Christian basilicas, one of which yielded a celebrated fourth-to-fifth-century floor mosaic with a fountain scene — among the earliest Christian mosaics of the Caucasus. Made at the edge of everything. And by 325 this outpost had its own bishop: Stratophilus of Pityus, who travelled and took his seat at the Council of Nicaea. The site encloses the later medieval cathedral too, a thousand years of history layered on one patch of ground. Nobody is stationed too far out to matter. Nobody.

Stop four

Pitsunda Lighthouse

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel: Last stop, and it is the one I care about most. In the early twentieth century a lattice iron tower was erected at the tip of Cape Pitsunda, guiding coastal shipping along the eastern Black Sea, where the cape's projection and the deep water offshore made it a key mark between Sochi and Sukhumi. It worked through the Russian imperial era. It worked through the Soviet era. Then, in the late 1960s, the Pitsunda resort complex went up beside the pine grove — a showcase ensemble of modernist high-rise sanatoriums built on Khrushchev's initiative — a new light was mounted atop one of the tall buildings, and the old tower was decommissioned. Rendered obsolete. Now be honest with me: is that the end of a career? Because it is still standing, left among the towers and the beach promenade, and that rusted veteran became the unofficial monument of the whole resort, the photographed relic that puts the cape's maritime past and its Soviet leisure architecture in a single frame. Everybody wants the picture with the old one. You do not stop mattering the day they stop using you. Say it back to me.

The Pitsunda, Georgia track

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

A reel of Classic Synthetic Gut is the least glamorous thing in the shop and I love it the way you love a road you grew up on.

The build is the old, honest one: a solid nylon-based centre core with thin outer wraps over it. Not a bundle of hundreds of filaments, not a stiff co-poly barrel — one core, thin wraps, and that is where the crisp feel comes from. This is the 16 gauge, 1.30mm.

Tennis Warehouse rate it 7 for power, 7 for control and 6 for durability, which is exactly the shape of a string with no weaknesses and no theatrics, and it sits at the softer end of the synthetic guts on the market.

The reel is 660 ft / 200 m. At 40 feet a frame that is somewhere around sixteen racquets out of one box, which is why this is the string that lives under the counter of every club stringer who has ever existed. Volkl also make it in 17 gauge if you want a little more feel and a little less life out of it.

Pitsunda is a cape of pines on the Black Sea coast.

Inside the old walls stands Pitsunda Cathedral, a tall cross-domed church of banded stone and brick with a conical-roofed drum, built around the turn of the eleventh century by Bagrat III, the first king of a united Georgia, on ground whose Christian history reaches back to late antiquity — Pityus was an early bishopric, and John Chrysostom died in 407 on his way here.

It was the seat of the Catholicos of Abkhazia for centuries, it keeps fragments of medieval fresco in the dome and apse, and since 1975 a German-built organ has stood under that dome, so the place spends its evenings as a concert hall.

The pines are the other half of it: a relict grove of the Pitsunda pine, a long-needled survivor of the Tertiary flora of this coast and the largest stand of its kind, running about four kilometres along the beaches toward Ldzaa over some two hundred hectares, with trees two centuries old and an ancient boxwood grove beside them.

Inside the same walls, the Great Pitiunt archaeological site holds the excavated town: a Greek trading post first, then a Roman garrison from the first and second centuries AD, the empire's farthest stronghold on this coast, with a castellum, baths, wine cellars and early Christian basilicas, one of which gave up a fourth- or fifth-century floor mosaic of a fountain.

And near the beach, among the modernist resort towers of the 1960s, the old Pitsunda Lighthouse still stands, decommissioned when a new light went up on top of one of the towers, rusting quietly and photographed constantly.

Bring the reel. String somebody's frame in the shade. You will use it everywhere from a cracked court under the Pitsunda towers to an indoor hall in Sukhumi up the coast, and by the way, it is also perfect for the walk out to the end of the cape, where the trees stop, the sea starts, and absolutely nothing else is going on.

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Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel

Volkl Classic Synthetic Gut 16g Tennis String Reel