Nameste Walk

My name is Vlad. I've been researching history since 2009, and I hold a degree in tour guiding and excursion management — so the walking tour isn't a side format for me, it's the thing I was actually trained to do. I've been travelling more or less constantly since then, because cities are easier to understand when you walk them yourself.

My focus is the Black Sea region and Central Asia: two places where empires, trade routes and languages have been overlapping for centuries, and where almost every building has more than one story attached to it. I create walking audio tours across Russia, Georgia, Turkey and Eastern Europe, and I write each one the same way — archives first, streets second, and then a lot of walking to check whether the story actually works out loud.

For the Batumi tour I spent time in the city's archives and libraries, read through consular and port records from the late imperial period, and walked every street of the old town. What I found was a city that most visitors pass through without noticing: a free port where some twenty consulates once operated at the same time, where Georgian, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Russian and Jewish communities lived side by side, and where oil money from Baku built the façades people now photograph without knowing why they look the way they do.

My tours are made for travellers who want the layer underneath the postcard.