Granai della Memoria

Kakha Abulidze is a Georgian shepherd. He lives with his family in the Tusheti region, in the Caucasus mountains at an altitude of more than 2000 meters above sea level. There is no road connection between his farm and the nearest inhabited center, the movements are made by horseback. The 4 \ 5 hours of walking that separate his farm from the rest of the world (he does not even take the cell phone in the area where Kakha lives) make us understand how his life is marked by the natural rhythms of the seasons.

Kakha have 500 sheep of Tushuri breed, a rustic and resistant breed, very suitable for nomadism but which produces low quantity of milk. The flock is milked twice a day and Guda cheese is made with this milk. Guda is a raw milk cheese that has the particularity of being put to age in bags made of sheepskin, thus preserving for more than a year.

This technique was almost completely abandoned, the bags of sheepskin were replaced by those of plastic that alter the flavor of the product. The demand for this cheese is very high and, as Kakha explains, the few traditional producers of Guda do not consider themselves competitors but colleagues.