“So, where now?” I forced a smile and looked at the tired faces of my German guests, who decided to visit Georgia after discovering that a distant relative of them used to live here in the XIX century. A sweltering heat of July afternoon made us dizzy. We spent an hour wandering along the quiet, dusty streets of Bolnisi, looking for the spirit of former German colony Katharinenfeld. The Swabs started settling at the territory of Georgia in 1817, as the Russian Emperor offered them agricultural lands and ten tax-free years. In 1941, all colonists were forcefully resettled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The forced settlers from the other regions of Georgia took over the empty houses. Seemed like the tour I thoroughly planned was a complete failure. Several months before, I’ve googled all the names and family history of the most prominent colonists – winemakers, farmers, brewers. I visited two biggest villages, talked to the people living in old German houses. Those Fachwerkhäuser have almost lost its German touch, the wooden beams covered by cement, the gardens looking wild. “Let’s have lunch in the old German mill?” I suggested, my voice more confident than I. Three ladies in front of me nodded. As we had our tomato-and-cucumber salad with aromatic Svanetian salt and a huge khachapuri, oozing with milky cheese, I offered them a wine named after a local German, Schalla. The ladies refused politely, and an imaginary stone laying upon my heart got heavier. I disappointed them. I failed to find their family in Bolnisi. “Let’s see the sports school before we go back to Tbilisi?” I suggested once we paid. The exhausting heat was gone, and dark clouds were coming. We walked to an unremarkable, shabby building that used to be a church. In the Soviet period, the dome was torn down, walls painted dirty green, volleyball nets and basketball rings replaced the crucifix. Although, one wall still had an outline of a cross. As we were taking pictures, a slender, tanned man approached us. “Deutsch”, he stated. “Come, I’ll show you something”. A sudden spark of curiosity made us follow him to a tiny, clogged room. “I have an old German map and books”, he said in Georgian. I translated. “That’s how Katharinenfeld used to look like. Nearby, there were some other villages and farms that don’t exist anymore”. I looked a bit closer and screamed. The name of Kutschenbach stood on the map! After a heated discussion and comparing the old map with what Google gave us, we decided to go and see that place. After forty minutes, a bumpy road was over. We followed the river, as it carried the same name as 150 years ago, and ended up in a desolated settlement. No one was in the street. We walked from house to a house under drizzling rain, when we saw a woman with a sad, wrinkled face. She spoke only Azeri. Having listened to our desperate “Deutsch! Germanelebi! Niemtsy!” for a while, she waved us in. With our summer shoes sinking in mud, jumping over cow patties, we followed the sad woman, to face another shocking surprise: a German cemetery just in her backyard! While we were trying to read the hundred-years-old inscriptions, several curiosity-driven villagers passed by. One of them spoke a bit of Russian. “My great-grandfather was Kutschenbachs’ cook”, he claimed. I started translating. “His stories were very detailed! The mansion stood there. On that hill, there was a summer pasture. Those ruins used to be the cheese manufacture…” “…and the milk farm was standing there”, one of the guests said, her voice shaking, her hands trembling. She took a pile of papers out of her bag - letters, maps, and schemata. Her ancestor’s farmhouses, accurately drawn on the paper, now stood in front of her eyes, ruined and neglected, but she was excited to unfold this part of her family’s story. Back home, I started browsing my brochure about Germans in Georgia; the Katharinenfeld pages full of my notes. How come nobody knew about the farm’s location! Several pages were glued together. I separated them with paper-knife and gasped. An already familiar map with Kutschenbach's name looked at me from page 101.