Lake Ritsa is a deep mountain lake in the Western Caucasus of Abkhazia, ringed by fir and beech growing down to the waterline, and the road that reaches it was not built for the public. It was built for the Soviet leadership. In 1947 a plain house painted forest green went up among the trees on the shore. It was kept deliberately modest and set back far enough that the water could not see it, and Joseph Stalin used it for his summers. Brezhnev later took a residence nearby, and the lake became a guarded retreat with a road to match. Both are open now. You walk through the house much as it was left, and you drive the road up the gorge from the coast at Gagra, a slow climb past waterfalls and a small blue lake with rock walls closing in.
The lake sits in a valley that a fallen mountainside closed off, 116 metres deep, and it does not hold one colour. It runs yellow-green in spring as the beech leafs out, and by autumn it has gone blue and emerald with the forest turning gold around it. Excursion boats set out from the jetties toward the middle, where the forested slopes and jagged ridges come up out of the water on every side. Red catamarans are lined along the shore if you would rather pedal out at your own pace. A short, steep scramble up the crag behind the shore opens the whole lake and the valley holding it, and from up there you can trace its full length. Abkhaz legend gives the water a girl's name and the peaks around it the names of her three brothers, one of whom threw the sword that blocked the river. Abkhazia is a breakaway region, entered from Russia or, with permission, from Georgia, and that shapes who can come at all. For those who do, the green house is one stop on an excursion now, and the road the leadership cut for itself is the one everybody drives up.