საკქართველო IV

Statue in Batumi, created by Tamara Kvesitadze in 2010, depicting Ali and Nino, star-crossed lovers and also main characters of the wonderful eponymous novel

and we took turns recounting
the details of lost time
and when we had both
admitted it all
we threw our heads back
and laughed until we cried
we laughed because the world
is absurd and beautiful and small

-- "Small World", Ani DiFranco

This was my second return to Georgia, after leaving when I finished two semesters of teaching with the volunteer program Teach and Learn with Georgia! in December of 2012. It was nice to be back, and strange, because just like my first return post-teaching, so much had changed. It shouldn't be a surprise, of course; Georgia is a country that is influenced by and is influencing a lot of things happening in its region, and there are many people in the country who are working to move things "forward", to progress the country's place in the international/European community and to improve things for people within. There are also a lot of people, it seems to me, who want very much for Georgia to stay the traditional and conservative place that is has been for so long.

There are some striking and very peculiar similarities between the Parliamentary election that I witnessed during my time in Georgia in October 2012 and the most recent American presidential election. In the week before the actual voting took place, a video was released to the national news outlets that showed atrocious human rights abuses being committed in Georgian prisons.

It was alleged that the current president Mikheil Saakashvili knew about them and had in fact ordered his rivals/opponents to be put in those prisons.

I remember I lived briefly with a host family during that semester, for the first month or so, and watching the disturbing footage of the conditions of the Georgian prisons alongside my kind but apolitical host mother, her two very young sons, and my police officer host father was a uniquely uncomfortable situation on multiple levels. People were truly outraged, and everywhere you went you could hear people discussing the video: my host family, in the teacher's room, at the cafes, on the bus. Some people told me, in hushed tones, that of course everyone already knew about the prisons, and the outrage was all a performance. Make of that what you will, I certainly still don't know how to.

And then the opposition party, Georgian Dream, won the election. The reaction was truly riotous; people were excited to see democracy in their country, which had experienced so much brutal authoritarianism. I remember fireworks being set off every night for months, happy shootings happening in the streets at dusk during the week following the election results, people talking excitedly about what it all meant.

 I think Georgian Dream won because of people's frustration with Mikheil Saakashvili's reforms and the people it had left behind. The uneducated, rural communities, the elderly, those who had held outmoded jobs or who had been ousted when Misha became president following the 2003 Rose Revolution: they found no place for themselves in his EU-leaning government, job/industry development that helped college-educated, English-speaking young people, or experimental architectural overhaul of metropolitan administrative/public spaces. [Seriously, check out this blog for what I'm talking about. I saw a lot of these in person, and the Mestia ones in particular were truly surreal, as everything surrounding the police station/city hall/bridge was just... a mountain village. Dirt roads, squat concrete houses, large yards full of vegetables. They had only just begun construction on the airport when I visited, and perched up on a high point a little ways outside of the village, even just the skeletal frame of what would become that building was perhaps oddest of them all.] This is just my opinion. There were also a lot of accusations of fraud, electoral and otherwise. Accusations of corruption.

The thing that's good to remember about Georgia, and maybe about a lot of places with tight-knit communities where hearsay gets passed around so easily and quickly it soon transforms into hallowed legend, and then soon after is cemented into "fact", is that a lot of people have a lot of ideas about what Misha did right and what he did wrong. Many told me he was a strong leader for Georgia during the 2008 conflict with Russia. I know that he formed and developed the program that brought me to this ancient culture and beautiful piece of earth (TLG). He made some major reforms. He left a lot to be desired, for many. The saying goes that there are two sides to every story, but here's a hot take: two sides is dangerously simplistic. There are dozens of sides to even the simplest stories, and with a story like Georgia's, that has been told and retold for millennia until it is honed into the strange and obtuse beast it is today, the "sides" are virtually countless.

So, here are some of those sides. These are just some of the things people told me while I was living in the Republic of Georgia:

Georgia invented wine. (Although there may actually be some evidence that this is true, or at least partially true.)

Georgia is the oldest converted Christian nation.

Joseph Stalin was a great man and is still a national hero. (He was originally from Georgia, born Ioseb Jughashvili in the village of Gori. You can visit it, there's a museum dedicated to him and a shrine built around his childhood home. Check out my blog post about it here, I talk about the museum about halfway down the page.)

Saakashvili fired every single member of the Georgian police force upon entering office, as they were considered to be one of the most corrupt in post-soviet Europe. He hired only young college graduates to replace them.

Saakashvili placed political opponents in prison indefinitely without trial.

He condoned torture.

He saved the country.

He ruined the country.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the "eccentric" billionaire who headed the opposition party (Georgian Dream), gave a satellite dish and washing machine to every single household of his childhood village. He had the streets and sidewalks of his village paved, and renovated the local schools.

Because Ivanishvili was rich, and he had donated generously to political and social causes in the past, he would make a good prime minister.

He was going to give every Georgian money. Just hand it out to 'em.

He was going to fix all the roads.

He was going to give jobs to the forgotten Georgians, who had been left behind by Saakashvili's United National Movement party.

He had gotten rich in Russia, therefore he would know how to turn Georgia into a rich country.

Does any of this sound familiar to you, after the 2016 elections? Imagine my surprise when the opinions that I had found understandable when being held by conservative, religious Georgians who were with limited internet access, leading difficult lives in rural villages in a country where democracy is really still in its infancy, started spewing forth from Americans last year.

Imagine my fear.

Damn, I hadn't meant to get so political in this post. Let's take a break, chill out, and look at some pictures of Ozurgeti, the town where my friend Kayla served her Peace Corps Response assignment. Ozurgeti is located in the region of Guria, which is right along the coast of the Black Sea, although her town is further inland, in an area that could fairly be described as hilly/mountainous. I visited at the end of June, after I finished my spring semester of school in Hungary. It's a great time to go! Everything is very green and hot and dusty but also sunny and lazy. It's alright.

One of my favorite foods in Georgia, which is in abundant supply because of members of the Orthodox religion who abstain from eating meat/animal products at various points throughout the year, is lobiani. It's a spiced bean mixture baked into bread. It goes down very nicely on a hot day with some ice-cold sparkling mineral water (Georgiaa, of course, as the country is famous for its water) and a strong beer, equally chilled.

An abandoned building in Ozurgeti that I was quite enamored with.

Feast #1.

An after-dinner stroll and playing around with my camera's aperture.

The public space in the city center being enjoyed on a warm evening.

"I love you! I love you! I love you!"

The next morning, we woke at the crack of dawn to catch the train down to the bustling metropolis of Batumi. It's a nice ride, moving slowly down through the hills and then alongside the coast.

The walk from the train station into town is about 45 minutes or so but on a sunny-ish day it's pretty enjoyable.

Reaching the port! And apparently incapable of taking a picture where this clock-tower does not appear crooked.

Some interesting street art.

After throwing our things down in the hostel (where we were booked in a dorm room that we discovered to be a literal hallway with no lockers for our stuff, with people were constantly passing through, at which pointed I coughed up the extra 40 GEL (~$16) for a private room), we headed over to the beach to soak up some sun. 

And in a stroke of lucky timing, we just happened to catch a exceptionally entertaining air show!

Feast #2.

There's a small bamboo garden in Batumi, in the park area that runs alongside the water. It's cool! (Literally and figuratively.)

That evening, I insisted we give the Ferris wheel a try. Kayla and I rode this creaky monster back during our first semester, on a weekend visit to Batumi in the spring of 2012, and I wanted to see if it remained as hilariously dangerous as I remembered. It does.

Afterwards, Kayla took me to a small bar, ChaCha Time, that does tcha-tcha cocktails. Having only tried tcha-tcha of the rank and stomach-ripping homemade variety, drinking a tcha-tcha old-fashioned was something of a revelation for me. It was great! We had perhaps more than we should have, and stumbled back to our hostel much later than we had planned. I wouldn't change a thing.

The next day, we went back to the city where I spent perhaps the most time during my year in Georgia (outside of Tbilisi, since I lived there for several months): Kutaisi. Kutaisi was at one point the second-biggest, second-most populated city in the country after Tbilisi. I think it may have fallen down to third-most populated, though, behind Batumi. It remains the legislative capital, however, and they were actually building this eyesore, the Parliament building, (nicknamed "the turtle" by locals) during my first semester, when I visited the city frequently. Here are some things people told me about that building:

Its construction was very visibly, very obviously behind schedule, and when Saakashvili's government decided to have an opening ceremony and set some arbitrary date in the spring, they had to rush to finish it. There were a few men who died in the dangerously hurried final days of construction.

It looks like a damn turtle.

That spring/summer in 2012 was extremely hot, and apparently people were sneaking through the temporary barriers put up around the construction site to swim in the rain puddles that had gathered in the man-made ponds around the building.

Moving on, here's a panorama of Kayla on the bus! This bus (# 10 I think?) was a reassuringly familiar sight in a sea of development; its doors remain as unable to fully close as ever, its faux-velvet seats and ragged curtains as shabby as I remember. Comforting, almost.

So after Kayla and I had taken our marshrutka from Batumi to Kutaisi (several very hot hours packed in like sardines among equally overheated strangers, ah now that's the Georgia I remember!), we found ourselves with a free afternoon in Kutaisi. I had one main goal: I wanted to hunt down my absolute favorite lobiani (and khatchapuri, and puri) shop in the city. It's not the easiest to find, it's somewhat hidden in the labyrinthine marketplace that wanders both indoors and out for about two blocks next to the McDonald's. But it is worth finding, if you have the will and the time.

Part of what I love about it (besides the fact that they make the best damn lobiani) is that the entire front of the shop is this massive window to the kitchen, where you can watch the bakers making the bread all day long.

TFW (external Youtube link that I promise is an apt comparison) and worth your time.

Later, Feast #3. (That's three in three days, for those keeping track. It was... not the most fun flight back to Hungary, the next morning.) This one with lobiani and khinkali, meat dumplings. And beer, of course.

Another Saakashvili-era building project: the fountain commemorating the Colchis heritage of the region.

Finally, after feasting and walking around the city for a while, Kayla and I found ourselves with yet more free time. Our flight, as with many arriving/departing Georgia, was not until about 4 am the next day. We had not booked a hostel/hotel/anywhere to stay, thinking we could get ourselves to the airport and sleep there. (For the record, I AM FINISHED SPENDING THE NIGHT IN AIRPORTS. I'M THIRTY DAMN YEARS OLD, WHY DO I KEEP DOING THIS TO MYSELF?)

In any case, we didn't do that because we found the taxi price to the airport to be highway robbery and the summer night was mild enough that we just decided to be vagabonds instead. So we whiled away a few hours by climbing one of the city hills to look at Bagrati Cathedral. I visited this church early on during my stay in 2012, and as you can see from the photos here, it was undergoing conservation during most of the year that I was there. So I was happy to finally be able to see it in its full glory!

It was peaceful up there, just the wind and the remote sounds of the city and some couples walking around. A group of teenagers sitting far from us, on the rolling, grassy field in front of the church, playing Georgian folk songs and singing together. The lights down below twinkled, the lobiani settled peaceably in my stomach (for a time), and I even managed not to worry about where we would spend the early morning hours until the shuttle we'd scheduled to pick us up would take us to the airport.

Long story slightly less long: we figured it out, but only just barely and the results were not stellar. Obviously. It was kind of destined to be one of those nights I think back on with wonderment at how monumentally stubborn and stupid I'm capable of being sometimes. Which is to say: it was a mess. But we survived. This is the end of many of my Georgia tales.

Much later, I watched a lovely, gentle summer sunrise after I settled myself into my plane seat and then followed with rapt amusement as the other bedraggled passengers stumbled across the tarmac to climb aboard.

It should probably come as no surprise that I slept, fitfully but without truly waking, for most of the flight.

As for the politics of Georgia these days... well, it's interesting. Ivanishvili retired from political office in 2013, only about a year after his election. Here is something people told me:

He was too thin-skinned for the job. He hated the constant criticism, that people weren't just unthinkingly thankful for his benevolent presence, that they expected him to fulfill the promises he'd made and enact change in the system. That he'd promised to fix things and when they went unfixed, people turned on him just like they did Saakashvili.

Does this sound familiar to you?

There might be a lesson in here, I don't know. The parallel is far from perfect, but I still think it warrants some passing thought, perhaps.

Here is something I read on Wikipedia:

According to political scientist Kornely Kakachia, he [Ivanishvili] is "outside democratic control, outside institutional checks and balances, yet he is ultimately calling the shots, which puts Georgia in a vulnerable position both vis-à-vis democracy and foreign policy."

Somehow I doubt, were our president to resign, that this would be the case. So. Imperfect parallel. Still interesting, though.

What will happen to Saakashvili remains to be seen. He's definitely not having an easy go of things in Ukraine right now, and it's truly unclear what his future will hold. I honestly don't know if the accusations against him were true, just as I don't know if he really overhauled the country as thoroughly as his legend says he did. I know what I saw with my eyes, I know what people told me. I know what I've read in the news, and I know how news can be influenced. I know that my very presence in that country was a testament to the belief the man held that moving Georgia closer to the west was the way "forward" for his country. I know the backlash he received for that, and the backlash to the backlash and the backlash to that backlash and so on forever and ever, perhaps. All of us lashing back until we've utterly forgotten the meaning or the value of the original idea, and all the ensuing ideas, just reacting without thought or reason.

As for me, I still believe in the young people of Georgia. I met a lot of exceptionally cool, smart, motivated people while I was living there. I've seen news about them doing their best to improve their country, and their own lives. It's an old story, Georgia's, older than my country's and older than many of the countries' of Europe; perhaps it gains something for its being so, perhaps it loses something. In any case, it's one I will continue to follow.

The place has a way of worming itself inside of you, by way of love or resentment or both, and before you know it you carry it around inside of you for all the days of your life.

Kind of like home.