In the middle of December, I spent a few days in Tbilisi. I had wanted to visit Georgia for a long time, and now I finally got the opportunity to start exploring it. And it so happened that it was at a time of political protests, about which I can now report on from the ground.
The City
Tbilisi really charmed me. The old parts of the city reminded me of my beloved hidden corners of the old Constantinople: winding streets with dilapidated houses and poor, but all the more friendly people. I wandered through these streets the whole weekend, peering into concealed backyards with winding wooden staircases and courtyard galleries, lines with washed clothes, gnarled platan trees and pergolas wrapped in vines with yellow leaves and over-ripen blue grapes.
Just like in the old districts of Istanbul, gentrification unfortunately started to bite also among the old houses in Tbilisi. Fortunately, hipster restaurants, tourist shops and newly rebuilt facades are still limited to one or two streets. Just turn a corner, and you find yourself in a whole different world. It may be decaying, but it has – at least for me – a strong magic, authenticity and neighborhood togetherness.
The weather was drizzly, with the cold air getting under one’s skin. Thus, I didn’t meet many people outside. Those few on streets were mostly hurrying home, laden with bags of food bought from street vendors. It’s a tangerine and khaki season right now, so the orange color shone brightly through their plastic bags. In contrast, the people passing by looked tired and sad; even my greeting usually failed to bring a smile.
However, I managed to lighten up this somber mood during several nice encounters. For example, with a toothless man who had just said goodbye to his two similar buddies on the corner and, having noticed me taking photo of a graffiti on one of the houses, invited me to follow him, saying he had something to show me. He led me through a passageway into a courtyard – assuring me that I don’t need to be afraid – that resembled a surrealist gallery. All the walls and corners were either decorated with colorful paintings or covered with framed photographs, paintings and mirrors. I asked who had created this learned that it was “just a neighbor who had a penchant for it”.
My loveliest encounter had a similar context. While wandering through a poor part of the old town, I spotted a pavilion with a mosaic of pictures hanging on the wall. As I approached the house, I saw that the entrance to the dark staircase was open, and a hand-scrawled message hung on the plaster chipped wall, “gallery, free entrance” So I climbed the rickety, wooden stairs to the gallery. The peeling walls were decorated with pictures, ranging from miniatures on pieces of hardboard to larger once on canvas stretched in a simple frame of recycled planks. Although colorful, they were nice and tasteful, in contrast to the tourist pleasing kitsch in the city centre.
After a while, a little boy appeared, spotted me and called inside the apartment “tourist!”. A moment later his dad, a shy long-haired and slightly stooped man, came out, muttered a greeting and greeted me in Russian, mentioning that it was his wife who painted the pictures. She appeared next, in her home clothes, a little shy and without a make-up. You could see she was tired and struggling with poverty. I bought some pictures from her, we spoke a bit and exchanged contacts. Her name is Nini Bakashvili and you can find Instagram feed here https://www.instagram.com/art_ninibak. And if you ever visit Tbilisi, consider visiting her gallery https://maps.app.goo.gl/CgjsPoQvVYXE3AKA8.
The Museums
While wandering around the city, I also visited two local museums.
The first was a photography museum. Like many other institutions there – including for example notaries – it is located in a dark passageway of an unmaintained building. A place into which few people in my country would dare to venture. Admission was free and the whole institution seemed to be run by a bunch of enthusiasts.
On the walls of the modest room hung a couple of dozen larger prints that, frankly speaking, were not that great. But several publications featuring leading Georgian photographers were stacked on a table by the window, and these were really worth it. I spent most of my time in the museum flipping through them. One contained excellent black-and-white images of Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting small human joys against the backdrop of depressing reality of the Soviet regime; another showed the hard and simple life in a Caucasus village; a third reproduced modern color images and remarkable collages. A great experience!
My second visit was to the National Museum, a magnificent building almost directly opposite the Parliament. On its top floor, above rooms filled with fossils, prehistoric and ancient excavations, and displays of medieval jewelry and clothing and weapons, is a permanent exhibition of the Soviet occupation of Georgia.
Its concept and bears some resemblance to Moscow’s Museum of Gulag History, which I visited in 2019. (I was “temporarily” closed last month. The reasoning? An official inspection found alleged flaws in the building’s fire safety.) Around the walls of the large, dark room, are sections with photographs, temporary documents and lists of names of victims. These are complemented by stories of terror, repression, deportations and mass murders of Georgian intellectuals, political leaders as well as rural residents.
To make the gloomy atmosphere of the space even darker, there are eight authentic prison doors placed in the open space, along with other objects related to the horrible events described. At the entrance to the installation, there is a section of a wagon-car in which the Chekists executed their prisoners. Its rough wooden planks are riddled with bullets.
Georgia’s population was just under three million in 1920. Of that, almost half a million disappeared during the Soviet repression (80,000 people executed and another 400,000 deported, of those most were subsequently murdered or died in the gulags). Another nearly half a million men were killed at the front during the Second World War.
The figures are terrifying. But it is even heavier to look at the individual faces and read the fates that the exhibition shows on each panel. A monstrous trial of a group of students aged just 17; the portraits of some of the many thousands of leading scientists and teachers executed in the 1937-1938 purges (nearly 4,000 death sentences were directly ordered by Stalin himself); the faces of the victims of the massacre during the military crackdown on protest in 1989.
The Soviet occupation is not the only dark episode in Georgia’s relations with its neighboring Russia. In the modern history, it experienced first betrayals at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Georgia, as a small group of several kingdoms, was subjected to attacks by both the Ottoman and Persian empires for a long time. In 1783, the Georgian king entered into an alliance with tsarina Catherine in the hope that Russia, as an Orthodox, Christian empire, it would protect its small fellow country. But the moment things got hot in 1795 when the Shah of Persia gave Georgia an ultimatum, the Tsarist army withdrew, whereupon the Persians captured and burned Tbilisi. Six years later, in 1801, Russia – in violation of the signed agreements – sent its army back and annexed Georgia it to the empire.
Georgia had a brief spell as a free democratic state between 1918, when it broke away from Bolshevik revolution-torn Russia, and 1921, when the Soviet Union – again in violation of agreements made just a year before, recognizing Georgia’s independence – invaded and occupied it after a month of hopeless resistance by the local army. It subsequently incorporated Georgia into the Soviet Union in 1922.
Not surprisingly, current events evoke in Georgian people memories of historical suffering and repeated invasions by its large imperial neighbor. Russia’s increasing pressure to incorporate Georgia into its sphere of direct influence – even more so with the current Putin’s regime – is quite understandably a frightening prospect.
The Protests
Mass protests are still taking place in Tbilisi. They started shortly after the rigged and unfair national elections held on 26 October 2024. Two days later, the prime minister of the ruling and winning party Georgian Dream announced that he would suspend accession talks with the EU, sparking a big wave of protests. Georgians took to the streets, where they were brutally attacked by the riot police who, among other things, targeted journalists.
Public protests in Tbilisi have continued every day since then. The people I spoke to at the protest rallies refused to recognize the legitimacy of the newly elected parliament. Their main concern in the short term was that the new assembly of deputies, where the pro-Russian Georgian Dream has a majority, will elect a new president to replace the current, pro-European president, Salome Zurabishvili. The election by the deputies happened to take place yesterday (14 December) and indeed, appointed Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former soccer player and a Euro-sceptic prominent.
During the day on Saturday 7th December, I encountered dozens of protesters outside the parliament building. Some were drumming on the steel barriers that protected the entrances to the Parliament. Other groups walked around with flags or blew whistles. Couple of other people gathered and lit candles at a monument outside parliament. It commemorates the massacre of civilians by the Soviet army on 9 April 1989, in which 21 citizens were killed and hundreds more injured. Even then, the protests were for Georgia’s independence. The police placed cars with flashing lights on every corner and dozens of officers stood in clusters around the parliament, but they did not intervene. After dark, I went back to my hotel to get some sleep, as I was exhausted from a sleepless night and travel the day before.
During Sunday, the main street looked similar, but the area in front of the parliament (including the monument) were fenced off and cordoned by police. Two cranes were installing a steel skeleton in the shape of a cone – a giant Christmas tree. It may be there every year, but this time it seemed like a great excuse to push the protesters out of the area and not let them in. I chatted with a couple of students with flags. They told me to definitely come in the evening, preferably around 9pm.
So I went exploring further the old city and came back at dusk. The situation had changed considerably: now there were already hundreds of demonstrators and they had retaken the area in front of the parliament. The structure of the Christmas tree was covered with green branches only at its top, while activists were climbing the lower half and hanging portraits of the badly beaten people from the first days of the protests. Improvised posters appeared with a bloodied Christmas tree and the slogan that the government had prepared a bloody Christmas for the Georgian people this year.
At one point, a man who had climbed high up on the structure started to shout something. From the crowd’s worried reactions and response, I understood that he was threatening to jump and commit a suicide. The crowd began shouting back at him to talk him out of it, and several activists swiftly climbed up to catch him; they then safely brought him down.
The spirit of togetherness and solidarity was felt at almost every turn. One lady came with a banner written in English and Georgian, “I protect journalists, they protect us”. Another handed out pictures of beaten demonstrators. Young activists with scarves over their faces were arranging security; they came to check me several times to see who am I and why am I taking pictures of the protesters, suspecting me to be a Russian agent.
The crowd was still dominated by young people, but over the course of the evening it became truly multigenerational. There were families with children who brought their hand-painted posters and then took photos with them in front of the parliament. Elderly people joined in individually, or with their friends. A male choir stood in a circle in front of the Kashveti church and sang lovely polyphonic national songs.
The street was lined with dozens of vendors with small stalls that quickly adapted their offer to the demand: European and Georgian flags, whistles and vuvuzelas, even ski goggles and protective masks with filters in case of a police tear gas attack.
When the ninth hour came and I looked around, I was electrified. While I was wading through the protesters in front of the parliament, the entire broad avenue (named after the medieval Georgian poet Rustaveli) got filled with a huge crowd, I was not able to see the end. The number of people, by my estimate, was well over a hundred thousand. It was beautiful, powerful, inspiring.
What was missing, however, at the protest was some kind of a clearer direction. A leader, sharp slogans, or political demands. Not a single speaker appeared during the whole evening. Not one representative of the protests, or the political opposition, spoke. Nor did people shout any slogans – at most, they blew their whistles and vuvuzelas. There were no banners with slogans in the crowd either, just Georgian and European flags. Only at one point did someone randomly start to beam laser signs such as “Georgia is occupied by Russia” or “Illegitimate Parliament” or “Impose sanctions” on the façade of the parliament. After a while, even these texts were replaced by the bat symbol from Batman.
This lack of direction and focus – perhaps even cluelessness – is undoubtedly a major weakness of the movement, which still manages to draw hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in Tbilisi. It is probably mirroring a similar state of the fragmented opposition (no less than four different pro-European coalitions ran against the ruling party). This is a great pity, because the pro-European forces are facing enough external challenges already.
I departed from Tbilisi enchanted by the city and its people, and inspired by the civil protests. As much as I would love to see all those people to succeed and have a better future, I also left with a heaviness that I spotted in the eyes of some of the activists. They already knew that their chances against so many odds are rather slim.
