issue#1518

Issue no: 1518

• SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025 • PUBLISHED WEEKLY

FOCUS ON GEORGIANGERMAN RELATIONS Tbilisi Mayor and Georgian PM slam German Ambassador, accuse him of meddling in internal affairs

PAGE 6

PRICE: GEL 2.50

In this week’s issue...

Tbilisoba 2025 to Take Place on September 20–21 NEWS PAGE 2

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Georgia's Geopolitical Balancing Act POLITICS PAGE 6

ADB Issues Georgia’s First Sovereign Loan in National Currency BUSINESS PAGE 7

Georgia’s Historic EuroBasket Journey Ends in Quarter-Final Loss to Finland SPORTS PAGE 8

The Opening of the Anagi Art Foundation: The Center That Calls Itself Forward Ambassador to Georgia Peter Fischer. Source: interpressnews

CULTURE PAGE 9

“A Georgian Nightmare”: US Lawmakers Sound Alarm on Georgia’s When the Sky Plays Along: Music and Atmosphere at Slide Toward Authoritarianism and Anti-American Alliances the 7th Tsinandali Festival

BY TEAM GT

CULTURE PAGE 10

O

nce hailed as a beacon of democracy in the post-Soviet region, Georgia is now at the center of growing concern in Washington.

At a recent US Helsinki Commission hearing titled “From Partner to Problem: Georgia’s Anti-American Shift,” lawmakers voiced deep alarm over what they described as Georgia’s sharp turn away from democracy, and from its longstanding relationship with the United States.

Leading the charge was Congressman Joe Wilson, co-chair of the Commission, who didn’t mince words: “The government of Georgian Dream, which falsified elections, is dragging the Georgian people toward dictatorship,” he said. “They are stripping away sovereignty, condemning citizens to poverty, and betraying traditional allies, including the United States.”

According to Wilson, the ruling Georgian Dream party has become the architect of an authoritarian system; one that jails opposition leaders, attacks peaceful protesters, silences independent media, and consolidates power into a one-party state.

Continued on page 6 Congressman Joe Wilson, co-chair of the Helsinki Commission. Source: sakartvelosambebi

Contained in Denial: A Family in White, an Audience in Headphones, and a City in Ruins — Mud at Open Space CULTURE PAGE 11 Prepared for Georgia Today Business by

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2

NEWS

GEORGIA TODAY

SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

Tbilisi Completes GEL 24 Million Rehabilitation of Key Vake Streets A previous Tbilisoba. Source: Georgian Journal

Tbilisoba 2025 to Take Place on September 20–21

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

K

akha Kaladze announced during the municipal government session that Tbilisi’s historical cultural festival, ‘Tbilisoba’, will be held on September 20–21 this year.

The festival, traditionally hosted in early October, was moved forward due to Georgia’s local self-government elections scheduled for October 4. Despite the change of date, the celebration will still hold its vibrant program across several central locations, including Orbeliani Square and Rike Park.

Kaladze stated that the two-day festivities will combine concerts, exhibi-

tions, theater performances and familyfriendly activities.

On September 20, the State Ceremonies Palace will host the annual Honorary Citizens of Tbilisi Award ceremony, broadcast on national television. The following day, September 21, a grand concert will take place at Europe Square starting at 20:00.

Apart from these headline events, visitors will enjoy a rich variety of cultural experiences. Orbeliani Square will showcase exhibitions, theatrical shows, children’s programs and entertainment throughout both days. Abanotubani will host the traditional ‘Tbilisi Diversity’ exhibition-sale while Rike Park will offer children’s performances and evening concerts with well-known Georgian performers.

Poland Invokes NATO Article 4 After Shooting Down Russian Drones

Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze on the new road in Vake

BY TEAM GT

A

large-scale infrastructure project has been completed in Tbilisi with the full rehabilitation of Kakutsa Cholokashvili and Giorgi Tsereteli streets in the Vake district.

The works, covering a 13,000-squaremetre area from Vake Park to Tskhneti Highway N6, included a complete renewal of underground utilities and the installation of modern road infrastructure.

Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, accompanied by Deputy Mayor Giorgi Tkemaladze and Assembly Chairman Zurab Abashidze, inspected the completed project.

“The conditions here were extremely poor. We began by fully renewing and

reorganizing the underground utilities.

Within the project, we also installed underground waste bins, lighting poles, and carried out landscaping. Despite the challenges and 24-hour shifts, this project has been completed thanks to the patience of local residents and the hard work of our teams. We will continue to develop and build the city, as many more important projects are planned,” said Kaladze.

The rehabilitation included the replacement of water supply, sewerage, drainage, and gas networks, as well as the underground placement of electrical cables. Pavements and asphalt surfaces were laid, and a reinforced concrete retaining wall was built near Vake cemetery for safety.

Modern, energy-efficient LED lighting was installed along both streets, together with around 40 underground waste bins,

new road markings, traffic signs, and smart traffic lights. The infrastructure was also adapted for people with special needs.

Landscaping completed the project, with irrigation systems, 180 new tree seedlings, and 2,100 square meters of grass cover added along the streets.

The GEL 24 million project was carried out by the Urban Infrastructure Development Service, the Transport and Urban Development Agency, Tbilservice Group, and the Environmental Protection Service. The renovated streets now link the rehabilitated Chavchavadze Avenue with Tskhneti Highway, creating a modern, fully organized transport and residential zone.

Tbilisi City Hall says the new infrastructure ensures greater comfort and safety for pedestrians, public transport, and private vehicles.

Georgian Pension Fund Assets Surpass GEL 7.4 Billion

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

Image: A drone or similar object struck a residential building in Wyryki in eastern Poland but nobody was injured, local officials said/DW

BY TEAM GT

P

olish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned on Wednesday that Poland is facing its greatest risk of direct conflict since World War II, following the interception of Russian drones that entered Polish airspace.

The NATO member state confirmed that its air defense systems shot down multiple drones launched from Russia, underscoring fears that Moscow’s war against Ukraine is increasingly spilling over into allied territory.

In response, Warsaw has formally requested consultations under Article 4 of the NATO treaty, a mechanism allowing any member to convene discussions when it feels its security, territorial integrity, or political independence is under threat. Article 4 has been invoked only a handful of times in NATO’s history, most notably by Turkey in 2012 and 2015 in relation to the Syrian conflict, and by several Eastern European states following Russia’s

full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Poland has not been this close to a potential open conflict since 1945,” Tusk stated, highlighting the severity of the threat. He stressed that Poland’s borders, which double as NATO’s eastern flank, are increasingly exposed to Russian aggression, whether through drone incursions, disinformation campaigns, or cyberattacks.

The incident comes amid a broader escalation of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities near the Polish border. Several times since the war began, stray Russian weapons have entered Polish territory, including the deadly 2022 missile strike in the village of Przewodów, which killed two civilians.

By requesting Article 4 consultations, Poland seeks stronger guarantees of collective defense, enhanced air-defense coordination, and a unified Western response to Russia’s provocations. The move also signals Warsaw’s determination to ensure that NATO’s eastern front remains secure as the war in Ukraine drags on into its third year.

T

he Pension Fund of Georgia has reported that citizens’ pension savings exceeded GEL 7.4 billion by the end of August, with total income generated since the program’s launch surpassing GEL 1.9 billion.

The Fund declared that August was an especially strong month for investment portfolios, fueled by favorable global market conditions. Rising stock prices,

driven by strong quarterly corporate earnings, an improving global economic outlook and expectations of looser U.S. Federal Reserve policy, contributed to the growth.

Among the Fund’s three investment strategies, the dynamic portfolio recorded the highest monthly gain at 1.98%, followed by the balanced portfolio at 1.51% and the conservative portfolio at 1.22%.

Performance in 2025 so far has also been positive across all portfolios: • Dynamic: 20% • Balanced: 11%

• Conservative: 29% Since their launch in August 2023, the investment options have delivered strong long-term returns. The dynamic portfolio leads with an annualized return of 13.8%, compared with 12.7% for the balanced option and 11.6% for the conservative one.

The pension scheme continues to expand its reach, with 1,667,000 registered participants as of August 31. To date, 22,843 individuals have already drawn on their accumulated pensions, receiving a combined GEL 100.3 million in payouts.

Illegal Slaughterhouse and Unsafe Meat Products Found in Georgia

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

T

he National Food Agency has found significant violations in Georgia’s food safety sector, identifying an illegal slaughterhouse and multiple cases of non-compliant meat products in Shida Kartli, Kvemo Kartli and Imereti.

As part of its nationwide campaign to monitor high-risk foods such as meat

and meat products, the agency conducted inspections across slaughterhouses, sales outlets and processing facilities. Samples taken from Shida Kartli’s retail network were sent to an accredited laboratory where violations were confirmed.

One case involved frozen kebab produced by New Gemo 2019 LLC (located in Gori, Rustaveli 10), dated August 25, 2025, with an expiration date of October 25, 2025. The company was ordered to withdraw the product from circulation and the agency’s authorized offic-

ers supervised its removal from the market.

Additional critical violations were identified at an illegal slaughterhouse in Samtredia (operated by Roin Burkadze) and at a meat outlet in the village of Talaveri, Bolnisi Municipality (operated

by Rovshan Gyulmametov). Inspectors found meat from cattle slaughtered without veterinary oversight, lacking the mandatory health marking.

The National Food Agency carried out more than 5,100 state inspections across the country, uncovering 449 violations.

POLITICS

GEORGIA TODAY SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

3

Ukraine Latest: Russian Drones Violate Polish Airspace as War Intensifies across Ukraine Frontlines COMPILED BY ANA DUMBADZE

T

he war in Ukraine took a dangerous turn this week when Russian drones crossed into NATO territory, violating Poland’s airspace in what Warsaw described as a grave act of aggression. The incident, which forced Polish and allied NATO aircraft into action, underscored the increasingly volatile nature of the conflict as heavy fighting raged across Ukraine’s eastern front, Russian strikes battered cities, and Kyiv’s drone campaign disrupted vital oil infrastructure deep inside Russia.

Polish officials say multiple drones entered their territory during a massive Russian bombardment of Ukraine.

Poland’s air force confirmed it had shot down hostile aerial objects, describing them as drones that strayed across the border. In response, Polish and allied aircraft, along with ground-based air defense systems and radar reconnaissance units, were placed on the “highest state of readiness.”

While investigations are ongoing, if confirmed to be of Russian origin, the episode would mark the first time Poland has directly engaged Russian assets in its skies since the full-scale war began in 2022.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk moved quickly to reassure citizens, while escalating Poland’s security posture. He announced that the country’s two remaining border crossings with Belarus would be closed at midnight on Thursday, citing a direct threat to Polish citizens as Russia and Belarus prepare for their “Zapad-2025” joint military exercises.

The drills, beginning Friday, are report-

edly to include simulations of nuclear weapon use and the deployment of the new Russian-made Oreshnik intermediate-range hypersonic missile. Neighboring NATO members Lithuania and Latvia, deeply alarmed by the planned maneuvers, have also begun reinforcing their borders.

The heightened tension coincides with a brutal week of fighting on the battlefield. In one of the most devastating single strikes in recent months, a Russian air attack killed 24 elderly Ukrainians in the village of Yarova, 24 kilometers from Sloviansk, as they waited to collect their pensions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack and reiterated his call for Kyiv’s allies to urgently strengthen air defense supplies. He warned that Moscow interprets the West’s failure to impose harsher sanctions as tacit permission to prolong and intensify its war.

The skies above Kyiv again came under assault as Russia launched a wave of drones at the capital early Wednesday.

Ukraine’s military administration said air defense units managed to repel many of the incoming drones, though fragments caused damage and injuries in some districts. At the same time, Russia reported that its own air defense units destroyed 122 Ukrainian drones overnight, highlighting the expanding drone war that now stretches deep into Russian territory.

One such Ukrainian strike proved deadly in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, where regional authorities confirmed that a man was killed after a drone crashed and exploded. Elsewhere, Ukrainian drone and missile attacks have inflicted serious damage on Russia’s energy infrastructure. Based on calculations by Reuters, Ukraine’s campaign against oil refineries and export facilities has

Polish border guard officers stand at the Poland-Belarusian border in July.

Photo by Czarek Sokolowski/AP

knocked out at least 17 percent of Russia’s oil processing capacity—roughly 1.1 million barrels per day. These strikes have disrupted exports and forced Moscow to divert resources toward the protection and repair of critical facilities.

Russia, however, remains capable of mounting large-scale offensives. Its military has intensified operations along several sectors of the front, especially in the Donetsk and Sumy regions. Ukrainian officials report that Russian forces are attempting to press forward in rural zones near Sloviansk and Pokrovsk, using glide bombs, artillery, and waves of infantry assaults. The attack on Yarova illustrated the deadly effect of these glide bombs, which can strike from beyond the reach of many of Ukraine’s short-range defenses. Despite high Russian casualties—Ukraine claims hundreds per day in some areas—the Kremlin’s troops continue to push

incrementally forward.

On the Ukrainian side, counterattacks have sought to blunt Russian momentum.

Over the past month, Ukrainian forces claimed to have regained territory at a rate five times higher than the land lost, particularly in parts of Donetsk. Analysts, however, note that Russia’s overall territorial gains still outweigh Ukraine’s, with Moscow slowly consolidating control in contested zones. The Institute for the Study of War recently estimated that Russia captured more than 220 square miles of territory in August alone, though the pace of advance slowed slightly compared to earlier months.

The human cost is staggering. Along with the 24 killed in Yarova, dozens more civilians were reported injured across Ukraine this week from missile and drone strikes that set residential buildings ablaze, destroyed infrastructure, and knocked out power supplies. In Odesa

and Zaporizhzhia, waves of drones caused significant damage to port facilities, complicating Ukraine’s efforts to keep grain exports flowing.

The war’s growing spillover into NATO territory has intensified diplomatic activity. Poland arrested a suspected Belarusian spy and announced the expulsion of a Belarusian diplomat accused of “supporting aggressive action” against Poland. Lithuania, which conducted military drills earlier this month with Poland and other NATO allies, has pledged to reinforce its borders with Belarus and Russia during the Zapad exercises. Western officials fear that Russia could use the drills as cover for provocations similar to this week’s drone incursion into Poland.

At the international level, calls for deescalation are growing even as battlefield violence worsens. US President Donald Trump confirmed that he plans to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the coming days, part of Washington’s ongoing effort to explore the possibility of a peace deal. The White House has not disclosed details of the proposed talks, but Ukrainian officials remain cautious, wary of any settlement that could cement Russian territorial gains.

For now, the war shows no signs of abating. Russia continues to deploy massive resources into the fight, while Ukraine leans heavily on Western support for weapons, ammunition, and air defenses.

The drone war is intensifying, striking deep into both nations and increasingly spilling into neighboring states. The violation of Poland’s airspace may mark a new threshold, one that risks drawing NATO more directly into the conflict.

As both sides trade blows, the frontlines remain unstable, the civilian toll rises, and Europe braces for what could be an even more perilous phase of the war.

4

POLITICS

GEORGIA TODAY

SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

The Scars You Can’t See: David Wood on War, Moral Injury, and the Human Cost of Conflict INTERVIEW BY VAZHA TAVBERIDZE

F

ew journalists have witnessed the worst of human conflict with the clarity – and moral unease – of David Wood. A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, he has spent more than three decades embedded with soldiers on front lines, from remote battlefields to bomb-shattered capitals, documenting not only the physical toll of battle but its corrosive effect on the human spirit. Raised a pacifist, Wood did not set out to cover wars, yet found himself in Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq, confronting scenes of such brutality that they left scars of their own. His reporting has helped bring the concept of “moral injury” – the deep psychic wound caused when one’s own moral code is violated – into the public conversation.

“To be in war is to be morally injured,” Wood tells RFL’s Georgian Service. “We all walk around with a sense of what's right in life. It's our own moral compass, our collection of beliefs, and we learn it as kids from our parents, our religion, from elders. As we go through life, we collect a sense of what's right. And in war, that sense of what's right, your own moral beliefs, are violated every day, every minute, all the time. That’s what war is. What do you do with that? How do you respond? How do you endure? I think that's especially germane to the war in Ukraine. I can't imagine the degree of moral injury among not just Ukrainian fighters, but the civilian population.”

HOW RELATABLE IS SUFFERING FROM A MORAL INJURY, MORAL SCARS, TO YOU PERSONALLY? Very relatable. When I was growing up, we believed that war wasn't effective.

We studied Gandhi and the power of nonviolence. I was quite taken with that idea of nonviolent resistance. I didn't choose to become a war correspondent.

I was working at Time magazine in Boston and Chicago, and then they sent me to Nairobi to cover Africa. What the job ended up being was to cover all the wars that were going on.

I found two things right off the bat.

One was that fear is physical. I was in a little village that was hit with an air strike.

And there were bombs and strafing and rockets, and a lot of people were killed, and I had trouble standing up. My knees just turned to jelly. And I didn't understand that about fear before: how physical it is.

I had grown up in a very peaceful place, in a loving family, and I always thought or assumed that the world was a good place. And then I got to an African village. The enemy came and killed a lot

It's time, even while the fighting is going on, to think about the post-war and what that's going to look like

of people — men, women and children — and then set the fields on fire so that the bodies burned.

I found a letter years later, written to my parents about that trip that I took, and I said, “Really, nothing much happened.” Back then, I couldn't find the words to describe what I felt. I had nightmares about it, and I couldn't speak about it for a long time. I had no way to process that. But one reaction I had was that I wanted a battalion of Marines to come wreak vengeance on the people who did this. I wanted revenge.

The other thing that I found about those early experiences in war was that it was exciting. And this is a dirty little secret of people who cover war. It's exciting, it's thrilling, it's dramatic, it's great journalism. And that was sort of a wakeup call for me. I'm still a pacifist, but I saw why people do this. I saw the other side as well, very much so.

There can be no lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia without some kind of atonement from Russia for what it's done

THERE WAS A SMALL BUT VERY TELLING SENTENCE IN YOUR OWN BIO WHERE YOU WRITE THAT “DAVID WOOD HERE HAS BEEN SCARED MUCH OF HIS PROFESSIONAL LIFE.” SHORT, BUT TELLING. Well, it’s true. I don't think you can be in war and not be scared. What I found out as a journalist is that my worry always was: “How can I convey what's going on here?” I have spent my career writing about individual soldiers. Who are they?

Why do they do what they do? What is it like for them?

It’s hard to do in the middle of a war, to assemble your cast, to capture some of the dialogue, to capture the flavor of what's going on. What does it smell like?

What does it feel like? And so in that sense, yes, I've been scared. But I've also been very busy.

HOW STEEP IS THE MOUNTAIN OF THE WAR’S SENSELESSNESS THAT YOU HAVE TO CLIMB WHILE STILL TRYING TO CARRY OUT YOUR PROFESSIONAL DUTIES? I learned from combat soldiers that, by and large, they are less interested in the course of the war than they are with what's right in front of them — their own little piece of it: as far as they could see or yell, that’s sort of their world.

When I was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, my editors back in Washington were always asking, “What do soldiers think about the war? Do they think it's going well or not?” I said, they can't answer that question. That's not what their daily life is. Their daily life is: “How do I avoid getting killed, and how soon can I go home?” That’s the whole thing.

I leave it to others — politicians and generals and strategists — to figure out what the course of the war is. But for the individual soldier, it's very self-centered and local.

YOU’VE SPENT MUCH OF YOUR CAREER DOCUMENTING THE PHYSICAL, MORAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF WAR, MOSTLY IN AMERICAN WARS. WHAT STRIKES YOU WHEN YOU OBSERVE RUSSIA’S WAR IN UKRAINE? What strikes me about the war in Ukraine, what makes it different, is the stark reality of Russia's unprovoked invasion, but also Russia's focusing violence on civilians: on apartment buildings, on hospitals and schools. The scale of brutality is beyond anything I have witnessed over my 35-year-long career, and I think it is unique in the annals of modern warfare.

David Wood, ASU Future of War Fellow. Source: newamerica

My reaction, as I watch this unfold, is this creeping, ever-growing fear for what happens to the Ukrainian people. Because the suffering that I've seen, the moral injury that I've seen over those long years, pales in comparison to what people in Ukraine are experiencing, year after year after year.

Bad things happen in war, and you can't escape it. Children are killed, people are killed or maimed, society is damaged.

The collective injury of those events in Ukraine really beggars belief. It would be hard to imagine if one asked you to, and yet we need not imagine, as we are watching it with our own eyes every day.

It's practically broadcast live.

Eventually, the war will end, as all wars do. The problem is that real peace depends on the injured overcoming those moral injuries and accepting the humanity of those on the other side. Unless that happens, there can't be real peace. And I worry how people will deal with that.

HOW TALL AN ORDER IS THAT TO ASK OF THE UKRAINIANS? It's huge. There has to be an element of forgiveness. How could I ask anyone in Ukraine to forgive the Russians for what they've done? It's beyond reckoning.

One thing that I have seen that can help is a truth commission. It’s a concept which gives a platform for people to relate their experiences. People telling their stories can be so powerful. It can be mending.

So maybe that lies in Ukraine’s future.

But I do worry what the future holds — even after the fighting stops.

WHAT OF THOSE RUSSIAN SOLDIERS WHO BELIEVE IN THE WAR, WHO BUY INTO THE PROPAGANDA, WHO EMBRACE RUSSIA’S IMPERIAL VISION AS A RIGHTEOUS CAUSE? Well, I think it's unavoidable that they have moral injuries too, but what they do with that is something different.

To bring an example of what happened in Africa: if you find yourself in combat and you kill a child who has picked up a gun and is a threat, in whatever circumstances, that's a moral injury. And I have to think that any human being who finds himself doing that experiences some kind of moral injury.

For those Russian soldiers who have bought into the propaganda, who believe

that they are on this historic mission of extending the Russian Empire, and that this is a glorious thing to be doing — I guess you can see how they would justify some of the horrible things that they've done.

But what happens when they go home and they're remembering: “Oh man... I killed two elderly women in the street for no reason? Was that a heroic act in defense of Russia's imperial glory? Did I make Russia greater by shooting Ukrainian kids?”

A lot of moral injury happens after soldiers return home. Once they're out of the combat zone, out of that moral universe where you can kill a child and that's somehow okay; back in civilian society where killing a child is an unspeakable horror.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS, MANY OF THEM YOUNG CONSCRIPTS OR FORCIBLY MOBILIZED MEN, SENT TO FIGHT A WAR THEY MAY NOT UNDERSTAND OR BELIEVE IN. HOW DEEP WILL THE PSYCHIC DAMAGE RUN AMONG THOSE RANKS? HOW DIFFERENT IS IT FROM WHAT WE’VE SEEN IN WESTERN CONFLICTS? The West does not do that. At least, doesn't do that anymore.

First of all, people who are sent into war unwillingly don't make very good soldiers. They make terrible soldiers.

They are the first to break, they are the first to run. What that does to them inside, I can't imagine. I mean, you would hate your government for doing that to you. You'd hate your fellow soldier. You’d hate everybody. It's a war crime and a moral crime, to drag somebody into combat like that.

BACK TO THE UKRAINIANS. WHAT DO THE MORAL SCARS GAINED IN A WAR WHERE YOU FIGHT FOR YOUR OWN LAND, FOR YOUR OWN FAMILY, LOOK LIKE? ARE THEY EASIER TO HEAL? If a nation feels like they prevailed in a war of self-defense against an aggressor, that's a very powerful and all-encompassing kind of thing. It strengthens society against the kinds of moral inju-

ries that we've been talking about — it’s a soothing balm of sorts.

But what if they don't win? What if there is a stalemate that turns into a frozen conflict that lasts for years? In Ukraine, if the war ends in a frozen stalemate, with the threat of renewed fighting constantly hanging over people's shoulders, I don't know how society responds to that kind of trauma. But I worry about it. It's even more important than the physical rebuilding, to do what we can to help assuage those feelings of moral injury, moral scars — which have got to be gigantic.

WHAT ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN POWS THAT ARE RETURNING HOME WITH HARROWING STORIES ABOUT HOW THE RUSSIANS TREATED THEM? “I DON’T WANT TO FORGET,” ONE SAID, “LET ALONE FORGIVE. I WANT REVENGE AND NOBODY CAN DENY ME THAT.” There can be no lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia unless there is some kind of atonement on the part of Russia for what it's done. And yet, I can't imagine that anything that the Russians could do would satisfy the POW you spoke of.

I got to know an American bomber pilot from World War Two who was shot down over Japan and captured, then tortured in prison. Unlike the Ukrainian soldier, who I presume was defending his homeland. I don't know how I feel about that, because the pilot was dropping bombs on Japanese civilians, which is not okay. Neither was the torture, though. The pilot held on to that anger for decades: for some 40 years he hated the Japanese.

Then he met, in a structured way, one of the Japanese prison guards. And they embraced and forgave each other and hugged and cried. He let all of his anger go. It was wonderful to see. Very emotional. But having spent his entire life holding on to that anger can't have been good for him. I don't think you can live a normal life carrying around that kind of anger.

But obviously it’s not for me to say, well, “why don't you just forgive the Russians for what they did?” Who am I to say that? Absolutely not. I can't. Nobody can say that. Words fail. What the people in Ukraine have been going through is just unspeakable. We need to think hard about how we help people through that, and we need to start now. I think it's time — even while the fighting is going on — to think about the post-war and what that's going to look like. There's not just the physical reconstruction that needs to happen. Glossing over the moral injuries will not do the people of Ukraine a service.

POLITICS

GEORGIA TODAY SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

5

Violence Erupts Outside Georgian Dream Headquarters Following Protest Against Kakha Kaladze

Deputy Mayor Irakli Bendeliani. Source: 1TV

Protesters in Tbilisi on September 9, 2025. Source: IPN

BY TEAM GT

O

n September 9, citizens gathered near the Philharmonic Hall in Tbilisi and marched toward the election headquarters of Kakha Kaladze, the Georgian Dream mayoral candidate. Upon arrival, protesters dismantled metal barriers surrounding the building while chanting slogans such as “Russians!” and “Slaves!” They demanded that Georgian Dream supporters inside the headquarters come outside. Police units were mobilized and formed a cordon around the building.

The protest followed violent clashes that had broken out the previous evening, September 8, on Melikishvili Avenue near Kaladze’s campaign office. What began as a verbal confrontation between demonstrators and members of the Georgian Dream party’s youth wing quickly escalated into physical violence. Protesters were reportedly pelted with water bottles and other objects from within

Kaladze’s headquarters. Several people, including journalists, were injured and required medical attention.

According to the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), the violence on September 8 was a “deliberate and coordinated attack” by Georgian Dream supporters. They reportedly arrived in several vehicles, armed with iron bars, and targeted peaceful protesters and members of the media. Video footage showed assailants approaching from both the party’s headquarters and the street. Journalists were assaulted, their equipment seized or damaged, and some, including Publika’s Laszlo Mese, required hospitalization.

GYLA stressed that the violence was not mutual, but a one-sided assault. The organization criticized police for failing to intervene and protect demonstrators.

In some cases, officers were seen disarming attackers without making arrests, while obstructing journalists instead of defending them. GYLA cited this as part of a broader pattern of inaction by law enforcement, recalling similar failures following the 2024 parliamentary elec-

tions and the July 5–6, 2021 attacks.

High-ranking Georgian Dream officials, including Dimitri Samkharadze and Mayor Kaladze, appeared to justify or even endorse the violence. Kaladze also made sexist remarks targeting female protesters.

In response to public outrage, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) issued a statement on September 9 announcing that it had launched an investigation under Article 126¹ of the Criminal Code, which concerns group violence. The MIA described the incident as a “confrontation between citizens” and stated that law enforcement had taken “necessary measures” to prevent further escalation.

GYLA rejected this characterization, insisting the events of September 8 were not a spontaneous clash but a deliberate attempt to suppress dissent through intimidation and organized violence.

“The September 8 events once again confirmed that Georgian Dream continues to grossly violate human rights against peaceful protest,” the organization concluded.

Controversy Erupts Over Student’s Detention for Allegedly Damaging Campaign Banner in Tbilisi

BY TEAM GT

BY TEAM GT

T

he OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has announced it will not deploy an election observation mission to Georgia’s upcoming local elections on October 4, citing the government's delayed invitation.

Maria Telalian, ODIHR Director, stated that the organization received the official request only weeks before the vote, leaving insufficient time to conduct meaningful observation in line with ODIHR’s comprehensive methodology. “Transparent and credible election observation requires thorough preparation and access to all key stages of the electoral process,” Telalian emphasized. “Unfortunately, the decision by the Georgian authorities to invite us at such a late stage makes effective observation impossible.”

ODIHR had previously urged Georgian authorities to issue a timely invitation but said its repeated calls were ignored.

Despite not observing the elections, ODIHR reaffirmed its commitment to

monitoring developments in Georgia related to democratic governance, human rights, and the rule of law.

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced on September 6 that the government had invited ODIHR to observe the elections. However, ODIHR confirmed on September 9 that the timing made meaningful observation unfeasible.

In response, Central Election Commission (CEC) spokesperson Natia Ioseliani voiced regret over ODIHR’s decision and stressed the importance of international monitoring for ensuring a healthy electoral environment. Speaking at a press conference, Ioseliani noted that 16 international and 9 local observer organizations have already registered and encouraged others to apply within the legal deadlines: September 24 for local observers, September 27 for international organizations, and September 29 for media accreditation.

While the Georgian opposition has claimed credit for pushing the government to extend the invitation, ODIHR's decision underscores growing international concerns over Georgia’s democratic trajectory ahead of the October elections.

Tbilisi Outlines Major Infrastructure Projects for Next Four Years

T

he detention of 23-year-old student Megi (Irma) Diasamidze has sparked public outrage and raised concerns about political repression in Georgia’s pre-election environment. Charged with damaging a campaign banner for the ruling “Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia” party, her arrest is being criticized as politically motivated and legally unfounded.

Her lawyer, Shota Tutberidze, described her as a “prisoner of conscience,” claiming her detention serves the ruling party’s electoral agenda.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Diasamidze was one of three people arrested following incidents on Melikishvili Avenue on September 8–9.

She is accused of damaging a banner promoting Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze and charged under Article 187 of the Criminal Code, related to property damage causing “significant harm.”

Legal experts disagree. Nana Kurdovanidze, Chair of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), said the action reportedly involved a temporary, non-permanent inscription and does not meet the threshold of criminal damage.

“If something can be cleaned off easily and causes no lasting harm, it’s not a crime,” she said. “At most, the owner

ODIHR Declines to Observe Georgia's Elections Over Late Invitation, Drawing Int’l Concern

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

The phrase ‘Russian Dream’ is shown written on one of Kakha Kaladze’s election posters on Melikishvili Avenue. Photo by Mariam Nikuradze/OC Media

could pursue a civil claim for cleaning costs.”

Kurdovanidze also pointed out that the banner may have been illegally placed. It was reportedly hung on the facade of the historic “Hotel Georgia,” a registered cultural heritage site, where campaign materials are prohibited by law. This could make the ruling party—not Diasamidze— responsible for a legal violation.

Tutberidze criticized the manner of Diasamidze’s arrest, calling it a “ridiculous special operation.” He said she was detained while traveling, in a staged roadside stop involving a decoy minibus.

Her phone was confiscated, and she was

taken without being informed of the charges. He described her treatment— cuffed behind her back for nine hours— as “inhuman,” and said she was denied access to a lawyer until hours later.

“This isn’t justice—it’s political theater,” he said. “But Megi is strong and maintains her innocence.”

In response, Mayor Kaladze defended the arrest, saying the law applies equally to all. He denied the banner was illegally placed, stating it was authorized by the property owner.

“They won’t stop us,” Kaladze said.

“We are continuing the election campaign.”

T

bilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze has presented a comprehensive plan for infrastructure development in the city over the next four years.

Deputy Mayor Irakli Bendeliani provided detailed information about the planned projects, declaring that the municipality’s main focus will include: • Road construction and rehabilitation; • Bridge and overpass building and repair; • Slope stabilization works; • Restoration of cultural monuments; • Projects implemented by TbilService Group, the Kindergarten Agency and district municipal offices.

Bendeliani emphasized that road works will go beyond resurfacing, involving full replacement of underground utili-

ties. Specific projects include: • Rehabilitation of Akaki Beliashvili Street and Kojori Highway; • Complete upgrades of the Kojori and Tsikhneti centers; • Full rehabilitation of Rustaveli, VazhaPshavela and Guramishvili avenues; • Renovation of Tamarashvili, Gorgasali, and Godziashvili streets.

Regarding bridges, overpasses, and slopes, Bendeliani noted that the municipality has worked in these areas in recent years and plans to continue in the coming term. Primary projects include: • Full rehabilitation of Mindeli and Galaktioni bridges; • Renovation of Tamar Mepe Bridge, including the adjacent overpass previously renewed due to structural risks; • Slope stabilization works near Vake district, along the New Dabi road, a location prone to landslides, with continuous monitoring to ensure safe transportation.

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POLITICS

GEORGIA TODAY

SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Georgia's Geopolitical Balancing Act OP-ED BY NUGZAR B. RUHADZE

T

ucked between Europe and Asia, Georgia sits at one of the world’s most complicated crossroads. This small South Caucasus nation is working hard to build a peaceful and stable future, but that’s no easy task when powerful global and regional players are constantly pulling in different directions.

From the democratic ideals of the West to the assertive presence of Russia and the growing influence of China, Georgia is trying to walk a careful line, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

For Western countries like the United States and members of the European Union, an independent, democratic Georgia is seen as key to keeping the region stable. The West has supported Georgia’s sovereignty for years and backed its hopes to one day join NATO and the EU. That support is also seen as a way to counter Russia’s influence and protect against democratic backsliding.

But lately, things have gotten tense. Moves by the Georgian government — such as pushing forward the controversial “foreign agent” law, have raised red flags in

Image source: securingdemocracy

the West. These steps feel uncomfortably close to Russian-style crackdowns on dissent, and they’ve left Western allies wondering how to hold the government accountable without losing the support of ordinary Georgians, or accidentally pushing the country closer to Moscow.

Meanwhile, Russia is playing a very different game. For Moscow, keeping Georgia out of Western alliances is a top

Tbilisi Mayor and Georgian PM Slam German Ambassador, Accuse Him of Meddling in Internal Affairs

priority. Russia still occupies two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia — using its military presence there to block any chance of reintegration. It also uses soft power tactics: propaganda, economic incentives like restoring direct flights, and political pressure to try to pull Georgia back into its orbit. To Russia, Western support for Georgia’s democracy isn’t help, it’s interference. And it’s

“A Georgian Nightmare”: US Lawmakers Sound Alarm on Georgia’s Slide Toward Authoritarianism and Anti-American Alliances Continued from page 1

Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze and German Ambassador to Georgia Peter Fischer.

Source: sakartvelosambebi

BY TEAM GT

T

bilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze launched sharp verbal attacks against German Ambassador to Georgia Peter Fischer midweek, accusing him of overstepping diplomatic boundaries and interfering in the country’s internal affairs.

Kaladze described Fischer’s conduct as “offensive,” stating that it is inappropriate to even refer to him as an ambassador. “He has crossed all diplomatic boundaries and red lines,” Kaladze said.

He further alleged that Fischer is “actively involving himself in Georgia’s domestic politics,” claiming that the ambassador is “encouraging public confrontation” and “inciting extremism to divide society.”

The mayor’s comments came in response to a post by Ambassador Fischer on X, where the diplomat highlighted a recent conversation with Germany’s Minister of State for European Affairs, Günter Krichbaum. According to Fischer, Krichbaum had expressed “deep concern about the direction of Georgia” and reaffirmed the German government’s full support for him in his role as ambassador.

“It is deeply troubling when a representative of another country interferes in Georgia’s internal political affairs,” Kaladze said. He referenced previous foreign statements made during parliamentary elections, alleging that those remarks were part of a broader campaign against the ruling party. “The Georgian people responded appropriately to these so-called diplomats who harbor hostility towards Georgians, by defeating them at the polls,” he added.

Prime Minister Kobakhidze echoed and escalated the criticism, characterizing Fischer as a “tragic figure” and

going as far as to suggest that expelling him would be a “gift.”

“Fischer is in a tragic situation, and even defending him is tragic,” Kobakhidze said. “He is such a tragic figure that expelling him would be a gift. It is tragic – when you are Khazaradze’s tenant, I don’t know what could be a greater tragedy.”

Despite the accusations, Ambassador Fischer stood by his remarks. In his original post, he reiterated Germany’s firm opposition to political violence and dismissed allegations to the contrary as “untrue.”

“Of course, Germany rejects political violence. I have said so publicly in Georgia. To claim otherwise is untrue,” Fischer wrote.

The European Union Representation in Georgia on Thursday expressed solidarity with German Ambassador Peter Fischer.

“We express solidarity with Germany's Ambassador in Georgia,” the EU mission wrote on X. “As stated by the HRVP spokesperson, the EU rejects and condemns the disinformation and baseless accusations regarding the EU and its Member States’ role and activities in Georgia.”

The statement came after Germany’s Foreign Ministry reaffirmed support for Fischer, stressing that he represents the official position of the Federal Government.

“The Federal Foreign Office categorically rejects and condemns Mr. Papuashvili's unfounded accusations. We are concerned that by spreading disinformation and divisive narratives, he is actively undermining Germany-Georgia relations,” the German ministry stated.

The escalating war of words marks a new low in Georgian-German diplomatic relations and underscores growing tensions between the Georgian government and Western representatives who have raised concerns about democratic backsliding in the country.

doing what it can to shape a Georgian government that sees things its way.

As ties with the West become more complicated, another big player has stepped in: China. Beijing is quietly but steadily expanding its presence in the South Caucasus. It’s investing heavily in infrastructure, especially the so-called ‘Middle Corridor,’ a trade route linking Asia to Europe through Georgia. In fact,

last year, Georgia and China officially upgraded their relationship to a strategic partnership. This growing connection has sparked debate at home and abroad: Is Georgia shifting its alliances? Or simply trying to broaden its options in an uncertain world?

Then there are Georgia’s neighbors.

Turkey has long supported Georgia’s territorial integrity and continues to strengthen economic ties through major connectivity projects. At the same time, Georgia is trying to be a constructive player in the region, offering to host peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan in hopes of helping resolve their long-running conflict. For Tbilisi, regional peace isn’t just goodwill: it’s vital to its own future.

Caught between these competing forces, Georgia’s leaders have a tough job. Each partner — the West, Russia, China, and its neighbors, brings its own interests, expectations, and pressures. Navigating all of them while staying true to Georgia’s values and goals is no small feat.

What’s needed now is smart diplomacy, steady leadership, and a clear sense of direction. Georgia may be stuck between a rock and a hard place, but with the right strategy, it just might be able to turn that pressure into progress.

He described Georgia as a “laboratory of authoritarian control,” and warned that the current government lacks any real legitimacy.

But the threat, lawmakers said, goes beyond Georgia’s borders.

Wilson and others warned that the Georgian Dream isn’t just turning away from the West, it’s cozying up to US adversaries. The party, he said, is deepening ties with Russia and China, while actively undermining American business and security interests in the region.

“Georgian Dream has chosen to align with the Chinese Communist Party,” Wilson said, “even handing over control of a strategic Black Sea port; blocking American businesses and tying Georgia’s future to a regime openly preparing for confrontation with the American people.”

He went further, accusing the Georgian government of helping Russia evade international sanctions by facilitating the resale of Russian oil, all while Russian forces continue to occupy 20% of Georgia’s territory: “This is a betrayal of the values and partnerships we’ve worked decades to build,” Wilson said.

“What we’re seeing is the unraveling of everything the US has invested in.”

And yet, despite the government’s hardline stance, Wilson emphasized that the Georgian people haven’t given up. In fact, they’re fighting back: “Time and again, Georgians have taken to the streets in massive numbers,” he said.

“They’re demanding democracy, sovereignty, and a future with the West.”

In response to Georgia’s democratic decline, US lawmakers introduced the MEGOBARI Act, short for ‘Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia’s Options for Building Accountability, Resilience, and Independence.’ The bill aimed to pressure the Georgian government with targeted sanctions, while supporting civil society and democratic institutions.

The Act passed overwhelmingly in the US House in May 2025, but hit a wall in the Senate, where it failed to move forward after months of behind-the-scenes lobbying and political pressure.

Congressman Steve Cohen voiced his frustration at the hearing: “Unfortu-

nately, the Senate didn’t pass it, and it looks like they’re not going to,” he said.

“It might have been one business, one individual, that blocked the whole thing over a port deal.”

Cohen was blunt in his criticism, describing the ruling party as a danger to its own people, and to the region: “The Georgian Dream has become a Georgian nightmare,” he said. “Russia has occupied part of Georgia, and now it has an ally inside the country in the form of [Georgian Dream founder] Ivanishvili. That makes it easier to undermine the country from within.”

Cohen also reflected on how unusual, and meaningful, it was to see such bipartisan unity on the MEGOBARI Act: “It’s remarkable how many Democrats and Republicans came together to support this,” he said. “That kind of unity is almost unheard of these days.”

But even broad support wasn’t enough to overcome entrenched interests, and Cohen lamented how foreign policy too often becomes a casualty of domestic politics.

Back in Georgia, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze welcomed the bill’s failure, calling it a “positive development.”

Speaking to journalists, Kobakhidze framed the MEGOBARI Act as a “hostile act” against Georgia and its people, alleging that the legislation would have damaged Georgia’s sovereignty and national interests.

“The MEGOBARI Act was, in reality, a hostile act against the Georgian people, our state, and national interests.

Fortunately, it has failed, which is very good,” he said.

Kobakhidze also used the moment to announce plans for a “reset” in USGeorgia relations.

“We have a specific goal to reset relations with a concrete roadmap from a clean slate and renew our strategic partnership with the US. We maintain hope for this. The rest depends on the new US administration itself,” he added.

In a particularly sharp rebuke, Kobakhidze lashed out at Georgian political figures who participated in the Helsinki Commission hearing — including former President Salome Zurabishvili and former Defense Minister Tinatin Khidasheli — accusing them of undermin-

ing national interests.

“We witnessed contemporary Sergo Ordzhonikidzes in Washington yesterday. It’s very tragic when a Georgian loses face, when a Georgian directly opposes their own state’s national interests. This is a tragic event, though it is their tragedy,” he said.

The PM also personally attacked US Congressman Joe Wilson, labeling him a “Deep State agent” and a “funded lobbyist,” signaling a further deterioration in diplomatic tone between Tbilisi and Washington.

The roots of the crisis trace back to 2023–2024, when the Georgian Dreamled government introduced a controversial “foreign agents” law, modeled on Russia’s. The law forced NGOs and media receiving foreign funding to register as foreign agents, sparking fears of a crackdown on civil liberties. Massive protests swept the country, but the government doubled down.

Tensions escalated further after the 2024 parliamentary elections, which many observers described as deeply flawed and held in an environment of democratic backsliding.

The US Helsinki Commission summarized the situation bluntly: “Georgian Dream is pulling the country into Russia’s orbit while deepening ties with China and other adversaries of the United States.”

It warned that the Georgian government has “dismantled institutions, blocked US businesses from access to Central Asian trade routes, and attracted Chinese investments that threaten Georgia’s sovereignty.”

As Georgia faces an uncertain future, US lawmakers are grappling with how to respond. The failure of the MEGOBARI Act has raised serious questions about America’s ability to hold authoritarian regimes accountable, especially when powerful business interests get in the way.

But one message rang clear throughout the hearing: the fight for democracy in Georgia isn’t over, and the US should not give up on its people.

“The Georgian people still want democracy, prosperity, and peace,” Wilson said. “And the United States must decide how to stand with them.”

BUSINESS

GEORGIA TODAY SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

7

Georgia and Romania ComCom: Global Hold Business Meeting Brands Dominate to Expand Cooperation Georgia’s TV Ad Market

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

BY MARIAM RAZMADZE

E

ven as overall ad revenue declined, global beverage producers, pharmaceutical companies and leading banks remained the biggest players in Georgia’s television advertising market during the second quarter of 2025.

National Communications Commission published data revealing that television broadcasters earned a combined GEL 15.6 million in Q2, down 13% compared to the same period last year.

Coca-Cola Bottlers Georgia was among the most active advertisers, placing com-

mercials across major networks including TV Imedi, Rustavi 2, Formula and TV Pirveli. Other top spenders included PSP Pharma, Aversi Pharma, Lactalis Georgia, Nestlé Georgia and the Georgian Beer Company.

On TV Imedi, advertisers that invested between GEL 100,000 and GEL 500,000 included Coca-Cola, Diplomat Georgia, PSP, Lactalis, Aversi, BERLIN-CHEMIE, Wim Bill Dan, IDS Borjomi, Nestlé and Georgian Beer Company.

Rustavi 2 reported similar activity, with Coca-Cola in the GEL 100,000–500,000 range, while PSP, Aversi, Lactalis, IDS Borjomi, Wim Bill Dan, GM Pharmaceuticals, TBC Bank and Nestlé spent between GEL 50,000–100,000.

On Formula TV, advertising in the GEL 100,000–500,000 bracket came from TBC Bank, Coca-Cola, PSP, Geoplant and Vazisubani Mamuli, while Mercado, Tegeta Motors and Lactalis Georgia were in the lower tier.

TV Pirveli also attracted significant investment, with Coca-Cola, PSP Pharma, and Mercado each spending 100,000– 500,000 GEL. TBC Bank, Geoplant, and San Petrolium Georgia fell into the 50,000–100,000 GEL range.

Meanwhile, Postv was funded by 100,000–500,000 GEL contributions from Bumba LLC, Geocep LLC, Natural Gas LLC, Stereo+ and Tiflis Fab. Georgian Dairy Products and Archi Promotion invested between 50,000–100,000 GEL.

ADB Issues Georgia’s First Sovereign Loan in National Currency

BY TEAM GT

U

nder the loan agreement for the Modern Skills for Better Jobs Sector Development Program – SubProgram 2, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has disbursed Georgia’s first sovereign loan in the national currency, amounting to GEL 68.2 million in budget support, the Ministry of Finance announced.

The Ministry says this is the first time an international financial institution has issued a sovereign loan in Georgian lari, underscoring the strong partnership between the ADB and the Government of Georgia—not only in financing investment projects but also in supporting structural reforms and sustainable public financial management.

The Ministry noted that borrowing in

ROMANIA’S AMBASSADOR: UNTAPPED POTENTIAL IN BLACK SEA PARTNERSHIP Romania’s Ambassador to Georgia, Razvan Rotundu, pointed our the great potential for expanding bilateral ties. He mentioned the shared culture and mentality, as well as the two countries’ position as Black Sea neighbors, as natural foundations for closer relationship.

“Romania and Georgia are neighboring countries on the Black Sea, so the potential is huge. I think there is a similarity in culture and mentality, which also helps us a lot. More contact between business sectors is needed and we are very grateful to the Georgia-EU Business Council and Zviad Chumburidze, who helped us a lot in organizing this meeting. This is just one step, but we are ready to continue,” Rotundu said.

The ambassador also emphasized the significance of the ferry link between the port of Poti and Constanta which has been operational for two years but remains underutilized. In addition, he emphasized Romania’s support for the Black Sea submarine cable project, a joint initiative of Georgia, Romania, Azerbaijan and Hungary which is expected to enhance energy security and establish a regional energy hub.

TRADE RELATIONS: IMPORTS DOMINATE, FERTILIZERS LEAD EXPORTS

Image source: ADB

GEL is consistent with Georgia’s debt management strategy, ensuring a balanced mix of foreign and domestic currency liabilities. This approach strengthens resilience to external shocks and reinforces long-term debt sustainability.

T

bilisi hosted a roundtable meeting between Georgian and Romanian business representatives, co-organized by the EU-Georgia Business Council (EUGBC) and the Georgian-Romanian Chamber of Commerce. Discussed topics included opportunities for stronger cooperation in trade, investment, transport and energy.

The programme also seeks to enhance the quality of vocational education, broaden accessibility and inclusiveness, and boost institutional capacity in support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Youth.

Economic data shows trade between Georgia and Romania is getting successful. In January–July 2025, bilateral trade turnover stood at $188.7 million, up from $134.9 million in the same period last year.

Image source: AzerNews

Imports from Romania accounted for the most of the trade, reaching $166.8 million in the first seven months of 2025.

Petroleum and petroleum products dominated at $132.6 million, making Romania the second-largest oil supplier to Georgia after Russia. Other imports included manufactured tobacco ($6.1M), rubber tires ($3.6M), medicines ($2.2M), and cars ($1.9M).

Exports to Romania totaled $21.9 million, slightly down from $24.5 million in 2024. Fertilizers were by far the leading export category, worth $16.8 million, followed by ferroalloys ($3M), amusement goods and games ($477K) and smaller shipments of machinery, brushes, detergents and mineral water.

Annual trade figures show consistent volumes: $246.9 million in 2024, $244.2 million in 2023 and $314.7 million in 2022.

INVESTMENT AND TOURISM: SMALL BUT GROWING Despite such strong ties, Romanian investment in Georgia remains modest.

In 2024, Georgia received $520,000 in FDI from Romania, slightly above $450,000 in 2023. In the first quarter of 2025, Romanian FDI amounted to only $143,000.

Tourism revenue also remain limited but continue to grow. In the first half of 2025, 3,860 Romanian visitors traveled to Georgia, a 6.7% year-on-year increase.

The annual total reached 8,246 visitors in 2024, up from 6,545 in 2023.

With strategic energy projects in talks and transport links like the Poti-Constanta ferry yet to reach their full potential, both sides see actual opportunities to deepen economic relations. While investment and tourism figures remain modest, the momentum suggests broader cooperation ahead, particularly if business-to-business relations expand as discussed at today’s meeting.

8

SOCIETY

GEORGIA TODAY

SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

Qvavilnari Interlude, 2

directions of alteration. We end up, this time, with images which might have been painted instead of photographed.

Having moved away decades ago from a working pottery studio of which I was a part (in Canada), and also from other communities of artists and media, I found myself left with the super-portable media of photography and writing. These both can be done anywhere, so they travel with me. Now that I’ve also begun embracing a camera phone alongside my “big” digital camera, using the phone’s video output for still images, another logical step to take will be using the camera to shoot larger-size video, or sets of still images at full-scale (4000 by 6000 pixels) and using these frames for both video production and still image layering.

I hope this isn’t too technical. It’s the musings of a mind at play, using that tools at hand in unconventional ways,

moving past what the manual tells me I can or “should” do, stretching the envelope to see how far we can go before it snaps or produces something really interesting. Close to that snapping point, I think, is what I seek. Almost too much.

But not quite. Genre-crossing and, hopefully, reasonably new and unexpected. I don’t need AI to produce fantasy: I am quite capable of imagining, and realizing, it myself.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/ SvanetiRenaissance/ He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Photo by the author

BLOG BY TONY HAMNER

H

aving written last week about photography as a tool for surrealism, I now realize that I have much more to say on this subject, including new images from those several days my wife and I spent recently on a short break on the Black Sea coast.

The sound and sight both of the endless crashing waves certainly are therapy to the soul.

Another way of producing “unreal” photographic images is to import video frames into your photographic editing program (in this case, Photoshop). You end up with a large set of layers. Here your image’s pixel size is usually more

limited: I shoot video on my iPhone at 1920 pixels high. So I usually upscale these images as a last step, to enable me to offer them as prints or digital files quite a bit larger than this.

Video flies have a standard frame rate of about 30 frames per second. So, unless your video is very short indeed, Photoshop will balk at producing a file with more than 500 layers in it. But that’s still a huge set of images to play with. I was holding the phone in my hand, not fixing it on a tripod; but doing my best to keep it still nonetheless.

I’ve been using an Overlay blend mode, with 1% opacity per image, so as to let each layer have a small but definite influence on the whole resulting image. The result certainly IS surreal: something between a photograph and a painting, in both content and colors/tones. Some-

thing you simply cannot see in real life, simply because it’s a composite of many different images shot over a small time period, and then set to influence each other. You might say that it’s based on a photograph, but be unable to explain how exactly it deviates from this. Which is fine with me.

So, not striving for anything able to be called a realistic image at all, I’m freed from the constraints of normal photography, using this medium simply as a starting point. This might be said of all photography; but there’s also some kind of multi-dimensional spectrum with some images closer to perceived reality and others definitely further away from it. The dimensions could include overand under-saturation (with “normal” colors in the middle), hue shifts, freezing or blurring of the subject, and many more

Photo by the author

SPORTS

Georgia’s Historic EuroBasket Journey Ends in Quarter-Final Loss to Finland

BY TEAM GT

G

eorgia’s remarkable run at EuroBasket 2025 came to a close on Tuesday night, as the national basketball team fell 79–93 to Finland in the quarter-finals. Despite the defeat, it marked the country’s best-ever result at the continental championship, a campaign filled with breakthrough moments and national pride.

A NEW BENCHMARK FOR GEORGIAN BASKETBALL Reaching the quarter-finals for the first time in history, the Georgian team surpassed its previous best of reaching the round of 16 in 2015. The journey to the final eight was highlighted by a stunning 80:70 victory over tournament favorites France in the round of 16 — a result that shook European basketball and cemented Georgia’s growing presence on the international stage.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze recognized the historic achievement by announcing a 3 million GEL bonus for the national team. Speaking at a government session, he pledged the same amount for every future EuroBasket victory, stating, “We are going to allocate 3 million GEL for the success already achieved and for every future win at EuroBasket.”

In the highly anticipated quarter-final matchup in Riga, Georgia matched Finland’s intensity early, trading long-range shots and staying competitive through the first half. Sandro Mamukelashvili (22

Finland’s Lauri Markkanen catches a ball during the Eurobasket, European Basketball Championship quarter final match between Finland and Georgia.

Photo by Sergei Grits/AP

points) and Duda Sanadze (19 points, 5 threes) led the offensive effort, while veteran Tornike Shengelia contributed 18 before fouling out late in the game.

Despite Georgia’s strong start, including seven three-pointers in the first half, Finland's high-tempo, perimeter-heavy style proved too much. The Finns, fresh off a 15-three-pointer performance against Serbia, knocked down 10 triples in the first half alone, opening up a 57–40 lead at the break.

Georgia showed resilience in the third quarter, tightening their defense and cut-

ting the deficit to single digits (62–71) heading into the final period. A brief fourthquarter surge brought the margin to just six points, but Finland’s Olivier Nkamhoua silenced the comeback with a deep threepointer that effectively sealed the game.

The final moments saw Georgia lose both Goga Bitadze and Shengelia to disqualifications, further stalling their efforts to rally. Bitadze finished with 14 points, and the match also marked Giorgi Shermadini’s 200th appearance for the national team: a symbolic milestone in a historic tournament.

A TOURNAMENT TO REMEMBER Georgia’s EuroBasket 2025 campaign was filled with drama and national pride.

After a group-stage loss to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the team’s qualification hopes hinged on the outcome of Greece vs. Spain, a game that ultimately went Georgia’s way when Greece won 90:86, allowing the team to advance to the round of 16.

The historic win over France followed, powered by the leadership of Kamar Baldwin and Shengelia, and decisive plays from Bitadze in the closing min-

utes. It was a triumph of tactics, heart, and belief — a moment that will be remembered for generations.

The quarter-final against Finland also carried symbolic weight. The matchup marked the 10th meeting between the two nations, and the result evened the all-time record at 5–5.

Though the journey ended in defeat, Georgia leaves EuroBasket 2025 with heads held high, having made history and sent a clear message: the “Crusaders” are now a force to be reckoned with in European basketball.

CULTURE

GEORGIA TODAY SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

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The Opening of the Anagi Art Foundation: The Center That Calls Itself Forward

BY IVAN NECHAEV

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bilisi has a gift for turning thresholds into rooms.

Streets slip from Ottoman balconies into Soviet courtyards; a single stairwell can feel like a hinge between centuries. The newly opened Anagi Art Foundation steps directly into this Georgian habit of standing on the threshold and making it habitable. It is less a building than an argument: that art made in a so-called “transitional” era is not a footnote to the present, but its grammar; that an archive can perform like a stage; that a shop might double as a research engine; and that the most honest way to speak about “after” is to show the seams of “during.”

The Foundation’s program opens with a multi-part exhibition ecology, whose keystone is Fragments of Transition—a research-driven reconstruction and reinterpretation of the late-Soviet and early-independence years in Georgian art. Orbiting it are three exhibitions that together act like instruments in a quartet: a photographic archaeology of Sergei Parajanov’s Legend of Surami Fortress; the conceptual, technically restless practice of Giorgi Shengelia; and a longoverdue encounter with Gregor Danelian, the Tbilisi-Armenian painter whose caprices read today as both nonconformist testimony and formalist manifesto.

A fourth chamber—devoted to Sergo Kobuladze—is an archive staged as cosmology, a model for what the Foundation seems to want to be: a house of memory that refuses to fossilize.

If the show is a thesis, its abstract is the Foundation’s own structure. Anagi is a private initiative designed, as its founders put it, to braid business with art and reinvest revenue into conservation, research, and public programs. The Art Concept Gallery—a curated emporium of numbered objects, limited editions, and exhibition-driven goods—gives that promise concrete form. You take something home and, in theory, fund the next question. There are precedents for this in global museum culture, but in Georgia—where the institutional landscape has historically been either starved or centralized—the model reads less like retail and more like a wager: can a shop behave like a bibliography?

THE EXHIBITION THAT REMEMBERS THE PRESENT Curated by Thea Goguadze-Apfel with research by Mariam Shergelashvili, Fragments of Transition does something crucial: it refuses to treat the late 1980s and early 1990s as a tidy prelude. Instead, it reads the period as an ongoing structure of feeling. The exhibition assembles works by Luka Lasareishvili, Iliko Zautashvili, Alexander Bandzeladze, Akaki (Koka) Ramishvili, Mamuka Japharidze, Guela Tsuladze, and Gia Rigava, alongside archival material for Gia Edzgveradze— a roster that not only maps an art scene but revives the specific pressure system under which it formed: Perestroika’s permissive fractures and the first years of Georgian independence, when state structures destabilized faster than new institutions could congeal.

This is not, however, a generic “postSoviet” sampler. The curatorial frame explicitly reconstructs two historically formative exhibitions in Germany—Georgia On My Mind (1990, DuMont Kunsthalle, with the Fridericianum and documenta Kassel) and Ein Dialog (1994, organized by the German gallerist and collector Françoise Friedrich). Those shows were not merely export events; they reframed Georgian contemporary art as a participant—rather than an exception—in the debates of the day. The catalogue writing of the period (Boris Groys among them) argued against a folkloric reading of “national schools,” proposing instead that artists in the 1990s negotiated between local memory and transnational codes, neither fully “Eastern” nor subsumed by the homogenizing vocabulary of global contemporaneity. Fragments of Transition operationalizes that discourse.

It doesn’t nostalgically rehang the past; it reactivates its questions.

One of the exhibition’s most vivid case studies is the dialogue between Mamuka Tsetskhladze and Karlo Kacharava— friends, collaborators, and members of artist formations like Archivarius (1984), 10th Floor (1986), and the Marjanishvili Studio (1987). Their work is reunited here largely through the stewardship of Friedrich’s collection, which kept crucial pieces intact and legible as a constellation.

THE TIGER WHO WALKED OUT OF THE FRAME Tsetskhladze’s monumental Tiger (1988), painted in Tbilisi and shown that year in a UNESCO space in Paris before its long absence from home, bears the genetics of neo-expressionism—saturated color, muscular brushwork, figuration punched through by abstraction. But the painting is more than a style citation. The tiger’s body is assured while its mask-like face looks startled, as if mid-metamorphosis.

The animal appears to breach the picture plane, to enter the viewer’s space with an authority that its gaze cannot quite cash. That dissonance—confident motion, bewildered attention—becomes an allegory for a society stepping out of one regime and into something unnamed. In Kacharava’s terms, Tsetskhladze articulated a notion of “Rich Art”: work that, precisely because it resists the utilitarian logic of its environment—non-commercial, impractical, excessive in scale—claims a different kind of value.

THE DIARY THAT LEARNED TO PAINT If Tsetskhladze gives the transition a body, Kacharava gives it a syntax. Painter, poet, critic, he wrote the era as he painted it—on diary pages, on German and Russian newspapers, on whatever support came to hand—and nearly always with a dedication: FÜR someone, named and beloved or canonically distant (Clemente, Kiefer, Baselitz, Duras). This habit of address matters. It inserts intimacy into art history, making influence feel like correspondence rather than capitulation. Kacharava’s surfaces are famously saturated—image, text, a pasted train ticket from his 1991 stay in Germany—so that the ground never disappears into neutrality. He wants the background to retain its own “history,” to be read as time and place as much as pigment. The result is a palimpsest that refuses clean beginnings, a visual essay in which the line and the sentence negotiate for breath.

If painting is often accused of silence, Kacharava counter-accuses with chatter, and the chatter is learned, tender, and structurally restless.

As a pairing, Tsetskhladze and Kacharava anchor the show’s claim: transition is not a bridge you cross; it is the very condition of walking. Their works, made at the edge of a state and in the interior of a friendship, naturalize hybridity without surrendering specificity.

EAST/WEST IS NOT A COMPASS, IT’S A TENSION The larger Fragments constellation extends that argument across practices that, at the time, invented new forms under pressure: conceptual strategies, experimental media, and political commentary as tactics suited to a ground that kept moving. Seeing these works in Tbilisi, many for the first time, matters.

It breaks a familiar circuit in which the archive of Georgian contemporaneity lives abroad and is accessed as rumor.

Here, the rumor becomes room.

Françoise Friedrich’s role is not incidental. Collections shape art history by sustaining ensembles that markets tend to atomize. In this case, the collection has functioned as both conservator and interlocutor, preserving not just individual works but the dialogue between them. Reintroducing that dialogue in Georgia is an institutional act with theoretical stakes: it suggests that the country’s “transition” is not merely toward European structures, but toward custodianship of its own contemporary archive.

CINEMA AS ARCHAEOLOGY:

THE PARAJANOV ROOM

The exhibition devoted to Sergei Parajanov’s Legend of Surami Fortress (1984) takes a deliberately oblique angle: not a film screening but a suite of photographs from the 1985 production—anonymously shot, preserved in a private collection, and presented here by Fotoatelier as a “visual historiography.” That phrase sounds like a funding proposal until you’re in front of the pictures. Then it becomes literal. The images have the procedural clarity of documentation and the composed intensity of tableaux; they are at once notes and myths, the grammar of Parajanov’s ritualistic directing method caught in full breath.

Parajanov’s detour from socialist realism is already canon—the non-linear montage, the liturgical symbolism, the story told as a cascade of images that behave more like illuminated manuscript than cinema. What the photographs add is a view of collaboration as liturgy. We see mise-en-scène not as decoration but as ontology; props act like actors; the set is a theology of space. The curatorial idea of the anonymous gaze is more than a clever conceit. It reframes authorship, reminding us that the “aura” (to borrow from Benjamin) of Parajanov’s cinema is a labor of many hands, and that still photography can do more than archive— it can make meaning at a different shutter speed. The film’s legendary theme— the boy entombed in the fortress wall so that the structure might stand—becomes, in the photos, a metaphor for the way cultural memory embeds sacrifice into beauty, and the way images entomb time so that our edifices of understanding don’t collapse.

ACCIDENT AS METHOD: GIORGI SHENGELIA Giorgi Shengelia’s exhibition threads together two essential bodies of work— Accidental Portraits and Untitled Sheets—to argue that the “accident” is not an error state but a philosophical category. Blur, distortion, and technical abrasion are not defects but tools that dilate perception, dislodging the photograph from its default documentary contract and pushing it toward a phenomenology of seeing. In these images, the line between human, animal, and landscape trembles; subject and object trade places; the print itself—its grain, its surface treatments—becomes an actor.

There is a long conversation here with the theory of photography in the late twentieth century—indexicality versus performance, the punctum that wounds and the studium that explains—but Shengelia locates those debates in practice. His training in photojournalism shadows the work; you can feel the memory of reportage in the way the camera notices. But the images aren’t after facts; they’re after duration. Instead of decisive moments, they offer decisive traces: a gesture remembered by its blur trail, a gaze that survives as atmosphere.

The result is a visual ethics for a culture of estrangement—images that admit they cannot deliver certainty and, in that admission, deliver intimacy.

THE CAPRICCIO AS SELF-PRESERVATION: GREGOR DANELIAN The rediscovery of Gregor Danelian is one of the program’s quiet shocks. Born in 1950, trained in Tbilisi and Yerevan, Danelian sits uncomfortably—and therefore productively—inside the categories we have for late-Soviet art. “Outsider” and “nonconformist” are umbrellas that keep the rain off, but they can also flatten the weather. The show’s argument is more precise. It tracks Danelian’s chameleonic stylistic arc—Expressionism and Pop’s collage energies in the 1960s– 70s; Rayonism, Cubism, and metaphysical painting in the 1970s–80s; a mystical, esoteric luminosity in later decades— without pretending that the shifts are decorative. Each turn is a survival tactic and a formal wager.

The still lifes echo de Chirico’s metaphysical stagecraft and Morandi’s devotional attention, with a local register that recalls Robert Kondakhsazov. Portraits

The Anagi Art Foundation. Photo by the author

carry the planar gravitas of Armenian fresco, the grotesque gleam of caricature, and the ethnographic precision of a gaze that refuses to exoticize even as it isolates. Family scenes organize their space as if it were woven: carpets and tapestries migrate from object to compositional logic, turning backgrounds into ornamental terrains. The term capriccio—a fantasy that assembles real fragments into invented vistas—fits not only as genre but as method: Danelian composes an equation between TbilisiArmenian and Western visual variables that is as local as a courtyard and as cosmopolitan as a library.

What becomes clear is that decadence, for Danelian, is not an indulgence; it is an ethics. Against a culture of ideological austerity, he insists on aesthetic plenty—on complication, on surface, on the right to ornament as thought. That insistence lands with particular force now, when moral clarity is often demanded at the expense of ambiguity.

Danelian’s answer is form.

THE ARCHIVE THAT BEHAVES LIKE AN ALTAR: SERGO KOBULADZE Curated with a dramaturg’s ear by Thea Goguadze-Apfel, advised and scenographically tuned by Marika Rakviashvili, the Sergo Kobuladze room is the exhibition’s most explicit wager on the archival turn: the idea that archives are not storage but media. Here, the twentiethcentury polymath—painter, printmaker, photographer, theorist, designer—reappears as a studio made legible. Casts and reliefs from the Renaissance and Classicism gather alongside Georgian decorative-applied objects; a photographic enlarger and projector sit with cutting devices; on the walls, theater designs, an etched portrait of his mother, a woman’s mask étude, King Lear illustrations, a “rehabilitation” sketch for an opera curtain, portraits of Savonarola and Dante; nearby, a restored video and a portrait of Kobuladze by Ketevan Magalashvili act like two steady eyes at history’s distance.

At the center is a shelf Kobuladze built—a piece of furniture treated like liturgy. It reads as iconostasis, but secular, partitioning the everyday from the transcendental while allowing passages between them. Its compartments—perfectly proportioned, tripartite, quietly obsessed with the golden ratio—hold a micro-cosmos: a reproduction of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, glossy black Tbilisi ceramics, an image of J. S. Bach, “alchemical” minerals, micro-tools, a Dante relief, film negatives, scientific texts. The object performs as philosophy.

It is both window and ledger, a device for seeing and a method for keeping accounts with time.

Comparisons to the James Ensor HouseMuseum in Ostend are apt: the unity of work, life, and milieu as a single organism. But the Kobuladze room is not a period reconstruction; it is a proposal for how to read an artist: not through masterpieces detached from context but through the ecology that made those works possible. It recasts biography as a spatial practice.

A SHOP THAT BEHAVES LIKE A FOOTNOTE The Foundation’s Art Concept Gallery— with its numbered objects, limited edi-

tions, and exhibition-specific merchandise—will be the most contentious element for some visitors. The anxiety is familiar: can the same institution that asks us to interrogate the political, conceptual, and historical predicates of art also offer us screen-printed T-shirts and sculptural bookends? There is no universal answer, but the local one is promising. The editions are not spun from generic design tropes; they emerge from collaboration with Georgian artists and designers, produced in small runs, and the proceeds are folded back into research and public programs. In this context— where funding infrastructures are fragile and where keeping an archive in the country is itself a cultural policy—the store reads less like a compromise and more like a mechanism. It’s the footnote that pays for the text.

There is also a subtler effect. By treating editions and books as part of the curatorial metabolism, the Foundation blurs a hierarchy that often hobbles institutions: “art” inside, “discourse” in the catalogue, “access” in the shop. Here, those vectors braid. You can exit with a tote and an argument, a poster and a genealogy.

WHAT “TRANSITION” NAMES NOW If the word “transition” feels tired, it’s because it’s been used to describe everyone else’s future and no one’s present.

This exhibition refuses that laziness. In its historical reconstructions, it shows that the early 1990s were not a waiting room but a laboratory in which Georgian artists engineered languages equal to their weather. In its contemporary framings—Parajanov’s backstage as historiography, Shengelia’s accident as epistemology, Danelian’s capriccio as ethics, Kobuladze’s shelf as theology of proportion—the program insists that transition is not a path from instability to stability. It is a habit of form. It is the way materials and minds behave when the ground is moving and likely to continue moving.

Institutionally, the Foundation wagers that a private model can underwrite public goods: research, conservation, the building of a new ecosystem that aligns heritage with infrastructure and curatorial innovation. That is not a modest claim. But the proof is on view, not in prospectus. Works long preserved abroad by a sympathetic collector are seen in Tbilisi; archives are staged with the dignity and risk of artworks; a generation of artists is discussed in terms other than provincial discovery or geopolitical tokenism.

The most persuasive moments are the least declarative. A pasted train ticket in Kacharava’s diary-painting. The startled face of Tsetskhladze’s tiger stepping past its own border. A blurred cheekbone in a Shengelia print that feels more like breath than skin. The ornamental logic of a Danelian background that refuses to be background. The golden-ratio insistence of Kobuladze’s shelf, which silently teaches proportion as ethics.

Together they propose a way of seeing Georgia that is neither “after empire” nor “before Europe,” but decidedly here: a culture fluent in thresholds, committed to memory without nostalgia, and prepared to let its institutions behave like the art they host—experimental, dialogic, and built to move.

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CULTURE

GEORGIA TODAY

SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

When the Sky Plays Along: Music and Atmosphere at the 7th Tsinandali Festival

Yamen Saadi, Marc Bouchkov, Daniel Lozakovich, Pablo Ferrández, Brendan Kane, Julien Quentin. Photo by the author

Marc Bouchkov, Mischa Maisky, Gianandrea Noseda and Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra. Photo by the author

REVIEW BY IVAN NECHAEV

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sinandali has always been a house of paradoxes: a Georgian estate whose 19thcentury salons now transformed into a festival laboratory where Europe’s most canonical music is heard against the unpredictable acoustics of the Caucasian outdoors. The festival’s seventh edition opened this September with its characteristic tension between control and chance. The Chamber Music Hall offers an almost Platonic ideal of sound—polished, balanced, a space in which every detail of articulation can be weighed. The Amphitheatre, by contrast, is a wager: it throws Beethoven, Brahms, or Shostakovich against birdsong, thunderclaps, barking dogs, or the heavy wind through vines.

This dialectic has become the festival’s signature ideology. Music here is not enclosed in cultural insulation. It is porous, contingent, exposed.

THE FIRST NIGHT The opening program demanded monumentality: Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, followed by Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

Behzod Abduraimov, whose reputation rests on a fusion of steel technique and combustible temperament, approached the concerto with less brute force than many expect. His opening chords, less hammer blows than granite pillars, prepared a narrative where Tchaikovsky’s

lyrical melancholy outweighed sheer bravura. The second movement became a suspended aria—its dialogue with woodwinds stretched like a moment of breath before collapse. In the finale, Abduraimov unleashed his trademark percussive articulation, but always framed

by Gianandrea Noseda’s pacing of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra: accelerations never tipped into chaos, climaxes built like architecture.

Harmony in this concerto depends on the tension between B-flat minor and the triumphant shifts to D-flat major— Abduraimov underlined the instability, never letting cadences settle. This sense of precarious balance resonated with the Amphitheatre setting itself, where wind carried fragments of the piano line into the night.

If Abduraimov sculpted fragility, Shostakovich’s Fifth detonated it. Noseda drove the Youth Orchestra with a sharpedged energy, exposing the symphony’s structural obsession: the interval of the falling second, repeated obsessively as if marking the tread of fate. In the notorious finale, the outdoor acoustic turned political ambiguity into elemental drama.

The brass blazed, but the surrounding night answered: a chorus of dogs barking in counter-rhythm to the militaristic coda. What in Moscow 1937 had been terror veiled in triumphalism here became almost grotesque, the intrusion of the real into the staged.

CHAMBER EXPERIMENTS IN OPEN-AIR The next morning’s concert offered a

different register: chamber intimacy in the Amphitheatre, always at risk of dispersal into the air.

Dvorák’s Bagatelles emerged as delicate Czech folk miniatures, yet their charm was tested by the wind, which carried away quiet cadences almost before they landed. Rossini’s Duet for Cello and Double Bass became a sly theatrical exchange, cellist Pablo Ferrández leaning into operatic flourish while bassist Brendan Kane parried with earthy retorts.

Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins revealed the cruel logic of counterpoint stripped of harmonic support: dissonant clashes, sudden consonances, the two lines circling each other like adversaries.

The harmonic sharpness of Shostakovich’s Duets for violin and piano gave the program its final sting—ironic domestic miniatures that parody salon entertainment. Heard outdoors, their brittle sarcasm dissolved into air, as if mocking the very idea of permanence.

Where the noon concert embodied fragility, Nikolai Lugansky’s evening recital embodied monumentality. Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata unfolded with structural inevitability: the rolling arpeggios of the first movement became tidal surges, harmonic instability resolved into fateful cadences. Schumann’s Carnaval Scenes from Vienna revealed Lugansky’s control of fleeting character sketches—waltz rhythm refracted through irony and nostalgia.

Yet it was in the Wagner–Liszt transcriptions that the Amphitheatre became uncanny. Isolde’s Liebestod, stripped of orchestral weight, condensed into piano

Behzod Abduraimov, Gianandrea Noseda and Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra. Photo by the author

sonority, rang into the night air like a prayer dissipating into sky. Liszt’s Legend No. 2—St. Francis of Paola walking on water—acquired additional metaphysical resonance when gusts of wind brushed across the stage. Here, transcendence was both metaphorical and literal.

CHAMBER AS SANCTUARY On Saturday, Marc Bouchkov and Julien Quentin offered a morning recital in the Chamber Hall—an immediate relief after the exposure of the Amphitheatre. Prokofiev’s Five Melodies floated with crystalline clarity, Debussy’s Violin Sonata pulsed with dissolving harmonies, Franck’s Sonata in A Major achieved its rapturous apotheosis with burnished balance. Indoors, one could trace every modulation, every chromatic inflection, with surgical precision.

That evening, Sir András Schiff embodied the festival’s pedagogical soul. His program, traversing Bach to Beethoven, was less recital than philosophical lecture. Bach’s counterpoint clarified the logic of voices, Haydn’s wit highlighted symmetry, Mozart’s songfulness provided equilibrium, Beethoven opened the abyss.

Schiff’s style is neither showmanship nor mysticism: it is the cultivation of listening itself. In his hands, the Chamber Hall became a temporary republic of reason.

STORM OVER THE KREUTZER Sunday morning brought the most unforgettable moment: Daniel Lozakovich and Behzod Abduraimov’s performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata under a storm. The opening A Major chords, already violent in their registral contrasts, became duels not only between violin and piano but with the sky itself. As the storm gathered, the second movement’s theme-and-variations sounded like fragile civility, repeatedly threatened by

interruption. In the finale, the storm broke: lightning, thunder, and torrential rain engulfed the sonata’s perpetualmotion frenzy. Instead of undermining the music, it exalted it—the Romantic ideal of music as combat with fate staged in real time.

That evening, the orchestra returned with Brahms’s Double Concerto and Beethoven’s Fifth. Maisky’s cello voice rasped against Bouchkov’s wiry violin tone, their dialogue less harmonious than dialectical, embodying Brahms’s late style—autumnal, argumentative, unwilling to settle.

Beethoven’s Fifth under Noseda was driven, clenched, its motivic obsession hammered with ruthless logic. Outdoors, the four-note fate motif seemed to echo not only within the orchestra but in the environment itself: the insistent barking of dogs as if mocking, or amplifying, the terror. The Amphitheatre made the symphony stranger, more uncanny, less a museum piece than a ritual confrontation.

MUSIC AS RISK The Tsinandali Festival’s seventh edition, at least in its opening days, proved once again that its core ideology is risk.

Risk of weather, risk of imperfection, risk of intrusion. The Chamber Hall provides the safety net, but the Amphitheatre is the soul: music exposed to contingency, forced into dialogue with nature, animals, storms, and silence.

In an era when concert life everywhere trends toward predictability, Tsinandali wagers on volatility. Here, Beethoven can be drowned in rain, Shostakovich punctuated by barking, Liszt brushed by wind. And precisely for that reason, music here feels less like repertoire and more like encounter—an event that happens once and then vanishes, absorbed back into the night of the magical Alazani valley.

Gianandrea Noseda and Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra. Photo by the author

CULTURE

GEORGIA TODAY SEPTEMBER 12 - 18, 2025

11

Contained in Denial: A Family in White, an Audience in Headphones, and a City in Ruins — Mud at Open Space REVIEW BY IVAN NECHAEV

T

here are productions that happen on stage and there are productions that happen in a city. Mud, the new play by Davit Khorbaladze directed by Mikheil Charkviani, belongs decisively to the second category. Its action unfolds in a metal container, parked in the courtyard of a crumbling Soviet-era housing block on the outskirts of Tbilisi, where Open Space—Georgia’s most restless experimental theater initiative—has made its home. The location is no neutral choice. By leaving the center, by staging itself in a ruin, Open Space declares that contemporary Georgian theater is not only about repertoires and premieres; it is about reclaiming the right to make art in spaces that the city, and perhaps the state, would prefer to abandon.

The first image sears itself into memory: a pristine white domestic interior assembled inside the shipping container.

The family—mother, father, son, daughter—look like they have stepped out of a detergent commercial. The floor, the furniture, even the cutlets on the breakfast table gleam with a sterile brightness. It is a visual joke as sharp as it is chilling: a family cocooned in impossible cleanliness, boxed off from the decay that surrounds them. Behind them, the façade of the ruined panel building looms like a mausoleum of history. This juxtaposition—clinical container versus rotting architecture— anchors the production in the contradictory aesthetics of Tbilisi today: glossy renovation projects pressed up against zones of abandonment, whitewashed

rhetoric pasted over systemic collapse.

The play’s mechanics intensify this contradiction. The actors are sealed inside their immaculate box, as if inside an aquarium. They cannot project to the audience in the courtyard. There is no live voice. Instead, each spectator receives a pair of headphones. Through these, the dialogue is transmitted with studio clarity, while sub-bass vibrations ripple through the ground, puncturing the body from below. This sound design (a collaboration between composer Erekle Getsadze and the technical team) produces an uncanny duality: the intimacy of whispered speech in your ear, the violence of vibration in your chest. Theatrical presence is displaced into a mediated acoustic experience. You watch bodies behind glass, but you hear them inside your skull.

This mediation is not a gimmick—it is the play’s central metaphor. The family is trapped in denial, endlessly insisting that “nothing has happened” despite evidence to the contrary. The audience, meanwhile, is forced into a parallel condition: to witness but never touch, to hear but never speak back. It is theater as surveillance, as voyeurism, as forced distance. The actors, for their part, play inside the box like animals in a terrarium.

Their gestures become heightened, stylized by the container’s claustrophobic frame. They are both protected and endangered, immaculate and drowning.

Drowning becomes literal. As the play advances, muddy water begins to seep into the pristine space. First a trickle, then a flood. The family continues to deny, continues to cook, to set the table, to arrange their breakfast as if nothing were happening. But the water rises until their movements are slowed, distorted, their white clothes stained and heavy.

Photo by the author

The sterile idyll collapses into slosh and struggle. The metaphor needs no explanation: denial is not sustainable, cleanliness cannot last, the swamp rises everywhere. And yet the insistence on routine persists. The father still polishes an egg, the mother still tends to the cutlets. Survival, in this context, means performance of normality.

The socio-political resonances of this staging are inescapable. By situating the play in the shell of a decayed panel building, Charkviani connects private denial to collective amnesia. Post-Soviet Tbilisi

Photo by the author

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is full of such ruins—monuments of deferred collapse, inhabited by ghosts of history. To install inside such a ruin a hermetically white family home is to stage the very contradiction of Georgia’s public life: official narratives of cleanliness and progress sealed off from the muddy realities of corruption, repression, and decay. The dedication of the performance to persecuted and exiled artists makes this resonance sharper.

Denial, here, is not an abstract condition; it is a daily political practice. The ostrich farm, with its giant eggs and buried heads, is less rural comedy than allegory of a society encouraged to look away.

What is remarkable is how the performance reconfigures the spectator’s role.

Theater usually traffics in presence, in the unmediated vibration of voice in air.

Here, presence is engineered technologically: headphones, sub-bass, container walls. The effect is paradoxical. On the one hand, the audience is hyper-connected—every breath of the actors courses directly into the ear canal. On the other hand, the audience is radically alienated—separated by steel, glass, and mud.

This double condition mirrors life under regimes of control, where citizens are overwhelmed with mediated information while simultaneously cut off from real political agency.

In aesthetic terms, the production participates in a lineage of container-theater and architectural interventions familiar in European performance art—from Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Aktion projects to the boxed installations of Rimini Protokoll. But in Tbilisi, the gesture takes on a different charge. It is less about international formal experimentation than about local survival. To place a play in a shipping container in the courtyard of a ruin is to acknowledge that Georgian theater’s future may be nomadic, provisional, improvisational—

always one step ahead of erasure.

The actors—Keti Javakhishvili, Kato Kalatozishvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Tornike Lazashvili, and Temo Vacharadze—deserve mention for navigating this extraordinary apparatus. Performing inside a soundproofed, water-filled container demands a new physical language.

Gestures must be both precise and exaggerated to be legible through glass; voices must sustain emotional truth for microphones without the feedback of live audience energy. Their acting oscillates between the stylized pantomime of silent cinema and the forensic intimacy of radio drama. This doubleness is exhausting to sustain, yet it is exactly the doubleness the play requires.

By the final scene, when the container is a swamp and the family still clings to their rituals, the production achieves a devastating clarity. The mud is no longer metaphor; it is matter. Denial, however radical, cannot keep shoes dry. And yet the denial continues. This is where the political bite of the piece lands: repression thrives precisely because people manage to perform normality while waist-deep in catastrophe.

Mud leaves the audience with more than images. It leaves a sensation: the weight of bass in the chest, the claustrophobic sound of headphones, the visual dissonance of sterile white against rotting concrete. It stages denial as a physiological condition. And it reaffirms what Open Space has been insisting for years— that theater in Georgia is inseparable from the city’s fractures, its ruins, its displacements.

To watch Mud is to realize that the family’s container is not sealed. The water that floods it is the same water that seeps through Georgian society, through its institutions, through its cultural life. To watch Mud is to admit that the mud is already here.

Journalists: Ana Dumbadze Vazha Tavberidze Tony Hanmer Nugzar B. Ruhadze Ivan Nechaev Mariam Razmadze

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