This giga-building reminds one of the Fudan project in Budapest and other stealthy colonization moves by China. But this is something different. Not a debt trap, like the Montenegro highway, Sri Lanka port, Laos railway and many other projects built from Chinese loans and, after the respective state’s insolvency, taken in Chinese possession. In 2015, the romance between Georgia and China started to be mutually beneficial. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, China discovered an alternative transportation route through Georgia bypassing Russia, while Georgia hoped for new markets and new investments from China instead of the short-sighted US governments that have neglected Georgia in the past decade, as well as serious political support to reclaim the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in return for which Georgia strongly supports the One China policy, staying away from Taiwan and never mentioning the repression of human rights in China. In this spirit of mutual benefit, China won a number of construction tenders in Georgia back in 2018 (albeit through a lot of corruption), and they are now implementing them, including the Tbilisi-Kutaisi highway. In the meantime, however, the rosy haze has dispersed. The momentum of the Belt and Road Initiative, launched as a great ideological battle cry in 2013, has by now slowed down, due to the growing difficulties of Chinese economy and the escalating Chinese-US trade war. China cannot now focus on its secondary partners as they thought they could in 2015. And Georgia is dissatisfied with Chinese markets – where they are allowed to export only copper and other raw materials –, as well as Chinese investments and Chinese political support, since the Chinese leadership systematically avoids conflict with Russia over the breakaway territories, and even engages in joint military excercises in the Caucasus with Russian, Abkhazian and South Ossetian troops.
An important difference between the routes of the Soviet and Chinese highway pillars standing next to each other in the bend of Dzirula is that the Soviet highway would have led straight to the millennial Ubisi monastery, perhaps providing an excuse for its demolition, while the Chinese highway bypasses the whole village with a tunnel.
We also know the painter of the beautiful frescoes of the church. He was called Damiane, and he followed the most elegant style of the 14th century, the Palaiologos Renaissance of Byzantium. The same style which his Western contemporaries, Giotto and Duccio, used to create the Italian Renaissance. I will write a separate post about these frescoes, so I only show a few of them now.
The wall of the church is also adorned with various graffiti, like in medieval churches in general, especially around the gate, where the bored believers spent time waiting for the liturgy. The figures are not really discernible through the many layers, but the inscriptions written in Nuskhuri, the widespread script of the Middle Ages, are still visible.
The highway from Tbilisi to Gori and even further, to the Rikoti Pass, has existed for many years. It runs on the northern bank of Mtkvari. However, the ancient, historic route follows the south bank of the river.
Gori also has a medieval castle, but the city is mainly famous for being the birthplace of the most powerful Georgian ruler ever, Stalin. “We respect Stalin very much”, the manager of a local guest house told me many years ago. “Think about it, if he wasn’t born here and his museum wasn’t here, who would come to Gori? What would we live on?” Crystal clear logic. Luckily, the people of Linz have other sources of livelihood.
However, the Georgian cult of Stalin is not as overwhelming as it appears. Georgians, especially young people and intellectuals, are aware of Stalin’s true historical merits, the great terror, the oppression of peoples, including their people, the divide and rule politics whose results they suffer now. It is mainly the elderly and simple folk who remember him with nostalgia, which is more of a nostalgia for their youth. A political movement could not be founded on Stalin in today’s Georgia, unlike in Russia. It is also because of the resurgent and officializing Russian cult of Stalin that it is seen with suspicion in Georgia.
On our most recent visit, in one of the halls, next to Stalin’s table with a small lampshade, a TV interview was taking place with a young local celebrity who certainly had not lived in Stalin’s time. The smashing red plastic shoes of the reporter, dressed in Soviet vaudeville style, matched perfectly the color of the “Stand Here” covid stickers glued to the parquet floor.
The same hall has the exhibition object that is most familiar to the Hungarian visitor. Not only because it represents a domestic landmark, but also because of the enthusiastic, warm devotion to the conqueror flowing from its inscription.
Habent sua fata artefacta, not only books, but works of art also have their own history. Laci Holler looked into the history of the peasant delegation of 1951, which donated the above model of the Statue of Liberty, and sent us the following articles from the Arcanum database for the round anniversary. The 200-member peasant delegation led by Imre Dögei, President of the Hungarian Parliament, visited the Soviet Union exactly 70 years ago, from 5 July to 3 August 1951, to “learn first-hand about the world’s most advanced agriculture, the decisive superiority of socialist large-scale production and the happy and cultured life of the Soviet peasantry”. In Moscow they paid a visit to the Timirazev Agricultural Academy and its experimental plants. They visited the Lenin Mausoleum and the museum where gifts from all over the globe for Stalin’s 70th birthday were exhibited. (The same gifts will be exhibited in the Gori Museum after 1957.) They then divided into five groups and traveled to five Soviet republics to study local agriculture. The group lead by Imre Dögei went to Georgia, where they were received by the President of the republic Mikhail Lelashvili, and they also visited the Stalin Kolkhoz in Gori.
When traveling from east to west, the westernmost junction of the Georgian road network is signed everywhere along the highway and national roads: Sukhumi, like Mosonmagyaróvár in my native Hungary. With the difference that Sukhumi has been the seat of the breakaway Abkhazia since the Abkhaz war of 1992-1993, where Georgian citizens have been forbidden to enter for almost thirty years. If they took the road sign seriously, they would, at the Inguri bridge, crash into the Russian army of occupation checking the passports. So the road sign is, in fact, not information, but a political statement, an irredenta manifesto, a stand for the country’s internationally recognized unity – Abkhazia’s independence is recognized, apart from Russia, only by such great powers as Venezuela and Nauru – and a reminder and call for an effective restoration of that unity.
At the Abkhaz border. From George Ovashvili’s The Other Bank / L’Autre Rive / გაღმა ნაპირი, Franco-Georgian co-production (2009)
This eschatological character of he Soviet view of history is particularly strong in World War II monuments, which paraphrase a traditional Christian theme, the victory of good and light over evil and darkness.
The rocket, cosmos and space travel have played an important role in the public decoration of socialism as a symbol and promise of a future already realized in the present, as is well analyzed in the studies of the volume Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. In the Soviet Union, the mosaic decoration of rural bus stops were important mediators of current ideological themes. Many of them have survived in Georgia.
Теперь нам не надо по улицам мыкаться ощупью. Машины нас ждут, и ракеты уносят нас вдаль… А все-таки жаль — иногда над победами нашими встают пьедесталы, которые выше побед. | | Today we no longer have to stumble down the street: Cars wait for us, and spaceships take us far… But it is still a pity that under our victories sometimes there stand pedestals that are higher than the victory. |
Bulat Okudzhava: Былое нельзя воротить (The past cannot be brought back)
The most romantic part of Kutaisi is perhaps the Rioni River, which, running down from the mountains of Lower Svaneti – the provinces of Racha and Lechkumi – runs down with forceful waves even here in its spectacular rock bed. Turn-of-the-century wooden houses with balconies rise up along the two steep sides of the riverbed, as if the twentieth century, which battered the built heritage on the two banks, had somehow blew over the deep riverbed without leaving a trace. Only home maintenance indicates the passage of time, but it makes them look even more romantic. As if Egon Schiele’s turn-of-the-century Vltava views in Český Krumlov came to life in the Rioni valley.
Above the bazaar, two churches face one other on the two banks, looking, respectively up and down, like the Basilica and Matthias Church in my native Budapest, only of course the distances are much smaller. On the “Pest” side, not far above the bazaar, a large-domed Neo-Baroque church, like a Roman basilica, rises on the riverside rocks. An unusual sight here in the Orthodox East. And even more unusual, the inscription on the arches of its vestibule is written in Latin: IN HONOREM IMMACULATAE CONCEPTIONIS B[EATAE] MARIAE S[EMPER] V[IRGINIS] – In honor of the Immaculate Conception of the always Virgin Blessed Mary. If Latin alone were not enough, this concept makes clear that it was a Catholic church. The idea of the Immaculate Conception – which does not mean that Mary conceived Jesus directly by the word of God, without any male participant, which is how most people understand this term, but that Mary herself was conceived without the “macula” (stain) of the original sin passed on from Adam and Eve, so she would be a pure source of Christ’s human nature – has been a specifically Catholic outcome since the late Middle Ages, which would become an official teaching of the church in 1854. Soon thereafter, in 1861 the Georgian Catholics in Constantinople founded their society of the Immaculate Conception to support Catholics in Georgia.
Georgian Catholics? Yes. The Catholic confession was established in Georgia in the 12th century, when Georgians and Frankish crusaders fought together against the Saracens and Turks. Sometimes the Georgian king sent auxiliary troops to the Holy Land, and sometimes the king of Jerusalem sent Frankish knights to Georgia, such as during the reconquest of Tbilisi from the Arabs in 1121. Tbilisi had a Catholic bishopric for Georgians who returned from the Holy Land as Catholics and for Franks who settled in Georgia. And the Georgian kings took the Catholic church under their patronage just as they did with the Orthodox church. After the 15th century, when Georgia broke up into a number of smaller principalities, the Catholic confession strengthened especially in the eastern part of the country, under Ottoman rule, partly because the Georgian Catholic diocese of Constantinople was able to reach this point, and partly because the center of the Georgian Orthodox church was in Mtskheta/Tbilisi, in the hostile Persian empire, from where Turks were reluctant to receive priests. Around today’s south-western border, Akhaltsikhe (Rabati in Ottoman times), a significant number of Georgian Catholics still live in many villages, spiritually taken care of by Polish priests who have learned Georgian. And the Catholic population of Kutaisi, which had belonged to the Turks, was also significant until the October Revolution.
Since the advent of independence in 1990, the former balance and good relations between the two confessions have been upset. As we saw in Tbilisi, in connection with the former Armenian churches of the Bethlehem quarter, the Orthodox Church, which had become the established church of the country, feels victorious, and is waging a full-scale offensive against all other denominations. Since 1990, the Catholich church has also filed for reclamation on their five former churches, but they have received only the one in Tbilisi. The rest were seized by the Orthodox, including the one in Kutaisi, which is now an Orthodox church. Latin inscriptions, papal coats of arms and characteristic Catholic statues and images have not been destroyed, as was the case with Armenian churches, but the church was renamed from Immaculate Conception to Annunciation, and everything is covered with Georgian icons. True, this also happened ambiguously. On the one hand, the side altars – which do not exist in an Orthodox church – were left with their Catholic altarpieces, circled with icons, just as the Neo-Baroque main altarpiece is only counterbalanced with an icon barrier in the sanctuary. On the other hand, a number of characteristic Catholic devotional images which do not exist in the Orthodox icon canon have developed here Orthodox icon variants, apparently based on formulas previously used by Catholic beleivers, such as the Baroque devotional image of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, perfectly transcribed here as an icon. Nevertheless, the Orthodox priests openly detest Catholic believers coming to the church, just like elsewhere in the country. Just as an example, they tried to persuade Georgian girlfriend of my perfectly Georgian-speaking Italian Catholic friend, loud enough for everyone to overhear, to break with her “heretical” boyfriend lest she burn in hell.
No official information in the church is left to remind us of its Catholic past. At the same time, next to the church stands the memorial house of Zakaria Paliashvili, the founder of the Georgian Academy of Music, whose information notes that the master received his basic musical education in the choir of the local Catholic church. But as to where this church was, even though it is nearby, is not mentioned.
The Kutaisi Catholics today gather in this same Newport Street, No. 10, in the communal space and apartment church established on the ground floor and courtyard of a house. In the same kind of fear from the threatening Orthodox majority as was visited on the pre-emancipation Jews and their hidden house-synagogues. Three years ago there was a modest inscription on the street façade of the apartment, it has since been removed.
To be continued.