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The Other Georgia on My Mind: Hope and Fears for an Ancient Land
| Article
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21914 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
4,576 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
Oddly, I have vivid memories of the Georgian State Museum on Rustaveli Street, Tbilisi. The museum is currently pockmarked by bullet holes from the vicious little war in downtown Tbilisi that got rid of the government of Zviad Gamsakhurdia in late 1991 and early 1992; some of the exhibits, and many of the glass cases, have been smashed by bullets. It is one of the few places where one can still find an approving reference to Stalin, a huge mural of a fictionalized instance in which the young Stalin (or Dugashvili, as he was known then) and a couple of revolutionary cronies are looking out over the Black Sea and planning their next move. But, generally, the museum is dull and unimaginative, plodding through six thousand years of history by way of stationary items in badly lit glass cases.
I would barely have given the museum a thought, had it not been for the insistence and enthusiasm of the students who took me to it. In the early part of the chronological sequence, they gathered round me enthusiastically, pointing out how the first wheat was sown in Georgia, how the first wine was made, perhaps as long ago as nine thousand years, and how this practice and the word (ghvino, in Georgian) spread to the world. They showed me early examples of the Georgian alphabet, a contemporary (at least) of the Latin and Greek alphabets and still in use. It was impossible to avoid the awareness that Georgia is a very ancient land and that the knowledge of ancient lineage is extremely important to people born in the 1970s. In the West, I can think of only Ireland where a group of young people would be so conscious of a distant past, and there it would not be so distant and they would not be so conscious. As we approached modern times in the museum, they became visibly bored, their task over, and they began to suggest that I must be tired and in need of refreshment.
ANCIENT GEORGIA
Western Georgia is the Colchis where Jason and the Argonauts landed and found a civilization already in existence; eastern Georgia is the Iberia of which the Greek geographer Strabo wrote. We think of Greece almost exclusively as the cradle of Western civilization, but Georgia has a right to dispute this claim, and Georgians tend to be upset when they find out how little modern Westerners know about them. Georgia was one of the first Christian countries; some of the coastal villages have been continuously Christian since the first century. The whole country was Christian by the end of the fourth century. There are, of course, places that were converted to Christianity earlier, including large parts of Syria and Turkey, but only Georgia and Armenia have remained
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