Great Epochs…

Givi Shakhnazari

It turns out to be very, very difficult to talk about culture...

Especially when pre-electoral chaos won’t let you draw breath and you forget how to express your stance amidst the confusion...

You look and listen to the ruthless confrontations, wondering who is right, who is wrong; this overflow of hate beyond description, and, naturally, you think that these ‘warriors’ for a better future for their homeland shouldn’t be quite so zealous...

I am saying all this because this situation hurt me; otherwise, someone might reproach me for taking part in the first parliamentary debates myself, but believe me, at that time, and even after that, I couldn’t have been held responsible for the good or bad deeds of other people, as “When it doesn’t feel right, one should get away” has always been my rule of life...

But please, don’t think this letter is a way of escaping anything.

Yes, during the 1990s, I had to meet the electorate with the Liberal Democrats, who were my party of choice, several times (mainly in Tbilisi).

When I saw myself listed in Rustaveli society’s newspaper “Mamuli” as the party’s No. 6, it made me smile; nobody realized that I wasn’t planning on getting into parliament, and that I only wanted to support my fellow party members...

I’m not a man who likes honors, though I was glad to have such an opportunity. But when they gave me the special registration form and asked me to fill in my data, I refused to enter parliament, and many looked at me with suspicion; they must have asked themselves –What did we do to offend him so much?

But no, Sir, there was no offence taken at all.

I did what I could for my fellow party members, and I would have been happy if my place could have been taken by an economist, a jurist, or a politician.

I thought that it would have been more appropriate, as they would better fulfill this public duty at parliament.

I was wrong!

Little by little, when almost everything collapsed in every possible way, when the long awaited and newly found independence was put under threat by dissolute “pseudo-independence”, when this chaotic epoch saw a failing to look after people and their human nature, when some people were asking for blood analyses in order to prove one’s origins, this is when I regretted not entering parliament, which is why I took the chance to raise my voice to protest... And when the shadow of yellow press attacked, the only respectable traditional newspaper we had at that time, and wrote horrible things of an unseen level, I became dispirited and couldn’t appease my wish to protest more... There was a time when you could quite often hear that no one was discriminated against in this country, and imagine that even this hard-to-believe opinion was no irritation to us at that time, because even in those hellish Soviet times, we were “tolerant” ...

And now? What’s happening right now?!

Did we accept and are we using the computer, one of the first ambassadors of the establishment of globalization in this world, as a most ancient country with great culture and traditions should have?!

Perhaps we have neglected another potential of this all capable machine leading us to progress – its transformation into an arena for any foreign or local enemy.

Just go on the Internet or on ‘Facebook’ and you will be terrified...

Even when Arabs, Persians or Ottomans were dominating our territory, nobody referred to the occupying nations in a bad way, despite the fact that freeing ourselves from their yoke was always every Georgian’s foremost aspiration...

If we look back at history, at the reigns of King David, Queen Tamara and King Erekle, we see how the three great representatives of the Bagrationi dynasty distinguished themselves with remarkable tolerance...

I was almost considered “the most tolerant person of the year” a few years ago. I’m mentioning this in order to introduce the following story. It was at the end of the 90s, when, it has to be said, “computer hatred” wasn’t at its full yet, but TV journalism in particular was already doing the job...

They were coming and asking us from which generation our families had been established in Tbilisi... As if being from Tbilisi was a special reward from God himself!

When, after only one week, another journalist asked me the same kind of question at the National Gallery, I asked her if she was carrying out this “research” on the orders of some stubborn superior.

A country is like a body, with vital organs. The capital is its heart, and whoever is the child of any region of Georgia and is proud of being its citizen can be considered as coming from Tbilisi!

By the way, if you are interested in my own story, I came with the bridal suite of “Shushaniki” (a christian martyr from the 5th century AD), I enamored a woman at the wedding, and I stayed... And since then, I’ve been serving the cultures of our two Christian countries, and they’ve been giving it back.