Georgian women praying in a church in Tbilisi this week
LIKE the Irish, the Georgians like dates. "April 9th," they used to say, and shake their heads. That was the day, in 1989, when Soviet tanks took up position in Tbilisi's Lenin Square near to where a group of independence demonstrators were due to end their five-day hunger-strike, writes Mary Russell
The Georgian Orthodox Patriarch, Ilya II, fearing a confrontation, urged the demonstrators to disperse. "Go home and pray," he said. But a voice in the crowd low, strong and certain, spoke one word: "Ara!" ("No!").
At 4am the tanks thundered in, followed by riot troops trained and brutalised, it was said, by the war in Afghanistan. Twenty-one people died,including a 16-year-old schoolgirl and a pregnant woman.
But this was nothing new. In 1903, Cossack troops broke into a political meeting in Tbilisi's city hall and clubbed to death what historians call "hundreds". Four years later, the poet and nationalist Illya Chavchavadze was murdered by agents of the Czar. Or by the Bolsheviks, depending on which history book you read.
Chavchavadze had founded Iveria, a magazine devoted to the revival of the Georgian language - which, incidentally, is as different from Russian as Irish is from English. One issue carried the following poem:
Let my dear land prosper,
My land of Iveria,
Iveria the motherland.
And you, man of Georgia,
May your labours join you
To your homeland.
The author was Iosif Dzhugashvili, better known to the world as Joe Stalin, whose home town of Gori was bombed by the Russians in recent days. Stalin may have walked the world's stage - revered or reviled depending on your politics - but he was never accepted in the Moscow salons where the smart set smirked at his rough provincial ways and the manner in which he spoke Russian with a Georgian accent.
No matter what they do, Georgians seem to end up feeling humiliated and the sight this week of President Saakashvili seeking shelter beneath a pile of riot shields can only heighten this self-image.
When Saakashvili was elected president in 2004, I was an election observer sent to Ajaria, a small area run by a local warlord. At one point my car was surrounded by men in balaclavas bearing AK47s, asking to see my passport - in, I have to say, the politest manner. Guns, of course, are part of Georgian life. Stand next to a man in a bar and he's likely to be wearing one tucked into his waistband. The following day, incidentally, a few gunmen tried to liberate a polling box from a polling station but were prevented by a group of women who actually sat on the box.
THERE was a time when most people in the West thought Georgia was a US state. Now most of us know - at least roughly - that it's also a country near the Caucasus with an oil pipeline running through it. But Georgian history goes back well beyond pipelines and many Georgians feel, rightly, that their language, their wine and their glorious polyphonic singing have never been fully appreciated.
Most damaging of all to Georgian national pride is the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, for it was to Georgia (Colchis in those days) that Jason sailed to be welcomed by a treacherous harridan who cast a spell on him, seduced him and then helped him find the golden fleece. Her name was Medea and yes, dear reader, he married her. But when he found, back home in Greece, that she lacked the finesse of Greek women, he ditched her for another model; at which point, she killed the two children she had borne him, thus proving to the guardians of civilisation that she had indeed been a barbarian all along.
Visit Georgia, however, and you hear a different story. Medea - and many women are called after her - was a healer who collected medicinal herbs. And in any market in Georgia you can see village women selling bunches of herbs that they gathered themselves on the mountainsides.
The golden fleece was a reference to the way in which men - and I've seen them doing it - pan for gold in the rivers by using a fleece which traps the tiny shards of precious metal.
But what of Georgia now — a small, proud country with a miserably defeated army, whose main function is to act as a conduit for three major pipelines and whose US protector would like it to join Nato? Indeed, when I was recently a guest of the British Council I was invited to hold a conversation class with a group of ageing Georgian military men who suddenly needed to learn English, the lingua franca of Nato.
If Georgia does join, Russia will feel itself even more threatened by US hegemony,surrounded as it is already by Nato bases. And for countries hopeing for oil security, that's a point worth bearing in mind.
• Mary Russell's book Please Don't Call it Soviet Georgia is published by Serpent's Tail.
© 2008 The Irish Times
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