PhotoEssay | My Once-Rebellious Municipality

2026-02-08 - 13:18

Author: Gvantsa Lomaia My grandmother had a spicy tongue that could make you want to die. But in the village, there was a quiet conviction that she was, in fact, too kind at heart, something that would only surface at the most inconvenient moments. She believed that, to keep up with life, one had to be tough and proud. I, she’d say, was too open, too thin, too social, too available, or too modest, and I was the one chasing boys – unlike her, who, at my age, was the one to be chased after. She’d play the ice queen, an inaccessible one, ruthlessly wounding men’s hearts before choosing and marrying the best one. That’s what she’d say, and I remember her words bitterly because they rang so true. She mostly spoke in Megrelian, but knew Georgian poems by heart. She would recite them to me under candlelight when I was a kid. She rarely left her village. But this story is not about my grandmother, and neither is it about me. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia “We all have our own opinions here, and it’s wrong for you to insult us over Facebook posts,” my neighbor in the village told me on the day my grandmother died. Having avoided my gaze previously, he finally gathered the courage to address me after drinking a glass or two. “Tell me, what do you have against King Erekle?” he went on, asking me about the Georgian medieval king with a much-debated legacy. I had nothing against King Erekle, but the TV channels he watched must have convinced him otherwise. The neighbor is Kotsi, or a ruling party supporter. My grandmother was Natsi, or an opposition supporter. My neighbor is also a schoolteacher. When repression and injustice spread across Georgia, I, now a Tbilisi liberal, might have been way too loud on social media in denouncing my former school’s silence. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia But he is a good neighbor. He gifted my father, an opposition voter, a turkey at New Year’s. It was to mark the occasion of my father finally managing to buy himself a car at the age of sixty. The night my grandmother died, the neighbors stayed until late. They helped. Our conversations would switch between memories of Grandma and political arguments. We defended our opposing truths, at times fiercely, at times with Lermontov’s “immortal verses.” It was quite frustrating, but there was also an undeniable sense of community. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia My village is in the Tsalenjikha municipality, in the western Georgian region of Samegrelo. It is one of the beautiful villages, with well-kept orchards, transparent fences to show off that well-keptness, and green, untouched rivers with occasional mood swings. Tsalendjikha is a five-hour drive from Tbilisi. But occasionally, we still make it onto the news. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia In the early ’90s, it was in those beautiful villages that the Mkhedrioni, a Georgian paramilitary group, chased Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first president, after the coup. The Mkhedrioni, infamous for their much-forgiven atrocities committed in our region, occupied our house in 1993. My family says the house on the hill was chosen as a good tactical spot to easily catch the president, who had escaped into the woods. They saw it, they liked it, and they stayed there for a month, leaving us displaced with my infant brother, who picked the worst time to get out of the womb. They would walk through the living room – or zala, Megrelians’ holy place – with dirty shoes, much to the irritation of my clean-freak grandmother. But in the end, my grandmother didn’t make too much fuss, knowing that at that very moment the Mkhedrioni had a man hanging upside down by his legs not far away. They believed the man worked for Zviad. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia We again hit the headlines in 2001. Three local men were exposed to radiation while collecting firewood in Lia, a nearby village. They went into the forest in the cold, saw a bunch of abandoned canisters that happened to be hot, and used them as a heat source as they stayed and drank overnight. The canisters turned out to be unlabeled radioisotope thermoelectric generator cores. They had been recklessly dismantled and left behind from the Soviet era. The International Atomic Energy Agency got involved, but one of the men still succumbed to complications years after unsuccessful treatment. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia The next spotlight came in 2003, when Mikheil Saakashvili, or Misha, boarded that red Tsalendjikha bus and led the convoy into the Rose Revolution. The famous imagery suddenly cheered up our village. I was eleven years old and dramatic then, and when the revolution succeeded, I remember going to the cross on a nearby hill, kneeling, and thanking the Lord. Years later, many around us would fall out of love with Misha, and they had reasons to do so, but I think they never forgot the nice bus gesture. That could be part of the reason why we again became relevant in 2021. After quite asymmetrical local elections, Tsalendjikha emerged as Georgia’s only municipality with an opposition mayor. So the hype started: we were called “Little Europe,” businessmen who were also politicians promised new jobs and democracy hubs, everyone planned something, projected something. Soon, the country would also learn that Georgia’s big football sensation, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who was reaching stardom in Europe, was also from our municipality. My grandma, too, was a Kvaratskhelia. Man at a local market with Kvara-77 slippers. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia The hype slowly subsided and, ultimately, we were left to each other again, perhaps a little more frustrated and poorer. And then things started getting worse. In 2024, in widely disputed parliamentary elections, Tsalenjikha was among the districts where the ruling party fell below 50 percent. It still had slightly more than four major opposition forces combined. A week later, the opposition mayor passed away. In 2025, another local election came. At least half of the opposition and their voters boycotted it, so the Georgian Dream candidate had no trouble securing 75 percent. Despite the boycott, the locals said the ruling party spent more money and administrative resources than ever before on the last municipal elections in the rogue municipality. I was there and saw their foul play with my own eyes. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia Months before that vote, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, a football veteran who is also Georgian Dream’s secretary general, raced through Tsalendjikha’s shabby roads in his blue Ferrari and bathed in those green rivers. He was hosted, among others, by his party colleague, Tsalenjikha’s disgraced son, Irakli Zarkua. The voyage seemed very much in line with the party’s rhetoric at the time. As Georgia was isolated from the West and faced suspension of visa-free travel with the EU, we still had so many beautiful places to visit at home, right? And what’s more exotic to explore than good old poverty? The municipality has been emptying year by year, and out of the remaining 20,200 residents, 40 percent depend on social assistance. But at least the rivers are green. So far. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia And yet, in the past two years, Zarkua had been caught in at least two scandals related to his not-so-modest foreign adventures. In January 2025, he was involved in a hotel brawl in Abu Dhabi. In January 2026, a random video circulated accidentally capturing him – a married and conservative lawmaker – with an unknown woman in Monaco. He claimed it was AI. It might have been a sham election, but Georgian Dream winning in Tsalenjikha in 2025 still felt dishonoring. We were mocked over and over again. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia I’ve been spending more time in my village since Grandma died. Politics remains a hot topic here, but not the only topic. The rage and estrangement I pick up at protests in Tbilisi struggle to stand their ground when a local Kotsi, whom I’ve known since my early years, says a heartfelt hello, invites me over for coffee, and redirects my anger to the politicians who made all these divisions happen. So is my father, who hates the ruling party even more than I do. He still breaks bread with those neighbors, whose Kotsi sheep regularly pasture in his garden. He told me they argue a lot, sometimes loudly, especially when drunk, but can’t afford to lose each other. It’s a village, and we rely on each other, he says. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia But then, when I again find myself at the same dinner table with them, I feel uneasy. I think about those standing at the Parliament, and I feel like a traitor. I am afraid I have no excuse: isn’t it precisely because of my Kotsi neighbors that the oppressive system stands? Isn’t it due to the silence of people like them that so many innocent people remain behind bars? I grew up in that village, and I remember a time when the district, constantly at odds with those in power, was struggling so badly that we survived only through mutual help. A cake used to be a form of collective labor and joy: supplies were scarce, so it took three or four families to bake one. Of course, we argued, but something larger than us always held us together: first, our love for Zviad and wounds from the Mkhedrioni; then the hatred toward Shevardnadze; later, Misha’s bus. And finally, disappointments – repeated disappointments. Photo: Gvantsa Lomaia I thought that’s what would happen when things again got dire in the past years. I believed that our truth was obvious, that if we raised our voices, we could wake up others, show them where Georgia was being dragged, and that even ruling party supporters would soften, reflect on their beaten neighbors, and once again join others in anger. But that’s not what happened, and, at the end of the day, it is still we who try to cling to old ties, to still find things in common and beat alienation. Perhaps that’s both our weakness and our strength. Tsalenjikha used to be Georgia’s rebel municipality. Now it’s complicated and painful. Grandma.