Ula Vayner

Another Georgia

Thirty three years ago, in the summer of 1991, I took a map of the Soviet Union and drew a hitchhiking plan on it. From my native Siberian city, Novosibirsk, through Moscow, to Georgia –the hidden-in-mountains magic place where, according to Georgian movies, beautiful men and women drink delicious red wine from drinking-horns and sing divine polyphonic songs.

On August, 19th 1991 the take-over happened. The Soviet Union didn’t exist any more. Fifteen Soviet former republics were getting ready to fight for independence.

My parents asked me give them some potassium cyanide before I left for my trip.

I didn’t do it. Instead, I had to put my plan on the back burner.

Fifteen years later, sitting in Houston and watching the famous Georgian movie “Mimino” with my daughter, I realized that if I didn’t go to Georgia right then I would not go to Georgia ever. The dream would expire and die. So I went, and just in time, because two months later the relationship between Russia and Georgia suddenly declined. Nobody can predict what politics will plan tomorrow.

This project is no documentary. There was no goal to reflect the economic or political situation of contemporary Georgia.

The ideal pictures, again inspired by Georgian movies, that I wanted to see would have been like this: a long table up on a hill with a white cloth on it. The beautiful voices of 40 Georgian men, sitting around the table. There were just two opportunities to see that Georgia: either pay a tourist agency or find a wedding or birthday party in a village, if you are lucky.

Instead I saw almost abandoned villages with only old people left in them, and nobody sang except for priests in churches.

However, what was most important for me, and what is captured in my pictures are beautiful faces and the atmosphere that reminds me something hard to find nowadays, something from the childhood that finished, something from the country that doesn’t exist anymore, something that I saw in old Georgian movies.

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