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“They want us to stop seeing each other, to lose contact, to feel alone,” Icelandic writer Sjón tells me at the Tbilisi Literary Festival. By “they,” he means all the dark forces rising across the world: populists, fascists, fundamentalists.
In September 2025, more people attended the Tbilisi Literary Festival than ever before. The halls were full, and I think everyone present felt grateful to the foreign guests for coming anyway — in defiance of “them.”
I don’t think coming to Tbilisi is an act of great heroism yet, but I already have countless examples of people no longer coming – people for whom this city and this country are dear, people who understand the context, who didn’t need things explained to them. Their absence gives me a completely new and unfamiliar feeling of abandonment.
The Europeans who put down roots here over decades are leaving Tbilisi. My father jokingly called them “cultural refugees.” Most of them came in the 1990s on humanitarian missions. Then they fell in love with this place and stayed here forever.
But nothing lasts forever, and the departure of noumerous such people feels like an alarm bell to me.
Our young people are leaving too. Quietly, without fuss. You think someone is still here because they remain active on social media, and then it turns out they are already trying to settle in Lisbon, Dublin, or Berlin.
We are too few to create communities and diasporas abroad. We will simply dissolve, scatter across the world, and disappear. Or rather, the part of us that loves thinking and is incapable of flattery will disappear.
We are too few to create communities and diasporas abroad. We will simply dissolve, scatter across the world, and disappear. Or rather, the part of us that loves thinking and is incapable of flattery will disappear
For those of us who remain here, literary festivals and similar cultural events are places where it is possible to breathe freely. At the festival, you never forget where you live, but no longer feel tense. You see like-minded people and tell them how glad you are to meet them somewhere other than at a protest march.* The festival doors are open to everyone, but conformists have no need to meet foreign or Georgian authors. They already know everything.
At the festival there is an empty chair for poet Zviad Ratiani. Two months earlier, he had effectively forced his own arrest by repeating the act of another political prisoner, the nonconformist journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli, who slapped a police officer.
The blow was not strong; it was symbolic – an example meant to wake us up and strengthen our resolve. He believed his action would change something. He prepared for it and did it. The last time I saw him was in court. He stood throughout the hearing, mashing and rolling non-stop cigarettes in his hands. Even his refusal to sit in the defendant’s chair was symbolic.
Zviad Ratiani is in prison now. Yet I often see him in the city streets, and regularly mistake passersby for him…
In the autumn, two diplomats who had lost their jobs offer me a collaboration. I agree, and once a month I speak about literature and cinema to a hall full of their colleagues — former diplomats. Several retired ambassadors attend the lectures too. On the first evening I choose patriotism and militarism in Japanese literature as the subject, and it seems to me I have never had such a good audience. I had never had contact with diplomats before, and it turns out they are wonderful people whose decades of accumulated experience and professionalism are no longer needed in today’s Georgia…
At the beginning of December, the annual Tbilisi Film Festival takes place. From the stage, the name most often heard is that of another prisoner of the regime, actor Andro Chichinadze.
At the end of November 2024, one day before leaving for Peru, I met a young, attractive man with colossal plans. While filming a war movie, pyrotechnics exploded beside Andro’s ear, leaving him with depersonalisation and derealisation syndromes. While fighting this condition, he discovered that hiking in the mountains helped him. Beyond a certain altitude, all the symptoms vanished. The theater and film actor took up mountaineering and later decided to climb the highest peaks on every continent and make a film about it.
He met me to ask me to co-write the script. I remember thinking that everything would work out for this guy. Something often happens to me when I meet good people – and it happened again here – I couldn’t say no and agreed. By the time I returned from Peru, Andro was supposed to have climbed Kilimanjaro and filmed the first episode.
Instead of Kilimanjaro, he ended up in prison on charges of group violence alongside people he had never even known before. I think he will remain friends with those people for the rest of his life.
At the film festival, every speaker mentions Andro, who transformed from a charming and talented young man into a hero and a symbol of resistance.
And I realize that at this latest festival I watch every film from an entirely different perspective. Even another work by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa about Stalinist repression. One might ask: why make another film about all this when so much has already been written and filmed? But following Russia’s example, the cult of Stalin has also been pulled out of mothballs here, and to my astonishment it turned out to be alive.
Official propagandists are still cautious, but government-affiliated trolls are increasingly talking about the greatness of the Leader. Stalin’s resurrection coincides with the rebirth of the most absurd ideas of Georgian messianism. Unknown professors and pseudoscientists have begun speaking about the uniqueness of Georgian civilisation…
I rarely remember an audience as emotional as the one I saw after the screening of Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater. After the film ends, no one goes home. Strangers hug each other, smoke together, pity the friends and family members who missed the film...
This joy and excitement feel very real.
A woman from my generation, whom I know from the protest rallies, tells me: “We are part of this, we always were, and they want to separate us from it!”
By “this,” she means Europe.
I smile. The film touched me deeply too, bringing me back to the day my young parents came back home after watching Breathless.
In my Soviet childhood, everything reached us late, and I vividly remember my parents watching that film twenty years after its release and being overwhelmed by it. They spoke about Belmondo’s reckless hero who killed easily and died easily, about Jean Seberg wearing that shirt, about the originality of Godard’s cinematic language, and about Paris – the most astonishing city, one that could exist only in books and films because it seemed impossible for such a city to exist on Earth.
It feels as though we have returned to those old days when European films reached us, but their creators never did
I first fell in love with Godard’s film through my parents’ stories. Several years later I saw with my own eyes how Belmondo imitated Humphrey Bogart and made funny faces. Then I found a girl who told me it was her favorite film too, and on our first date I grimaced like Belmondo myself, rubbing my thumb across my lips while holding a cigarette. I had only recently started smoking – perhaps solely in order to make that gesture...
The girl missed the reference and Godard and thought I simply had nervous tics.
In Linklater’s film, the young Godard and his friends are shooting Breathless. The nostalgic film that moved us all is a tribute to the past, made with great tact and love – to people who once, in the distant Sixties, created a masterpiece and laid the foundation for something new and real, perhaps for that very Europe we admire so much, the Europe we aspire to, the Europe each of us imagines differently. A Europe that has already become a myth, and now even the road toward that myth is being closed to us. We are forbidden from approaching it, and we grow angry, sometimes cry, sometimes fall into complete helplessness.
Yet the festival audience consists almost entirely of like-minded people, and you believe everything will be fine, that the efforts of so many good people cannot possibly end in defeat.
And still, the tragic feeling of abandonment does not leave me — perhaps because the festival is taking place without foreign guests. It feels as though we have returned to those old days when European films reached us, but their creators never did.
Above the hall full of nonconformists hovers the spectre of isolation.
The film festival opened with the Italian biographical film Duse. I ask the person beside me why such a boring work was chosen as the opening film, and he whispers back that outside, in the cinema foyer, there is a buffet and several bottles of wine gifted to the festival by the Italian embassy.
Everything becomes clear.
The Tbilisi International Festival was always poor, but the latest one is simply destitute.
Despite its poverty, the festival always had interesting guests who were happy to come here. And we eagerly awaited meeting them, attending their master classes and public lectures.
I am still friends with several people I met at the festival. Some of them I even disliked.
Today I miss those ones too – the arrogant European masters tired of human stupidity.
Still, the festival does have one foreign guest, and, would you believe it: he is the actor who played Benito Mussolini. Apparently there is a ten-minute episode in Duse that I never saw because I fell asleep when Mussolini appeared on screen. After the screening I wake up and watch the Duce’s actor on stage – his thick neck and square jaw. He says Tbilisi is a beautiful city. He thanks the audience. He is probably a good man, but why Mussolini of all people? Perhaps he was simply in Tbilisi as a tourist and his visit coincided with the festival...
The film festival ends too. But the protests continue, and so does our life in a country where laws designed to oppress and constrict us are being adopted at accelerated speed. We have neither money nor brute force nor, thank God, weapons. They are not afraid of us, but we greatly irritate the government and those who have chosen the path of conformism – as well as others who possess the skills necessary for life in an empire but not in a free society.
Such people have begun calling themselves “traditionalists”. They label the pro-European part of the population “liberals,” regardless of political views, and have learned to pronounce the word with particular hatred.
No matter where my guests are from — Dutch, Belgian, or German — at some point they will ask me why there are so many European Union flags hanging in Georgian towns and villages
Traditionalists are driven by spite toward liberals. If liberals are noticed caring for stray dogs, traditionalists consider it their duty to treat stray dogs with cruelty.
Tbilisi is becoming a difficult and depressing city to live in.
I walk through the streets of my native city and once again I think I see the imprisoned poet and his carrot-colored jacket…
For my next discussion with the former diplomats, I choose the image of dictators in Latin American literature, and through Conversation in the Cathedral by Vargas Llosa I convince myself that every dictatorship, no matter how solid and monolithic it appears, will one day collapse like sand.
The former diplomats nod in agreement.
Then spring arrives suddenly. Normally this is my busiest and most enjoyable time of year. Every April I spend several weeks guiding European birdwatchers, and the work never tires me – I enjoy it. But this year I will have only one Dutch group in May. The war in Iran frightened away the others.
Before the Dutch arrive, I become a birdwatcher myself. I go into nature alone and spend hours sitting in a hide that resembles a shelter. My camera is aimed at the branch where the kingfisher is supposed to land. I look very much like an eccentric retired European, and at the same time I feel protected from everything. I have cut a small window into the world, and through that window only nature is visible – not humanity, not its pain, not its nauseating adaptability.
But thoughts do not leave me here either. I think about the May group and the unpleasant moment that will inevitably come.
No matter where my guests are from — Dutch, Belgian, or German — at some point they will ask me why there are so many European Union flags hanging in Georgian towns and villages.
I will answer that my country strives toward the European Union and that this is the will of the Georgian people.
“Hmm!” the guests say in surprise. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea. The European Union already has enough problems...”
Birdwatchers are pleasant people and they come prepared. They know everything about our birds in advance; they have even studied their voices. But they have never heard that eighty percent of Georgia’s population wants EU membership, and they are surprised.
And if the birdwatcher is a good person, that surprise is inevitably followed by discomfort. Especially after I tell them that people have stood in the streets for more than 500 days for European ideals, that many have lost their jobs because of their civic stance, that even more have been fined and beaten. Some protesters are in prison, showing rare resilience, committing acts of civic heroism, refusing pardons.
While sitting in the hide, I receive a WhatsApp message from the diplomats. They ask whether I have thought of a topic for the next meeting. I reply that I have: surveillance and eavesdropping in the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Julio Cortázar, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michelangelo Antonioni.
It is good to have complete freedom in choosing topics.
The diplomats reply that I have chosen an excellent and very timely subject, and at that very moment the kingfisher lands on the branch with a freshly caught fish in its beak.
I take my dream photograph and return to Tbilisi to participate in a panel discussion at the book fair alongside Armenian colleagues.
Beside me on stage again stands the empty chair of Zviad Ratiani.
“Do we have to prove our European nature?”
That is the topic of the discussion. Our meeting is conducted in English, which is itself something new in Georgian-Armenian relations. I love my Armenian colleagues very much. I feel their tension and fear for the future. Elections are to be held in Armenia on 7 June, and there is a danger that our neighboring country may also return to the vicious circle called the Russian orbit, where there is nothing but pseudo-spirituality, claustrophobia, and corruption.
Tbilisi is becoming a difficult and depressing city to live in
At the book fair I meet the same woman who spoke to me after the screening of Nouvelle Vague. We greet each other like old acquaintances. If our protest has truly produced something good, it is this feeling of solidarity that was once foreign to us.
In May my Dutch visitors finally arrive. We travel through different regions of Georgia, through various bird habitats, and the tour is highly successful. Despite wars and countless disasters, birds continue their annual cycles: crossing borders they know nothing about, rebuilding nests, pairing up... Through my clients’ telescope I spot a mother bear moving across a snowy slope, frequently stopping to look back at her three cubs. The cubs tumble playfully after her, sliding down the snow like children, and it is my happy morning.
We have already been on the road for five days, and this time none of my birdwatchers asks the awkward question about European Union flags. I do not have to give my prepared angry answer – that yes, people here go to prison for the European idea, and that they have heard nothing about it; more than that, they did not even notice the European Union flags flying in Kyiv in 2013.
Ukrainians died beneath those flags on the Maidan for an idea, for their homeland, and for many things that had been given to my Dutch visitors them from birth and for which they never had to fight, which is why they no longer remember the value of those things...They stop asking this question because in the cities and villages of Georgia, European Union flags are now rarities.
*On 28 November 2024, Georgian Prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced the unilateral suspension of Georgia’s European Union accession process until 2028. Continuous protests have taken place in Georgia ever since.
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🤝 This essay is published in partnership with Debates on Europe, on the occasion of the Debates in Tbilisi, held in June 2026.
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