How Georgians, Azeris and Armenians play the drum, performed by an Armenian and uploaded by an Azeri.
My three stages of watching this video:
1. 
2. 
3. 
Not everyone is fighting over food: Ethnic Armenian and Azeri children at a birthday party enjoy dolma and a whole host of other regional dishes in the co-inhabited village of Tsopi, Georgia © Onnik Krikorian 2012
Onnik, who has done a lot of original work in the co-inhabited parts of Georgia, relayed a spot-on quote from an Azeri man named Ağarəhim: Dolma yeyənindi, Sarı Gəlin oxuyanındı — Dolma belongs to those who eat it, Sarı G(y)alin belongs to those who sing it.
Georgians Wrestle With Abortion Issue As Gender Imbalance Grows
TBILISI/PRAGUE — Georgia faces a serious and growing demographic problem. According to the United Nations, the ratio of newborn boys to girls in 1991 was 105 to 100. By 2000, it was nearly 110 to 10…
“Together with its neighbors in the South Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia is on a trajectory to develop a gender imbalance on a par with what has been observed in India and China.
According to World Health Organization and UN data from 2005, Georgia has 19.1 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, one of the highest rates in Europe, although in the middle among former Soviet countries. The average woman in Georgia will have three abortions in her lifetime.”
For more on gendercide in the Caucasus:
The Economist: The war on babygirls
Balcani e Caucaso: Gendercide in the South Caucasus
“Fuck your free market”
May 1 rally in Tbilisi
Photo: David Lobzhanidze
Ethnic Azeri engagement party, Tazakendi, Georgia © Onnik Krikorian 2013
More at http://www.facebook.com/onewmphoto
Also reblogged for chotai’s tag: #guys look it’s the War-Torn Caucasus
(via chotai)
Winner of Best Documentary at Sundance, Nicholas Clayton says it is now showing at the theatre on Rustaveli Avenue in Tblisi, with English subtitles.
“I lived in Europe for almost 9 years. The best thing for me was how free I felt in that environment,” he explained.
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“You eventually get sick of everything,” he replied.
(via temophoto)
A little crowdsourcing
Have you ever been to the Caucasus? Would you like to go? Dreams count too. I once flew over Samarkand and Tashkent in a dream and it was one of my better trips.
What are your immediate associations with the region? Fascinations? Preconceptions?
Do you enjoy saying the word as much as I do?
I would really love to know your answers. The Message box is right this way.
![umnica:
Today in Soviet citizens whose lives have spanned multiple wars, countries, states and histories:
Meliton Varlamovich Kantaria or Kantariya (Georgian: მელიტონ ქანთარია, Russian: Мелитон Варламович Кантария) (5 October 1920, Jvari,Georgia, – 27 December 1993, Moscow), Hero of the Soviet Union (8 May 1946), was a Georgian sergeant of the Soviet Army credited to have together with M. A. Yegorov hoisted a Soviet flag Banner of Victory over the Reichstag on April 30, 1945.[1]
Born to a peasant family in a small Georgian town of Jvari, he worked in kolkhoz until being mobilized in the Red Army in 1940. During World War II, he served in the 756th Rifle Regiment, 150th Rifle Division, of the 3rd Shock Army at the 1st Belorussian Front. He, together with Sergeant M.A. Yegorov, mounted a red banner in a famous photo over a defeated Reichstag on the 1 May 1945.[2]
Demobilized in 1946, he lived thereafter in Sukhumi working as a statal shop manager. Afilied PCUS in 1947. A year after the secessionist war in the region had begun he moved with his family to Moscow[3] where he died two months later in December 1993 in the Kremlin hospital.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c53f1834bd241213a31ed37decd31ec7/tumblr_mlm26aRnpE1qzmd1po1_400.jpg)
Today in Soviet citizens whose lives have spanned multiple wars, countries, states and histories:
Meliton Varlamovich Kantaria or Kantariya (Georgian: მელიტონ ქანთარია, Russian: Мелитон Варламович Кантария) (5 October 1920, Jvari,Georgia, – 27 December 1993, Moscow), Hero of the Soviet Union (8 May 1946), was a Georgian sergeant of the Soviet Army credited to have together with M. A. Yegorov hoisted a Soviet flag Banner of Victory over the Reichstag on April 30, 1945.[1]
Born to a peasant family in a small Georgian town of Jvari, he worked in kolkhoz until being mobilized in the Red Army in 1940. During World War II, he served in the 756th Rifle Regiment, 150th Rifle Division, of the 3rd Shock Army at the 1st Belorussian Front. He, together with Sergeant M.A. Yegorov, mounted a red banner in a famous photo over a defeated Reichstag on the 1 May 1945.[2]
Demobilized in 1946, he lived thereafter in Sukhumi working as a statal shop manager. Afilied PCUS in 1947. A year after the secessionist war in the region had begun he moved with his family to Moscow[3] where he died two months later in December 1993 in the Kremlin hospital.
“Why Kazbegi? Why not Gori, Stalin’s birthplace and for decades after his death a stubborn shrine to him? Or Batumi on the coast? Maybe, as much as anything, because I was in a time of transition and felt like being someplace definite, and a town at the end of a mountain road carried with it the comfort of definition. After Kazbegi, there was no place else to go. Well, Chechnya, but I sure wasn’t going there.”
— Glimpse of Georgia from the capital to the Caucasus Mountains by Rob McKenzie
I tell myself that this will never happen to me. I am the kargi gogo, the adopted daughter. I sit with Eka at the kitchen table, eating her food and refusing her cigarettes. Over tea, I am effusive about the Georgian mountains, about the Black Sea, about the places I have gone or will go, about the marketplace I have discovered in the underpass beneath Pushkin Street, about the new French cafe hidden behind the synagogue. She complains to me about her daughter, Khatuna, brilliant but mulish, whose piercings and sitcom-English are at once a source of consternation and secret pride. I pay my rent three months in advance.
In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi by Tara Isabella Burton
What used to be (one of) Stalin Home Museum in Batumi, Georgia. Now it’s a mossy bust in somebody’s incredibly unkept front yard.
