‘Georgian cinema was 100 years old last year!’ he told us proudly as we perused its history among the vintage movie posters that were hung along the corridors. It was all very impressive. It was also quiet; the building was empty, waiting for work. The executive wanted to show us a second building so we walked back out of the main entrance and across an apron of freshly laid stone paving and turned right, stumbling a little as the new smooth forecourt ended abruptly, giving way to a path of broken concrete slabs overgrown with weeds. ‘And now we’re going to the catacombs,’ said the executive ruefully, pointing ahead to indicate a crumbling block with cracked windows which served, canisters of film piled in dank corridors, as an archive. ‘I’ll get a torch.’

This was the line that I tripped across every day in Georgia, the line between gleaming-smart-new and old-crumbling-decrepit; the very literal, physical line between the present and the past. I walked through the city looking up at cranes hauling new cladding for a block I remembered as a shabby Khrushchev-era hulk, at an expanse of gleaming glass facade wrapped around a refurbished police station (‘Transparency! Transparency! ’Vano Merabishvili, the Interior Minister, told me once, showing off his improvements) next to a filigreed wooden balcony that sagged like an old man carrying tomatoes home from the market. I drank cappuccinos and marveled at the new ’antique’ streetlights along Chardin Street in the Old Town, a street that used to be deserted but for a few jewelers reduced to repairing watches, and was now lined with cafes boasting Wi-Fi access.

I walked and talked, reminisced and remapped my memories. I had lived in Tbilisi ten years before, when Georgia seemed like the land that time and electricity had forgotten. The Soviet Union had collapsed and everyone was still camping in its ruins, too preoccupied with the difficult and miserable quotidian business of life - kerosene, candles, devalued salaries, jerry-rigged car engines - to stretch their imaginations towards the enormity of rebuilding, from scratch, a nation, a state, a life. My friends and I used to sit around a kitchen table with the oven on for heat (municipal heat had been turned off in 1994; electricity in the winter was down to four hours a day), pouring more wine, lamenting, gossiping, laughing at the absurdity of it all. One evening, the small daughter of a friend pointed at a radiator and was incredulous to learn that once upon a time heat had come out of this strange object.

The transformation was, at first sight, in the refurbished details, as in the oft-repeated word evro-remont (evro, meaning ‘European’; remont, the Russian word for ‘repair’), which had come to denote a lick of paint, tiled or wood laminate flooring and recessed lighting. The basic quality of life had improved. My friends who, ten years ago, were struggling in the public sector on what I used to call the ‘mystery of the 70 lari salary’ (‘mystery’ because it was impossible to understand how a family could survive on the equivalent of $35 a month; but somehow they did) were now much better paid; friends who previously had no option but to take dollar salaries with foreign agencies had now set up their own businesses. Real estate had bubbled in Tbilisi (postwar, it deflated a bit - but certainly not as low as former levels), salaries increased, and while prices had inevitably risen too, conversations became concerned with the future instead of a subsistent present; with evro-remont and the other new buzzword, kredit.

New bathrooms, new kitchens, new jobs, new projects, where to find the best pastries in Tbilisi, gossip and scandal; conversations began as they might anywhere, but in Tbilisi they always ended up being about politics. The times - postwar, post global credit crunch -were looking as if they might become difficult again, and the opposition had called demonstrations for the following month, on 9th April. Conversations began with the superficial, and inevitably turned into an argument about the president (Misha: for or against? Should Misha stay or should he go?) amid various declamations and to-and-fro about the vociferous panoply of opposition leaders.

Amid all of this I met old friends and new friends and asked them to step back for a moment and reflect on the broader picture. What had changed for the mover the last ten years since the flatline Shevardnadze years, over the twenty years since independence? Was it just a matter of paint and polish, electricity and new cars on the road? Were Georgians learning the parameters of a functioning state: the fact of a new, respectable police force who no longer took bribes from motorists as a matter of unapologetic course; of taxes that had to be actually paid; of electricity meters and car registrations and building regulations; of bureaucratic procedures that could no longer be circumnavigated with connections and a few mulchy bank notes? What had happened to the Georgian psyche that had always believed itself above these petty things, and how were Georgians managing to redefine themselves, question their place in the world, and remain true to their Georgianness?

I decided to throw a party, a feast, known in Georgian as a supra (literally, ‘tablecloth’), because the supra is the gathered sum of the great Georgian tradition of eating, drinking, toasting and talking. I invited my friends and friends of friends, some older, some younger, those who used to be in government, academics, some who worked for foreign businesses, some who had started their own. It was inevitably a self-selected group of people who had traveled and read widely, who had prospered rather than been left behind, as so many Georgians had been, struggling, unemployed and poor, with the speed and unabashed free-market spree of reform. We gathered at ‘The Mill’, a restaurant on the banks of the river Mtkvari built of stone and slate, in the style of nostalgia, to resemble an old Georgian village, with brick paths and wooden staircases that wound between private dining rooms decorated with embroidered ethnic Khevsur tunics, leather-bound books, earthenware wine jugs and ancient radios that once tuned to Prague, Kiev and Moscow. Outside, along the road, were parked several big SUVs with blacked-out windows, the car of choice for the new rich and some government ministers.‘The Mill has become quite the plotting place!’ Kakha Tolordava, my old friend, who was helping me to organize the evening, joked as we walked in.

Zura Karumidze and Gaga Nizharadze were the first to arrive. Zura was a novelist and a director of the new Tbilisi jazz radio station whose mobile phone rang with Charlie Mingus playing a Bach prelude. Gaga was a psychologist (‘I’m the classical type of Soviet intellectual: overeducated, but not too deep!’). Both were bearded, warmly cynical and avuncular. ‘So how is it going to work this evening?’ Gaga asked.
Zura answered for me, teasing, ‘Wendy will record it, Merabishvili (the Interior Minister with a penchant for recording spectacular undercover sting operations) will edit it, and tomorrow it will appear on TV!’

Kakha found the waiter and ordered great quantities of food: baked cheese bread, mushrooms fried in clay dishes, barbecued pork sprinkled with pomegranate seeds, walnut sauce, sour plum sauce, spinach pounded to a paste with spices and walnuts, toasted corn bread, lamb stewed with tomato and marigold spice, tomato and cucumber salad, piles of fresh herbs, slabs of milky sulguni cheese, tarragon and pear lemonade, bottles of Borjomi, the salty sulphurous mineral water that Georgians swear cures all ills (especially hangovers) ...

‘Do you think it’s enough?’ he queried the waiter in a worried tone before turning his attention to the wine list and beginning a serious debate with Zura and Gaga about which bottles to order. Georgian viticulture is the oldest in the world; its grape varieties found nowhere else on earth, the sacred vine carved into the lintels of ancient churches. ‘Saperavi, aged in oak?’ ventured Zura eventually.

More people arrived and settled themselves, caught up on news, skiing trips, a new steakhouse on Chardin Street, asked after each other’s children. Reso Kiknadze, a jazz musician and electronica composer who had lived in Germany for many years but was returning to Tbilisi more andmore often to play and teach, recalled a conversation with Gunter Grass about nationalisms. Gaga discussed Johann Sebastian Bach with Zura.
‘He’s the most extraordinary person for me. Why? Because he used to drink a lot, work a lot, make an enormous quantity of children and at the same time composed music that was ... simply the greatest music. Such guys somehow show you how to live!’
Merab Basilaia, an academic expert on media, and Tamuna Chergoleishvili, who worked for the Council of Europe and was married to one of the president’s closest advisers, swapped stories about the new polite efficiency of the Tbilisi patrol police.
‘I drive very slowly and always wear my belt and I am always getting stopped!’ Merab complained.
‘Ah, because it looks as if you are driving drunk,’ suggested Tamuna.
‘The new thing now is all the lines they are painting on the roads.Georgians don’t know how to drive inside the lines!’

Shorena Shaverdashvili, editor of the cultural magazine Hot Chocolate, for which Kakha wrote jazz reviews, arrived with Zaza Rusadze, a handsome young filmmaker. They were from a younger generation than Zura and Kakha and Gaga, and had come of age in a post-Soviet world. Both had left Georgia as teenagers and studied in the West, Shorena in Cyprus and America, Zaza in New York and Germany, and both had found their re-entry to Georgian life sometimes jarring. Shorena always seemed to me the very vanguard of the young new dynamic Georgia. She told me once, sitting in a tea house, that she often wasn’t sure she felt very Georgian, she was always butting her feminist head against the expectations and assumptions of her parents. Zaza, dressed in a pair of trendy plaid jeans and a baseball cap, was frequently assumed to be a foreigner. In cafes waiters were always addressing him in English. Shorena was already tired of all the distracting hoopla around the upcoming protests. ‘I’m fed up of hearing about them. But finally I said to my staff, “You know, I am going to put together an education issue - this is my way of protesting in April.” Because I think that’s the most important thing and not these silly demonstrations!’

Although the table was a properly groaning supra, we did not designate a toastmaster, a tamada, the traditional leader of such a feast, who would have raised his glass periodically to offer speeches to a traditional sequence of Georgian values: peace and motherland, the sacred grape, ancestors and family and children, women, friendship, absent friends...

The assembled eschewed such tropes. Instead, everyone set about chipping away at the great triumvirate of tenets of traditional Georgianness: machismo, the enduring institution of the Georgian Orthodox Church, and - as was laid before us - indulgence in excessive hospitality.

Tamuna related a story about a girlfriend of hers who had landed a good job in a ministry that came with an 800 lari monthly salary, but whose husband had objected so strongly to her working that she was thinking of resigning the position. Tamuna, petite and Parisian chic, threw her fists in the air to demonstrate her frustration with the chauvinism of the Georgian male.
‘So I started to yell at her. My friend started to blame herself saying it was her fault because she came back from work too happy! I said,
“You are 33 years old. Finally you got the job that pays well - of course you would be happy!”
‘And you have the right to be happy, for God’s sake,’ said Shorena, nodding her head in emphatic agreement.
‘Who wouldn’t be happy about 800 lari a month!’ put in Merab.
The other men around the table, I noticed, had fallen quiet at this female display of outrage.
‘There are serious gender problems,’ continued Shorena.
‘Where? You mean in the cities even, not just in the countryside?’ asked Zura, somewhat uncomprehendingly.
‘Yes, of course!’ said Shorena. ‘In my friends’ families! Even in my own family!’
Several of the men, I observed, were running their hands over their faces, absolving themselves from the debate. Shorena laughed when I pointed this out.
‘Whenever you say there is a gender problem, people say, “Where? Where do you mean? I don’t see this!”

‘Well sometimes there is some drinking and there are fights -we’re not yet a European country!’
Security guard outside a small basement restaurant specializing in meat dumplings

The argument fragmented and abated, plates of spicy Imeretian sausages were passed around. Tamuna found another target. She said she was shocked to have discovered a teacher’s prayer printed on the front page of her daughter’s school textbook. It was so regressive!
‘Have you noticed eight-year-old kids are now crossing themselves before playing?’ The secularists around the table echoed her alarm at the new trend of national religiosity.
‘And Georgians have never been religious people, not like the Armenians,’ said Zura. Gaga suggested that it was a symptom of popular conservatism rather than real religious fervor.
‘In polls they say only about 16% of Orthodox people actually observe the religious precepts.’ Someone pointed out that this was, ironically, roughly the same percentage of the population that paid taxes. It seemed to me that the full churches on Sundays were a pretty natural reaction to the pace of reform, if people felt they were being dragged out of their comfort zone into a new alien kind of state.
‘So what is the definition of being Georgian?’ I asked half joking.
‘Being Orthodox or paying taxes?’
Zura snorted with characteristic dry pessimism, ‘According to the statistics Georgians are doing neither!’

Those around the table saw themselves as a minority of liberal opinion in the country. Shorena recounted an argument with her uncle, in which he railed at her support of the reforms (for Shorena the government couldn’t reform fast enough).
‘My uncle told me, “You are insulting everything that your grandfather and I believe in! You don’t understand what it means to be Georgian!”’ Merab recalled being beaten up in a restaurant a few years previously for defending a new government policy. But in fact, as I had discovered, chatting with and eavesdropping on ordinary people around Tbilisi, my friends’ debate and discussion about a new model Georgia (towards Europe, away from Russia? Modern or traditional? Innovate or copy or stay the same?) was echoed throughout the city. Georgians tended to have a default setting of complaint, but there were various crosshatched paradoxes shot all through the for-and-against, us and them of argument. Georgians, it seemed, very clearly, were still figuring it all out.

Even the sacred supra had come in for recent re-evaluation. An academic had published an article declaring it to be a 19th-century invention. Needless to say, he had been roundly vilified in the mainstream press, but those around the table found much to recommend his argument.
‘The function of Georgian supra was very much developed in the Soviet period to show that you were not Russian,’ said Gaga, ‘and the sequence of toasts was a virtual display of the hierarchy of Georgian cultural values. This was how you could show your loyalty and keep your self-identity.’ Zaza, who was much younger than most present and who might have been expected to scorn the weighty formality of the supra, took umbrage.
‘I may sound ridiculous defending the supra, but it can be such a marvelous experience. The toast for brothers and sisters, for example. With this, the tamada connects all the people around the table as each realizes and remembers they all have brothers and sisters. We reveal our families, our relations. We understand each other.’

Merab, however, remembered how advantageously Georgians deployed their hospitality when dealing with visiting Russians.
‘We are forgetting that in Soviet times the supra was the best way to do business. The supra was the place to network. Georgian businessmen - even in those years -were building their prosperity in this way. The table is full, everyone is drinking and toasting, and tomorrow we will meet at our workplaces and we’ll remember this good time. So it became both corruption and expression of Georgian values.’
‘A perversion of the supra!’ said Zura.
‘It’s not good to lose it,’ said Reso the musician, musing, ‘because a supra can be like a great jazz session.’
‘Collective improvisation!’ said Kakha.

‘So let’s drink for this corner of land where we grew up - of course I am drunk now- but let’s drink for our ancestors who were proud and honest. Money will never come in between our friendship, and even though times are changing we will remain true to ourselves. Children will be born and the family will continue. Let’s drink for this love that unites us, for our country, for the great king David the Builder, and even through hard times we have remained friends. At some point we will die but we must remain true to ourselves, so I am drinking for brotherhood. I am a Georgian man and Georgia is a great country, and let’s drink!’
Timber merchant toasting a machinery distributor with whom he hoped to do business, in a basement restaurant in Tbilisi

The conversation around the table turned to the pride of small nations and the Georgian belief in the immutable uniqueness of Georgia. References were made to Finland, Ireland, ancient Armenian hymns, Hammurabi (‘but he was Assyrian!’), and the Ukrainian myth that they were descended from the Sumerians.

‘We are Georgian! The best of the best!’
‘I don’t see why we are always saying we are the best!’
‘We’ve survived for 4,000 years!’
‘Ambitions are good for the nation, pride is fine - but you have to do something to prove it!’
Debate about being Georgian, in a class of university students studying international relations and business

Around the table the conversation expanded, different voices all spoke at once, knitting pronouncements and counter-arguments about Georgian identity. Zura put his hands up against the cacophony. ‘It’s very Georgian conversation - polyphonic!’ he declaimed, alluding to the traditional multivoiced Georgian folk harmonies. From the end of the table Alex Rondeli (who had arrived late, having come from a drinks party at the American Embassy), the grandee of Georgian academic diplomacy, white-haired with more than a passing resemblance to the American actor Leslie Nielson, summed up with the great wisdom that his long career and experience had gathered. Everyone stopped deferentially (he had taught many of those present at one time or another) to listen.

‘Georgians,’ he said carefully, ‘had never been free and the supra was a niche of freedom, partly tradition, partly bullshit. We were always afraid of what to do with freedom and now we have it, we cannot handle it. The new generation will learn but our generation doesn’t know what to do with it. We used to fill the gap with tradition - surpass. Because we were not free, we created a virtual world in which we could live the most comfortably. We’re still lost in our own mythology and after independence this demythologizing is a painful process; Georgians don’t like reality and we’re trying to find a new myth to replace the old ones. Georgians lived in a state that was not their own for a long time. We became part of Russia and then part of the Soviet Empire. We were barely half capitalist and half feudal and then came Bolshevism. Now we’re restoring our state, and it’s causing bedlam in our mentality. But slowly people are beginning to understand what is real business, beginning to understand the value of money, the value of stability and peace. Georgia is like a spoiled child. We are provincially arrogant, but when we try to explain why we are not in pace with modernity, we have a tendency to blame others, to find an excuse.

Georgians believe they’re Europeans, but they automatically believe this -without understanding what Europe is. We know that Europe looks at us askance because we lack discipline, we are a bit lazy and our joie de vivre is often groundless. Sometimes we think Europe is too far ahead. “My God, can we ever really become like them?” we think to ourselves. “And if we really became like them would we still be Georgians?”’

Georgia had been the richest republic in the Soviet Union and also the most liberal. Kakha remembered summers on the Abkhaz coast as a privileged film student, smoking dope, listening to contraband rock records, flirting with Russian girls in bikinis on the beach.
‘When I think back to that time, we did everything to have fun, everything just to enjoy ourselves,’ he told me. Alex’s eyes would mist a little when he remembered old Georgian triumphs: Dinamo Tbilisi winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1981, chess champions, famed cinema and theatre.
‘We had this false feeling of being important,’ he explained, ‘of being in the limelight. Now we struggle with the fear that we are really becoming provincial.’ Harder and more painful perhaps than the economic transition, was the shift from superiority to an inferiority complex.

‘So,’ I asked the assembled, trying to cut through the crosscurrents and paradoxes of optimism and pessimism voiced about the current state of the Georgian soul, ‘what has changed? What is the biggest change that you see? Is the new Georgia about electricity and bank accounts or are we talking about something much more fundamental
- a change in mentality?’
‘Empowerment!’ said Shorena, simply and quickly.
‘For me,’ said Tamuna, recanting her earlier complaints, ‘I see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s blinking, but -’
Zura, ever ready with puncturing cynicism, cut her off.
‘Don’t you know Murphy’s Law about the light at the end of the tunnel?’
Gaga cast his mind back to his youth.
‘Twenty years ago if someone had showed me a picture of modern Tbilisi I would have said it was paradise. It has become full of the things we always dreamed about: foreign cars, foreign cigarettes...’ Everyone laughed, but it was true.

‘Restaurants, bars, foreigners,’ added Kakha.
‘Signs in English instead of in Russian,’ said Zura. ‘Soviet beer was just undrinkable, but Georgian beer is actually very good. Same with the ice-cream.’
‘But,’ said Gaga, reflecting a little on his earlier glibness, ‘is this our ideal paradise?’
‘Why not? It’s a start!’ said Shorena.

‘Ah,’ said Alex sagely, ‘this is the problem of paradise: when you reach it, it disappears.’
Zaza once told me how he had dreamed of studying film abroad. We were sitting in the Literaturuli Kafe, a young hip hangout for writers and creative types, famed for its abysmal service and its excellent cakes. He told me about one miserable cold winter in the mid 1990s when he had spent weeks trying to fill out his application to the Film Academy in Potsdam. He would walk for miles, because petrol was expensive and there were virtually no buses, only to find the copying centre closed, another one nursing a broken machine, a third stalled in a power cut. Now he tried, in front of everyone, to define the moment his life had changed.
‘I remember my first day at the film school in Germany and being shown around and finding myself in the library. How you get the card, how you get the films, how you get the books. There was this humongous bookshelf full of DVDs and books and I just stood in front of it, gaping.
And on that day I realized: I am the one, I am the one who can choose a DVD to watch. I can choose it and then decide if I like it or not and then figure out for myself why I like it or why I don’t like it.’ ‘That is education.’ Shorena said.
‘It was more than that,’ Zaza replied. ‘I grew up in the Soviet Union and I still feel the hangover sometimes of being part Homo sovieticus. We didn’t grow up with a big shelf in front of us, or the responsibility of how to choose something from it. That day I understood: changing our mentality is about exposure, about breadth.’
‘We are exploring now. Young people are traveling, studying, looking at the world with different ideas,’ said Alex. ‘I think it is definitely a great, great change. This provinciality is changing. The new generation is asking questions.’

Merab joked, ‘For sure, my seven-year-old daughter is asking questions. She wants to know what the old kerosene lamp we have in the kitchen is for. It has become her newest toy! She asks me to tell her the old Communist stories, and wants to know what is “Young Pioneer”, what is “Komsomol”!’
‘Could we have imagined a time when these things would become fairy tales?’ asked Shorena, almost in child like wonderment.
I looked around at the faces that had become somber in reflection, and marveled at the pace of change that Georgia has rushed through and all the violent lurches of elections, economic collapse, revolution, street protests and war it had endured since independence. Much had changed, much was still changing, and there were still plenty of arguments to have about it all. The party devolved, as expected, into heated exchanges over the upcoming April 9th opposition rally. I caught snatches of sentences: ‘Oh I understand our great president made mistakes but...’
‘Of course, the judicial system!’
‘Don’t talk to me about those idiots!’

‘Why do you want to ruin an established country?
Everything is fixed now!’
‘It’s not established!’
‘Just look outside, look at all the new cars on the streets!’
‘Well look at the villages! There nothing has changed!’
‘I’m from the village myself. They’re distributing land, yes, it’s true - now you have to work to get something!’
Debate about the political situation, in an open-air market in an outer suburb of Tbilisi

Gaga watched Zura fill his glass with more wine.
‘Don’t drink too much! You’re slowly turning into Dracula!’
‘Don’t worry, I can connect with my inner Dracula quite happily!’
Kakha regarded the animated scene with the sentimental affection afforded by gentle inebriation.
‘Whatever happens,’ he told his friends, ‘we’ve learned our lessons from losing friends over the years.’ He raised his glass to those who had been lost along the way. ‘Despite our political differences, the most important thing to all of us is our friendship, and we should be clear: wine drinkers are more powerful than the politicians!’
One by one, people said their goodnights. Kakha, ever the diligent host, walked them to their cars. Shorena, despite feminist misgivings, acquiesced to his gallantry. Alex said he was very glad to have been invited, and began to sing softly as they walked towards the road, musing his memories into hope for the future:
‘My dear old country!’

Wendell Steavenson