“I want to go to Nice… who was it that told me? That all of Nice has been taken over by Arabs, France is facing nationalist resurgence, everything has been overrun by Arabs and blacks. Right, it was one disguised Zviadist who told me that during dinner. We were eating sausage, drinking red wine, and discussing French problems from our national angle.”
In the opening paragraph of Paliashvili Street Dogs, a novel by Georgian writer Aka Morchiladze, Zaza, a lively but melancholic narrator, recalls someone sharing his deep(-ly racist) concerns about the fate of France. The dialogue takes place in Georgia’s nineties, a dark period when economic crisis and criminal culture produced the country’s own lost generation. The book came out in 1995 and offers one of the most memorable depictions of Georgia’s first difficult years of (regained) independence. Zaza repeatedly dreaming of “going to Nice” became a popular line to express the desperate urge of Georgians to escape the hopelessness of those times.
Nearly three decades have passed since the publication, but the local coping mechanisms haven’t changed much: either you obsessively want to escape to France, or, stuck in your own misery, you obsessively assure yourself that the French have it somehow worse than you.
Here is Nini and Dispatch newsletter surviving yet another week in the crazy country and even crazier world.
It’s never easy to pinpoint the exact moment when disaster struck. But we can try to trace when Georgia’s EURO2024 football euphoria slowly faded and the politics of hate reclaimed its usual dominance. Another group of athletes did try to delay the catastrophe but only ended up being its first victims.
It all started on July 16, in the late hangover phase following the Georgian national football team’s success. On that fateful day, the country’s women’s football team pulled off another surprise by making it to the playoffs of the Nations League, increasing their chances of going to their first big tournament – just like their male pals. In doing so, the girls made history without even a fraction of the support, funding, and spotlight their male counterparts enjoyed. And while the initial national instinct was to celebrate and take pride in this breakthrough, it didn’t last. Giorgi Gvelesiani, Georgian national men’s team defender, was just beginning to enjoy his rare spotlight, didn’t know where to take his new-found fame, and decided to take it out on women.
Gvelesiani spent his best years playing in the Iranian league, out of the Georgian fans’ spotlight. The national team coach then gave him a rare opportunity to compete in the Euros, and the defender soon made a name for himself by blocking a dangerous shot from Cristiano Ronaldo, by talking about his past struggles, and by possessing a pair of piercing blue eyes. But those eyes proved incapable of seeing any battles but Gvelesiani’s own. During one of the interviews (of which, some complain, he’s had too many lately), the player was reminded of his earlier negative remarks about women’s football and asked if he still believed that football was not a woman’s business. Gvelesiani cautiously reiterated that football was “less of a woman’s business.”
The inevitable feminist backlash to his remarks was met with a fierce conservative reaction. Large groups of both men and women came to back Gvelesiani to tell girls to know their place, which they believed wasn’t in sports like football or sports at all. It’s not gentle enough for Georgian women, they argued (because the Georgian women have experienced nothing but tenderness and lighthearted pleasures in their lives, right?!). Thankfully, as the nation was struggling to survive another moment of toxicity, there was still hope: we still had the Olympics and we still had Paris.
Wouldn’t it be Nice?
And so, in the evening hours of July 26, Georgia, like the rest of the world, tuned in for the grand opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. For Georgians, it was supposed to be special: one of the flagbearers was Nino Salukvadze, a legendary woman athlete who was about to break her record by competing in a tenth (!) consecutive Olympic games. Salukvadze, Georgia’s national pride, has made a name for herself in the (apparently) most feminine of sports: firing bullets from a gun. A three-times Olympic medalist, the 55-year-old sports shooter was proving to the world that you’re never too old to compete, and if they don’t let you play football as a woman, you can always reach for a gu… (no, we won’t go there. Things have been too paranoid here for us to finish that sentence).
So, that evening, Georgians came to see their flags but ended up dazzled by several hours of daring French magic. At least that’s what it first looked like: as creative breakthroughs merged with technological advances to light up the Seine River, it wasn’t hard to relate to Zaza’s “I want to go to Nice” dream. The bold and captivating ceremony was both shocking and inspiring – depending on whether you were the cautious one or the one tired of constant caution. Shocking, because it offered a profound contrast to all the fears and self-limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves over the past months and years, which often felt like walking through a minefield. And inspiring, because it was a rare event that showed that there still was a life beyond those self-imposed limits.
It would be foolish to expect that certain parts of the ceremony, such as the appearance of drag queens, wouldn’t set off one or two sensitive souls in Georgia. But the hours following the ceremony were surprisingly peaceful. The dominant debate on Georgian social media was whether the event was well organized, and the only talked-about biblical allegory was Celine Dion’s miraculous resurrection. Even earlier the next day, some pro-government media couldn’t hide their excitement in their ceremony coverage. But then, apparently, someone tasked with scrolling the far-right XTwitter finally started his workday.
Protect me from what I want
Slowly, Georgian pro-government media and conservative platforms began to import and channel all the accumulated foreign rancor over the Paris Olympics – quoting French clergy here, American Republicans there, and calling on a wider public to be offended by something they had barely noticed: the French dared to mock the Last Supper! The news then spread on Georgian social media, the collective fury erupted, and members of the ruling party happily joined (and led) the Europe-condemning bash. Clearly, not something a pro-Western Georgian wished for ahead of critical October elections.
Fortunately, the news that the controversial episode was meant as a scene from Greek mythology soon caught up with us, and the battle slowly grew into two opposing camps – Georgian liberals and conservatives – questioning each other’s level of education and observation skills. Some voices even pointed out that ackchyually Georgia was one of the cradles of the Dionisic Cult in antiquity (witness the vines on Churches?!)
The liberals then even went on the counteroffensive, pointing out the mounting problems Georgia was facing while worrying about alleged French decadence. That included another series of reports about the dire state of the Gelati Cathedral, Georgia’s important cultural and religious monument, because of the repeated failure of authorities to protect it from water infiltration.
But while some are figuring out the true meaning of the scandalous scene and others are debating the ethics of taking offense, the question that haunts us is a different one: Have we become too dependent on foreign imports in choosing what to be angry about? Because we’ve had controversies over the Last Supper “at home” and much bigger ones, but we’ve learned to get over them.
Homemade Supper
So here’s one: in 2010, Georgian artist and writer Erekle Deisadze first rose to (in-)fame for publishing a gay-themed dystopian satire in which, as Georgians love to say, he “left nothing sacred.” The desacralization began with the title, where a single letter in The Last Supper was changed to become a vulgar phrase. We can’t spoil the plot here, but trust us: France could stage ten more opening ceremonies like this and not even come close to the number of feelings hurt by that single publication.
A drama naturally followed, and Deisadze had to go into hiding for months. But he soon returned to public life, composed more poems and songs, and would live to see his poetry published in Asaval-Dasavali, an ultra-conservative newspaper known for its fierce defense of sanctities and vainly wasted creativity. So we know how to get over it.
But does the world know?
