New year, new madness, and we don’t necessarily mean Georgia. The arrival of 2025 just seems to add new horrors to whatever the world has been through in recent years. There is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has his eye on Greenland and Canada. There are sunny LA beaches engulfed by hellish wildfires, and an earthquake shaking the tranquil mountains of Tibet. There is Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who may be hinting at new destruction by calling Armenia a “fascist state.” And there is Georgia, where protesters have emerged as unlikely champions of rationality by doing the most appropriate thing in this global mess: standing together on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue on Christmas night and praying.
To some, however, these pro-EU Georgians – whom their opponents habitually condemn as “liberal fascists” – doing all this praying might seem rather irrational, if not hypocritical. But sometimes, simplifying the narrative is what really complicates things.
Here is Nini, and the Dispatch newsletter, to tell about Georgia’s parallel battlefields.
“I have never been so happy with the New Year,” Tea Darchia, a prominent 50-something Georgian folk dancer and choreographer, told the media during the December 31 “protest night” on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue. She had an excited look on her face and was wearing a national dress. “I have always protested that I should sit at supra and listen to the howling of Georgians…” she continued. “…the same songs we’ve been listening to for centuries, for years.”
The comments became one of two viral videos from that night featuring Darchia that have been making the rounds on social media ever since. The other footage showed her performing Kartuli, arguably the best-known Georgian dance, which usually takes two people – a man and a woman. Darchia danced solo, in a small space set aside for her on the crowded Rustaveli Avenue, surrounded by other protesters who barely felt the absence of a male partner: her style was too captivating, her moves – too overwhelming. She didn’t walk, she glided, she floated. No one saw her feet in the long dress, so no one really knew what exactly she was doing with them.
The performance easily stole the spotlight from another, more classical Kartuli dance on the same street the same night, offered by her former troupe – the legendary Sukhishvili Ballet. And yet, while one part of social media went into collective admiration of Darchia’s moves, others found themselves in an opposite frenzy, digitally lynching her for her “howling” remarks.
“How dare she disrespect our polyphonic singing?” – was the cry as the Georgian Dream media threw a tantrum. And she certainly meant polyphonic singing, why else would she mention “centuries”? And this while the Georgian singing tradition is recognized by UNESCO, it has even been sent into space, and FOREIGNERS LIKE IT. In the end, Darchia apologized, saying she had been misunderstood. But there were those – mostly women – who said they knew exactly what she meant and found it relatable: because this last New Year’s Eve was indeed different.
Before They’d Stretch That Giant Supra
Georgians celebrating New Year’s in the streets were hard to find until the non-stop protests drove many to Rustaveli Avenue to break bread on a giant, long supra (festive table) to see 2025 together. Before that, it was mostly foreigners who occupied the area and had fun. Georgians would appear on the streets somewhere after 1-2 am, mostly stuck in traffic jams and looking annoyed in their cars. They were either returning home after having dinner with friends or relatives or, more likely, they were on their way there after first celebrating the New Year with families.
Wherever they went, it was very likely that there was at least one woman who carried the burden of the fun and festivities there. Women usually join the supra after days and hours of cleaning, cooking, and scolding those who get in the way instead of helping. You can tell funny stories, sing, play guitar, or even invite the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with its best conductor to play a piece after midnight: there is no impressing the exhausted Georgian woman. Sing whatever you want, play whatever you can, it will still be “howling”.
But that was less of an excuse for those who had all the time in the world to attack Darchia, who had become a favorite target of Georgian Dream’s conservative bubble.
It began when the Foreign Agents Law was reintroduced, and the dancer publicly opposed it. Pro-government media quoted her phone interview, in which she reportedly said that she hadn’t read the law, but that she felt “with her body” that it was wrong. The comments led supporters of the law to dismiss her as unintelligent: the “what’s wrong with transparency” people wouldn’t be persuaded by the dancer’s body, nor by the body of arguments of those who had read, analyzed, compared, and sounded multiple alarms about the bill.
But one reason conservative circles were so bitter about the dancer’s rebellion was that they might have hoped she would be on their side.
Not many individual folk dancers get as much publicity as she did, and her personality and skills made her a constant object of media attention. Darchia had superhuman talents, but pleasing everyone was never among them. Her vaccine-skeptical comments during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t make the liberal bubble happy. The controversies led the sensationalist media to invite her over and over again to comment on more issues, producing more controversies, such as concerns that she was encouraging Islamophobia by equating Georgianness too much with Orthodox Christianity – the religion she openly practices. Whenever journalists called her to clarify her remarks, she’d only add insult (many insults) to injury.
Walk the line
It must have frustrated Georgian Dream supporters when the ruling party drew strict lines of “us against them,” the pious against the godless, conservatives against liberals, Georgians against the rootless, only to find people like Darchia on enemy territory.
And it must have felt even worse when they saw the revered dancer – wearing sunglasses, chokha, and national and EU flags – smilingly leading those godless and rootless liberals in the famous protest dance on Rustaveli Avenue on December 21. The choreographer once again managed to break one or two rules. That night, it was women who led and dominated the Khorumi, a battle dance usually performed by men, and yet with what we’d witnessed during the 2023-2024 Georgian protests, a woman with a flag leading the battle seemed the most natural thing (and one of many examples where traditions are reembraced in Georgia through challenging them).
Nothing scares the authoritarian rulers more than what appear to be “defectors” who challenge the party’s monopoly on values and concepts, and there seem to be many such challengers joining the protests.
Many brought protest discussions to their fasting New Year’s dinners; others took their annual Christmas prayers to Rustaveli Avenue because they see no conflict between religion and the desire for justice; and many kept breaking into spontaneous polyphonic singing with fellow protesters who could not be more different from them, re-transforming the musical tradition from a strictly guarded artifact into a living thing with the purpose of embracing diversity instead of turning it into a conflict.
Silent Nights for Silent Fights
But as time passes, the fear grows that all this singing, dancing, and search for unity is turning into a joke (we’ve been there before). It’s been a month and a half since non-stop nationwide protests broke out in Georgia, and it’s been weeks since the tumultuous nights of clashes on Rustaveli Avenue gave way to quieter nights of marches, discussions, prayers, and soul-searching.
This doesn’t seem to be making the Georgian Dream any nicer. Arbitrary arrests are back, and dozens of people arrested during protests have been remanded in custody after two days of hearings designed to mock the defendants’ families. Politically motivated dismissals from the civil service are now a trend, and recently introduced repressive laws have made everything illegal. Are these silent nights on Rustaveli Avenue dooming the resistance for defeat against the reckless party with enough power and resources to punish critics and kill solidarity with its heavy conspiratorial propaganda machine?
Maybe yes, maybe no. These silent nights are also for silent fights, silent battles to escape the need for strict definitions that have destroyed democracies here and elsewhere, and a silent war where the greatest gains are made in hearts and minds. And what’s wrong with praying anyway – the world outside doesn’t seem to be very favorable to a small nation’s struggle for freedom and democracy.
So if the odds are not in our favor, maybe the gods will be.