Dispatch – June 7: Story of Us, Colorized

“They fancy themselves as important as the baobabs.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Little Prince“

Those were the times of boredom and stagnation. It was the summer of 2001, and, at first glance, not much was going on, except for a string of mysterious disappearances of bronze statues from Tbilisi parks. First vanished the Exupérian small statuettes around the charming and somewhat melancholic Little Prince fountain in Tbilisi’s Mrgvali Baghi (Round Square), across the UN building. Weeks later, a bronze bust of Ilia Chavchavadze, “father of the Georgian nation”, went missing from the nearby university park.

Law wasn’t lawing, and life wasn’t exactly lifeing either. One thing that thrived was the junk business. Selling metal for scrap was legal, and the economically struggling nation took the business seriously enough for it to become the key export product. When no electrical cable above and no drainage well cap below were left untouched, metal thieves came for the sculptures. The disappearance of the bronze bust of Georgia’s most revered man was the last straw. Local newspapers sounded the alarm about the “degradation of national pride”, and called for gunmen to guard the precious monuments. But there must have been safer ways to protect the memory.

On July 5, 2001, hours after Ilia’s bust was reported missing, Civil Georgia published its first article online.

Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to break Civil.ge’s habit and to tell you about ourselves.

Looking back, not everything was dead in 2001. Beneath the dull facade of Eduard Shevardnadze’s rule, Georgian civil society was quietly emerging. Young people formed associations, launched media projects, and discussed the future they wanted to build from this lingering void.

One such group was UNA Georgia (UNAG). It was composed mainly of young, enthusiastic staff who, while quietly doing their youth projects, developed an appetite to tell the outside world about whatever their country was going through. They worried that those civil society discussions were particularly lost in the outside narrative of a post-Soviet nation fighting for its life. To fill this void, they started a news outlet and named it Civil Georgia. Thus began the decades-long work to translate Georgian travails for international readers.

The translation was perhaps a bit too literal at first. Initial Civil.ge pieces, drafted at times in broken English, read like innocent accounts of kids telling about their day. The coverage combined news with commentaries that the staff would find in the morning press, back when the print press was still the main platform for opinionated Georgians. Then things accelerated, the writing improved, and by the time Russia invaded in 2008, Civil.ge‘s work had become important enough for Moscow to single it out as a direct target in its massive cyberattack.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

It’s now summer of 2025, and the tapping on keyboards continues.

The small newsroom brings together veterans who’ve been around since the early years and restless newcomers. While news junkies stalk the news, history nerds browse for context. Office perfectionists work alongside more adventurous vagabonds. The former chase facts and details at their desks while the latter prefer to chase protest marches in “rain and wind.” The good thing is that the two groups don’t harbor mutual envy and largely prefer to see each other as senseless masochists. (As someone who has done both, I can confirm: trying to find the right words to tell a tricky story under time pressure, without compromising the truth or clarity, can be a much scarier experience than being caught in indiscriminate violence or suffocating in tear gas and thinking you won’t make it. Not all heroes wear press vests.)

The coverage is often what comes out of daily editorial battles between younger minds who want to keep up with the fast-paced media frenzy, and their seasoned colleagues, who warn against “losing focus”. Decades of reporting have created a culture and developed instincts that help us stay grounded in an era of informational chaos. If the challenge once was finding news in the void, the trouble now is finding a story in an endless flow of news.

It might sound boring, but those time-tested routines are what created a parallel space for experimentation and innovation. Not everything worked, and the best products are usually the ones that evolve through years of trial, error, conflict, or some accidental Darwinian mutations.  Over time, strict reporting was also supplemented with narrative forms. We lived our daily lives in this country and wanted others to know that there’s more to it than being periodically invaded by Russia or oppressed by our homegrown power-hungry rulers.

A greater diversity and magic, however, lay in the parallel lives and parallel timelines that the outlet lived.

Time Travelers

Stepping into the Civil.ge newsroom often feels like stepping into a time machine. If for the international audience the outlet has become a reliable source of day-to-day updates, for the Georgian audience we are like saints who are valued for their past. “I love your archive,” we are often complimented, turning our hair instantly grey. It still makes us happy. Having a well-organized online archive since 2001 may not seem like a big flex by global standards. In Georgia, however, where physical archives have a habit of catching fire, monuments are routinely sold as scrap, and half of political controversy arises from conflicting interpretations of the past, guarding history in all its truth (and with non-lethal weapons) could be something to be proud of. 

Blasts from the past disturb our peace occasionally. It usually happens when someone digs into our archive to find that certain politicians once were the demons they now claim to be fighting. And it’s hard to say which one is sadder: going back in time to find that things were the opposite, or to find that things were pretty much the same.  Browsing the archive often means coming across reports from 2001, 2006, or 2009 that you can endlessly republish as current news, and hardly anyone will notice. Those are mainly bad news.

• 17/07/2001: The Government Does Not Take the Opinion of NGOs into Consideration at All
• 12/07/2001: Consent on Local Self-Governance Elections Could Not be Reached Again
• 31/07/2006: Parliament to Develop Law against ‘Political Extremism’
• 28/05/2009: Policemen, Protesters Injured in Clash
• 2025 | Chronicle of Repression

It is due to our peculiar relationship with the past that we have learned to draft our stories into the future. A good story is one that you’ll read 5 or 25 years later and will still make sense. What seems mundane today may become priceless information in a decade. We may also live to see that something that makes noise and headlines now ends up making no difference at all. The time-travel approach has also proved useful when choosing the right dosage and context for stories we offer to our international readers.

We tell, therefore we are

Days after its disappearance on July 5, 2001, Ilia Chavchavadze’s bronze bust was traced in a local scrap metal store. There, having come for the big man’s sculpture, police also discovered pieces of the Little Prince fountain, stolen weeks earlier. These were bronze statuettes of lone adults Little Prince encounters on his journey to planet Earth – the king, the conceited man, the drunkard, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the elderly geographer, all on small asteroids of their own. The police were late: the small statues had already been passed through a shredder. “Grown-ups are like that.”

Now, decades after that incident, it feels like we are being taken to the same shredder, and our time is running out. Injustice is spreading like baobab roots, and thieves are back to rob, piece by piece, our small but rich world built by dedicated writers and editors for so many years with care and passion.

At least three repressive laws are currently preventing Civil.ge from carrying on with business as usual. But we want to keep doing our work. We want to keep translating, narrating, and expressing Georgia to the outside world. We want to keep drafting the past in all its detail so that autocrats later can’t rewrite it according to their whims – something they’ve learned to do. To make that possible, we’ll soon need the strong support of our readers. You’ll hear more from us soon. Until then, you can support us by simply reading our story and spreading the word.

Because we exist while our story is heard.

But we truly exist while we are able to tell our story in all its truth.

• 10/07/2001: Ilia’s Stolen Bust Was Returned to its Place