10 Astonishing and Unconventional Facts About Georgian Society

10 Astonishing and Unconventional Facts About Georgian Society

Fittingly located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, where the great Caucasus Mountains meet the Black Sea, Georgia is a country with an old soul and turbulent history. Although increasingly explored by travelers for its stunning landscapes and renowned hospitality, Georgian society remains a prosperous and often enigmatic patchwork. Beyond the banal post-Soviet narrative or the recent tourist route, there is a world of curious social norms, ancient traditions, and surprising contradictions. To really know Georgia is to look beyond the surface and find the fascinating, sometimes strange, subtleties that define the Georgian people. Below are ten weird facts that present the hidden character of Georgian society.

**1. The "Supra": A Feast Where a Professional Toastmaster Governs Your Emotions**

A dinner party is in most societies an informal, meandering affair. For the Georgians, it is a ritualized, emotional, and philosophical occasion under the guidance of a master of ceremonies known as the *Tamada*.

**The Ritual of the Toast:** A Georgian feast, or *Supra*, is not just eating and drinking. It is a sacred social ritual. The *Tamada* is selected (officially or unofficially) to guide the feast. This is not a career for the tongue-tied or the shy. The *Tamada* needs to be clever, cleverer, and have an iron liver. They deliver a sequence of elaborate toasts during the meal, and each one follows a prescribed sequence and subject. The first toast is always for peace, and following that, toasts are offered for family, ancestors, friends, the future, and occasionally for abstract things like love or beauty.

**The Emotional Conductor:** The odd thing is the level of control and emotional guidance the *Tamada* possesses. He controls the tempo, the atmosphere, and the focus of the entire table. Guests have to listen carefully and then mirror the *Tamada's* sentiment with a short, genuine speech of their own. You don't drink whenever you want; you only drink during toasts. It turns a simple meal into an intense, hours-long ritual of communal bonding, philosophy, and catharsis. It is a social pressure cooker and a glue factory, all in one person's hands.

**2. A Country That Sips Wine from Horns and Qvevris, and Doesn't Even Know the Term for "Nightcap"**

Georgia is the "wine cradle," with 8,000 continuous years of viticulture. Yet its culture of drinking is as unique as its ancient traditions.

**The Qvevri Method:** While the rest of the world uses wooden barrels or stainless steel tanks, the Georgians aged their wine for millennia in large, egg-shaped terracotta vessels called *qvevri*, buried underground. That ancient tradition, now a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, gives the wine an amber hue and a full-bodied, tannic character. Wine is not just a beverage in Georgia; it is "the blood of the land," a national identity component of respect.

**Drinking from Horns (Kantsi):** You can drink at a *Supra* from a *kantsi*, an animal horn. The challenging and intriguing aspect? A horn should not be put down until it is empty. This creates a group pressure to keep drinking. Furthermore, there is no Western concept of an informal "nightcap" in the Georgian attitude towards alcohol. Drinking is almost always a social, ritualized activity, deeply embedded in the *Supra*. You never really see Georgians sitting by themselves with a drink or sipping one solitary beer; alcohol is for sharing, not consolation.

**3. A Polyphonic Singing Tradition That is a Sonic Representation of Society**

Georgian polyphonic singing is not a style of music; it is a sonic representation of society—multiplied, textured, and resilient.

**Three-Part Harmony as a Worldview:** This UNESCO-protected ancient tradition consists of three different vocal parts: a drone (a sustained bass note), a middle melody, and an ethereal, extremely ornamented top part. The effect is a hauntingly dissonant, breathtakingly lovely sound unlike any other harmony anywhere else on the planet.

**The Social Harmony:** The peculiar aspect is how it reflects Georgian social order. The drone is the ground, the solid earth and convention. The middle voice is the people, the basic structure of day-to-day life. The top, free voice is the self, making personal happiness and sadness, but always in relation to the whole. The fact that this complex tradition has endured centuries of occupation and suppression is a testament to its being a cornerstone of cultural identity, a way of actually "sounding" like an integral people.

**4. The "City of Stairs": A Capital Planned for Defence, Not Convenience**

Tbilisi, the capital, is a lovely mess of twisting streets, but its strangest residential zones are the Soviet-era micro-districts on hillsides surrounding the city, linked by a mad maze of bridges, stairs, and cable cars.

**A Structural Abnormality:** Unlike grid-planned cities, most of Tbilisi is a vertical maze. An example are the "Old Vake" neighborhood or the roads to the Narikala Fortress. Stairways are principal thoroughfares, and houses and shops have been built right onto them. This was not an aesthetic choice but a requirement in the past—the city was built on defensive, hilly terrain.

**A Social Microcosm:** The verticality is characteristic and creates a unique social dynamic. Life is lived on these stairs. Neighbors exchange words on landings, kids play on steps, and elderly people sit observing passersby. The staircase becomes a hybrid public-private zone, a linear village square that fosters a strong, near-village sense of community in a sprawling capital. It's a daily reminder that the geography of the city has basically predetermined its social relationships.

**5. A Loyal "Family" and Informal "Adoption"**

The actual core of Georgian society is family, but this is way beyond the nuclear family in a practice referred to as *fosterage* or spiritual kinship.

**The Sacred Role of the Godparent:** The relationship between a child and his or her godparent (*nmobi*) ranks among the most intimate in Georgian society. It is considered to be a spiritual, life-long commitment that may be more pivotal than one of blood. A godparent should act as a guide, mentor, and economic support.

**The "Foster" Tradition:** More unusually, it was once customary (and to some extent still is today) for a child, especially a boy, to be fostered out with a strong or capable family—normally their godparent's—for a period to be educated and raised. This was in order to create powerful family alliances. This tradition built an enormous, complicated web of kinship in which your "family" was not only members related by blood, but by sacred vow and social bond, building a strong safety net and complicated web of responsibility.

**6. A Country Where the Alphabet Looks Like Elvish Script**

The *Mkhedruli*, the Georgian alphabet, is one of the rare 14 unique writing systems in the world. The beautiful, flowing, and perfectly rounded letters are a profound wellspring of national pride and a visual representation of exceptionality.

**An Isolated Language Marvel:** To the outside world, it looked like a combination of Armenian, Aramaic, and the Elvish Tengwar of J.R.R. Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings*. Few are aware of its origin or history. The interesting thing is that it lasted. Beset on all sides by languages that use Cyrillic, Latin, or Arabic scripts, Georgia held on to its own, a tangible bulwark against absorption into the surrounding culture by successive powers, from Persians to Russians.

**More Than Letters:** The writing is not only a means of communication; it is art. Calligraphy is greatly respected. To see the writing everywhere—from signs on the street to frescoes in churches—is a ubiquitous, visual reminder to Georgians and guests alike that this culture is ancient, unique, and has no equivalent anywhere on our planet.

**7. The Curious Case of the "Black Clad" Grandmothers as Moral Guardians**

In the cities of Georgia, one can observe old women, often from head to foot dressed in black, on street corners or in yards, sitting quietly. These "babushkas" or *bebias* are de facto moral overseers and archivists of society.

**The Unspoken Power:** They are guardians of family tradition, social gossip, and community norms. They possess the power of a glance. They know who is seeing whom, who comes home late, and which family is in conflict. Although they do not hold any official power, their voice can create local reputations.

**A Dying Institution:** This tacit surveillance is a residue of a tight-knit, communal existence that is slowly breaking down under urbanization and globalization. But they remain a living reminder of a society where community surveillance was a primary instrument of social control, and where elders received colossal, unstated respect.

**8. A Land of "Ghost Cities" and Imposing Soviet Projects**

Scattered around Georgia are the eerie remains of grand Soviet projects—entire cities and resorts built for a future that never came.

**The Tkvarcheli Paradox:** The most striking example is Tkvarcheli, a coal-mining town in Abkhazia that was a model Soviet industrial town. In the 1990s war, it had been almost deserted, a ghost of its former self. Similarly, the Black Sea coast resort town of Gagra has derelict Soviet-era sanatoriums looking like dystopian palaces.

**Living Among the Ruins:** The strangeness is that Georgians live alongside these ghostly monuments. They are not tourist novelties but part of the landscape—bitter reminders of a close, troubled past. They represent both the monumental hubris and ultimate collapse of the Soviet experiment, and their presence offers a solid sense of living among the accretions of history.

**9. A Church That Bars Women Who Wear Pants (and Men Who Wear Shorts)

The Georgian Orthodox Church is a massively influential body, more reliable than the government. It has social influence to strict, sometimes surprising, codes of conduct inside its places of worship.

**The Doorstep Law:** While universal in most conservative churches, the enforcement in Georgia is highly publicized. Women will be asked to wear headscarves and skirts. Trousers are generally forbidden. Men must wear long pants; shorts are unacceptable. Temporary headscarves and wraparound skirts are provided at the door by most churches.

**A Social, Not Religious, Decree:** What's unique about this is that it serves as a social divider. It immediately separates the educated, respectful visitors (and locals) from the ignorant. It's a solid, physical manifestation of the Church's role in the day-to-day, one that reminds individuals that in order to participate in this fundamental aspect of Georgian culture, one must be in line with its traditional values, creating a clear boundary between the profane and the sacred.

**10. A Tradition of Radical Hospitality in a History of Blood Feuds**

This is the greatest Georgian paradox: a culture renowned for its expansive, unconditional hospitality, yet having a blood-stained historical undertone of brutal blood feuds.

**The Holy Guest:** The finest of Georgian laws is *Stumari* (Hospitality). "Gift of God" is what a guest is considered. To take in a stranger into your home, to feed him till he can no longer move, and to protect him with your life is ingrained in the culture deeply. It is a national pride that is huge.

**The Shadow of the Feud:** Traditionally this existed alongside the custom of *blood feuds* (*sitsotskhle*), in which a murder or mortal offense would warrant vengeance over generations, decimating families and communities. The eerie contradiction between these two opposites—untenting devotion to the stranger and conditional vengeance against the enemy—tells much about the deeply ingrained importance of honor and the rich, volatile nature of the Georgian character. It is a culture of huge passion, both loving and hating, where social bonds are simultaneously a matter of moral obligation and life and death.

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Summary

Georgia is a nation of profound dualities. It is a nation where a toastmaster can bring an audience to tears, where wine is made in clay eggs buried in the ground, and where a peculiar alphabet has defied empires. It is a country that builds community upon dizzying staircases and holds itself together by sacred, non-corporeal kinships. Georgia is most comprehensible by understanding its resistance, its rich emotional and spiritual currents, and its fierce determination to be quite, absolutely other. It is not simply a destination to visit, but a complex social cosmos to be deciphered and to wonder at.