In Tbilisi today everybody was getting married. The grey sky and drizzle did not dampen the enthusiasm of the wedding parties that were driving round every street, beeping their horns so incessantly that, if I closed my eyes, I could imagine I was back in India. By the waterfall which flows through the historic centre of the town, brides in white dresses and grooms in traditional Georgian costume, basically a dress with a waistcoat and a sword, were posing for photographs. And every church was full to the brim with friends and families queuing to give their best wishes to newly-weds, all watched over by the wide-eyed icons of the Georgian orthodox church on the surrounding walls.

Taking a drag from his cigarette, our couchsurf host Zura looked down from the street onto another church emptying out its pious crowd. Commenting not on the wedding but on the faith itself, he said ‘some people think it’s nice, but to me they are idiots. Racists and homophobes, their thinking is all wrong.’ Later I would hear that a recent violent attack on a gay pride march in central Tbilisi had been led by a group of orthodox priests. Obviously they missed that little bit in the Bible about those without sin casting the first stone…

Zura was the perfect host to provide an introduction to Georgia, a free-thinking, libertarian with an amused, and often exasperated, sense of his country’s culture, past and present. Certainly Georgia is a country worth getting to know. A European style-Christian outpost stuck in the mountains in between Russia and the Muslim countries of central Asia and the Middle East. Georgia is so different from all the rest of the world that its language is unrelated to any others except for a mysterious connection with Basque.

Georgians, as portrayed by Zura, are a people full of hospitable spirit and hot-blood, both apparently common qualities amongst those whose homeland is the highlands. Their culture revolves around wine, elaborate toasts, feasting and fighting. The two or three fights Zura sees on the streets on every night out could be the modern version of the old highland Georgian tradition of duelling.

More seriously, according to Zura, 80% of what we would consider the Russian mafia are Georgian. Certainly the biggest criminal of the Soviet Union, Josef Dzhugashvili, was Georgian. And if you’ve never heard of him it’s only because he’s much better known by the name he gave himself, the “man of steel”, Stalin. Most modern Georgians apparently see Stalin as a criminal, but the vestiges of pride in him amongst some sections of society can be seen in the memorabilia for sale in the shops – the perfect presents for any hard-core communist history deniers in your life, from Stalin tea mugs to Stalin wine.

Zura was born in the same year as me, so spent the first 13 years of his life living in the Soviet Union. ‘A typically quiet Soviet childhood’ came to an end with the collapse of the empire and the creation of an independent Georgia. Crime spiralled out of control and Zura witnessed a sniper on top of the old building where he still lives shooting a man dead and then dragging the corpse down the stairs, the bloody head banging on each of the steps.

Modern Tbilisi, however, as far as I could tell, is a pretty peaceful place. The only violence I saw on the streets was a golden man pausing halfway through pushing a spear through the mouth of a dragon, the eponymous St George up on a pedestal in Freedom Square (formerly Lenin Square).

We climbed up through the backstreets with Zura to a ruined castle over-looking the city. Standing on the walls I enjoyed watching the drizzle in the lights of the castle walls. Drizzle is a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in most of the countries where we’ve spent the last five years. I like the way it doesn’t so much fall like regular rain but dances in the sky like the lightest of snow.

Tbilisi at dusk looked an attractive place. Behind us the fairy lights on a mini-Eifel tower overlooking the old town sputtered in the fading light and mist obscured the top. With no high-rise visible in the city centre the buildings that stood out where the illuminated churches, I could hear the strains of “Amazing Grace” (written, incidentally, by a Liverpool based ex-slave trader) rising up from one of them. Elsewhere I could see a still functioning synagogue, a testimony, according to Zura, to the lack of anti-semitism in Georgia’s history.  

One old neo-classical building with a glass dome on top reminded me of Berlin’s Bundestag (Parliament). The German version seems to me an excellent representation in brick and glass of the way democracy is meant to, as the public can climb up above their politicians to look down on them. In the Georgian version, however, no member of the public is allowed into the glass dome.

Zura looked down on all the signs of Tbilisi’s history in the city centre and criticised the Georgian people. ‘They always say “we were the greatest in the 10^th century”, I couldn’t give a shit about that, I only care about what we are now, and what sort of country my daughter will grow up in.’ For Zura the current government are ‘idiots’ and the previous government were ‘idiots, just not as big idiots as the current government’. Georgia, in his mind, suffered from too many people who were “not adequate”, meaning they were lost in the country’s glorious medieval past, trying to artificially keep alive cultural elements which were naturally dying out, and failing to recognise the economic solutions needed to improve the country in the modern world.

Today in Tbilisi everybody was getting married. What sort of country the children of all the weddings will grow up into is anybody’s guess.