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Georgians claim they invented wine. It’s a pretty lofty statement, but they do make a damn good fermented grape drink. The best stuff is made at home using the “old method,” in which the wine ferments in clay pots buried underground. This man saw that we had bought a bottle produced by some big wine company and decided to school us on how the real stuff tastes.
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Tbilisi market
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Tbilisi market. Georgians are warm hosts and always excited to talk to foreigners, especially Americans. The country seems to be one of the few places where we haven’t completely ruined our reputation as tourists. I easily stuck out as a foreigner in this busy market, and loads of people approached me wanting to talk about everything from politics in the US and Ukraine to what I thought about Georgian wine (in short: the wine is excellent and best when made at home, and Putin is behind everything wrong with the CIS).
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Ferris wheel in Batumi, Gerogia
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Finding serenity on the Black Sea. Batumi, Georgia
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Selling fruit and vegetables in northern Kiev
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Kiev construction king
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Victory Day, the celebration of the Nazi defeat in the Second World War, is a complicated and sometimes divisive holiday in the former Soviet Union.
For those in America and the UK, the lesson is fairly simple: victory of Western democratic society over Nazi totalitarianism. But for some Ukrainians—particularly those in western Ukraine—there isn’t much celebration. To many of them, the day is little more than glorification of victory for one murderous, authoritarian regime over another. That attitude has sometimes led to violent confrontations between Ukrainian nationalists and families of veterans since the country’s independence.
This difference in perspective is a sticking point between the regular soldiers who fought in the Red Army and millions of Ukrainians whose relatives were starved to death, deported, or executed under Stalin, since triumph over Nazi Germany served to further legitimize the Soviet regime under its most cruel and oppressive leader and allowed it to expand its reach westward.
In this part of the world, the holiday is both a commemoration of the soldiers who fought and died to stop Hitler’s war machine, and a day of reflection for those who were victims of the very system that made victory possible.
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Kiev
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Woman selling baskets in Kiev
