PhotoEssay | Easter Affairs (Or How I Broke Omertà)

Author: Gvantsa Lomaia (all photos by the author)

1. Resurrections

Easter in my village is a resurrection in the truest sense. Emptied, colourless, silenced streets suddenly turn green, fill with noise, and begin to breathe, providing a glimpse of what’s to come in summer, when urbanised villagers briefly return from cities.

Only my parents’ generation lives in my village now. Their parents all died in recent years, one after another. Those who could afford to rent an apartment went to work in the city, mostly in construction,  planning to return in old age. Their children, though, no longer want to come back. Working the land is thankless labour, hard and undervalued. 

Soon, my house, too, may no longer have a permanent inhabitant. My father,  who has lived there alone since my grandmother’s death, tending the hazelnut plantation through spring and summer, met us in a gleaming house, mid-renovation as always, fixing one room or another to keep the loneliness at bay. But with nobody to take care of anymore, it won’t be long till he, too, will seek shelter in the capital, only to go back seasonally, and, of course, for Easter.

Easter is a celebration of life, but life can only be celebrated through death. Just like anywhere else in Georgia, we, too, love to roll red-dyed eggs over the graves, but it’s an even bigger thing in a village where we now count more of our own among the dead than among the living. We carry paskas (Easter cake), sweets, wine, and flat phrases to our own cemetery plots, then make our way into one another’s.  “May she rest in peace…” ”She was a good woman…” “Such is life (meaning: short)…”  “Get up, Lamara, Christ has risen…” 

Cemeteries are quickly brought to life through hearty exchanges. As facts blend with gossip, conversations focus on those living, the dead, the state of the nation, and whatever is trending in the village. One such trending topic this year was Nodari’s lost social assistance. Another was how I sent my neighbour to jail over Easter.  Let me tell you about both.

2. Nodari and Gogi’s Boy

Nodari is not a grand or complex man. He is fairly transparent and ordinary: simple ideas, simple desires, simple demands from life. He was born into a working family against his will, and was taken to school against his will. My aunt remembers him, still a kid, sitting on the front steps of the house, beating his school books against his head through hot tears. “It won’t go in, what do I do,” the whole village would hear him moan.

He also married his wife, Mzia, who stands a full head taller than Nodari on her high heels, under his family’s persistent pressure, I guess, or so he wants us to guess. They have no children.

Nodari’s heart issues grew more frequent with age. His knees wore out, his tongue sharpened, and his humour darkened. Around Easter, I found him undone: just before the holiday, the state had revoked his social assistance, the only stable income for him, his wife, and their three cows. He doesn’t know who to turn to or where to complain. Having brought my own rage from Tbilisi, all I could do was to shake my head in disdain and utter Megrelian curses towards Nodari’s wrongdoer. 

But a strange thing about those wrongdoers is that at least they understand the language we curse in.

Such is Gogi’s boy. 

Gogi’s boy is a man “Kotsied” by life – something we’ll say about our fellow humans, whom life, unfair as it is, brought a bit too close to the similarly unfair ruling authorities. Gogi’s boy is a little shy, but a great listener. When the ruling party recaptured power in Tsalenjikha, he was appointed village representative. 

His reputation as a well-respected man in the village survived his political affiliation, and that’s mostly because he, a farmer himself, knows the price of working the land: how many bags of fertiliser a hectare needs, when the hazelnuts should be sprayed, and what it costs a farmer to bring in a harvest. He speaks in a language Nodari understands, and a language opposition figures have yet to learn – the language of floods and disasters, pesticides, and cartels who control hazelnut harvests, the main source of income for many local households.

Will Nodari go to Gogi’s boy to seek help?

Nodari is that kind of man, the one with political taste. He says that before the elections, a ruling-party fixer tried to take his ID card in exchange for 100 Lari. It didn’t work. Nodari sells milk, cheese, and sometimes matsoni, thick yogurt, but never his conscience.  It is not that Georgian Dream has been particularly cruel to him. Like most villagers, he is simply out of sight, out of mind for those in power. And yet he has developed a particular contempt for that one man whose name is better left unsaid. He knows only one opposition leader and supports him; the others he neither knows by ideology nor by face. How would he? He doesn’t find much time to watch television, and no one comes to visit. 

And so it goes. Nodari’s social assistance remains withdrawn. He decides not to go to Gogi’s boy after all, and the only opposition leader he knows and likes is still in prison, and might linger in there for a while.

The village knows what this means for Mzia, an even stronger-headed opposition supporter: more trips to occupied Gali to bring back local goods, Russian Alyona chocolates, malako, kisselj, and selling them through the village.

3. I Broke Omertà

I ran into Gogi’s boy this Easter. I generously emptied a wine glass over the grave of his recently deceased father, Gogi, after first taking a sip for the peace of his soul, as is the tradition. For a moment, I felt like the most noble person alive: paying respects to a political opponent’s father, doing the decent human thing. Though Gogi’s boy, a great listener he is, was probably well aware that this noble woman had locked her neighbour behind bars just ahead of the holiday, committing the deadliest of local sins.

Georgians love to boast that we look out for each other, and that is a particularly big thing in Samegrelo. This is, however, true as long as you conform to the unwritten codes of family and community. In practice, this means that anything short of oversharing, overcaring, and boundary-crossing may feel here cold and inhuman.

I remember my surprise when, during my studies in Sweden, my classmate said she was uncomfortable because the girl sitting next to her was too close. To me, that other girl seemed perfectly fine, sitting in her own mental space, minding her own business. But far from home, boundaries were drawn differently. I tried to adjust, but with little success: I’d hear rumours that I was asking too many questions during classes.

Then I came back with that Swedish law diploma and realised Georgia wasn’t asking me to change. Here, you could be completely out of the ordinary and still be in the majority. You could embrace a total stranger and ask as many questions as you liked. Boundaries only appear here when there is an actual urgency to speak: a code of silence — nameless in Georgia, but called omertà in Sicily, as my friends tell me. 

Days before Easter, I broke the omertà: I reported my neighbor, who had menaced my father for years, to the police after hearing he had now physically attacked a family friend. 

That neighbor had made my father his sworn enemy for no apparent reason. For years, he’d hurl insults – and stones — from his yard, occasionally redecorating my father’s face.

The story was well known across the neighborhood, but others only stirred when I finally reported on him, and he was put behind bars. It could have been handled differently, they said. Handled differently here means my father settling the debt by striking back. The different handling, everyone secretly knows, may lead to more bloodshed or longer prison sentences. The village cemetery also remembers the fatal outcomes of things “handled differently” in the past. 

But those collective memories did not help, and I had to tiptoe around the village the whole Easter, nearly in tears with every whisper. “Get your laws away from me, Gvantsa,” my father told me after having been taken aside by a village fixer. My progressive friend, instead of supporting me, kept reminding me about the heavy moral and mental toll on the actual victim who had to testify. Only my mother took my side.

But the seeds of omerta and similar communal traditions can be found in the present as much as in the past. In a country where the rule of law has crumbled, communities reach back to older, obsolete codes of collective pressure: local strongmen call the shots, those struggling have nowhere to complain, and those expected to enforce the actual laws choose to step aside. 

This was not my first call to the police. The first two times, my abusive neighbour received only verbal warnings, so this last time, I skipped the local station and called Tbilisi instead. That one decision changed everything. The local officers, who had been perfectly comfortable looking the other way, now could not meet my eyes, possibly after having been reprimanded from above for their passivity. 

The absence of the rule of law does not necessarily mean the absence of the rule itself, nor does it necessarily imply corrupt judges. More often, it means rule by the community that claims to love you, embraces you, only to try you in a mob tribunal the next day.

And yet, paradoxically, nothing surpasses a neighbour’s Easter cake: you may scrutinize it, find fault with its taste, but you will still bless the hands that made it.

• Note: the names in the article have been modified to protect the privacy.