The Purple Culture Guide to Georgia

Chapter 1: First Impressions

The first thing that hits you about Georgia isn't a sight. It's a feeling of having stepped into a place that refuses to be one thing. Tbilisi, the capital, is the best introduction to this. One street will be lined with elegant, crumbling 19th-century balconies with vines crawling over them. Turn a corner, and you're facing a hulking, half-finished concrete building from the Soviet era, and next to it, a slick, glassy new hotel that could be in any city in the world. This isn't a coordinated urban plan. It's a visual argument happening in real time between history, poverty, ambition, and pride. And somehow, across the span of a ten-minute walk, it all feels like it belongs together.

The most common wrong assumption people bring is that Georgia is a smaller, simpler version of Russia, or that it's just another stop on the backpacker trail through the Caucasus. Neither is remotely true. The language is unlike anything around it, a beautiful, guttural tongue with its own unique alphabet that looks like it was designed by a jeweler. The culture is fiercely, almost defiantly, its own. Georgians are the first to tell you they are not Russian, not Turkish, not European - they are simply Georgian, and they've survived at the crossroads of empires for centuries because of an unshakeable belief in their own identity. You feel this in the way they talk about their wine, their food, their polyphonic singing, and their language with a