While the rest of the country celebrates Easter every year at home around the dinner table, one village in western Georgia marks the day with a rugby-like scramble that effectively blocks traffic for hours on the country’s East-West national highway. The game, lelo ( "goal" in Georgian), has no rules, no time-outs and no limit to the number of men who may play.
Back home, their differences may run strong, but within Turkey, ethnic groups from the Caucasus often find that they have more in common than conflict. Thousands of ethnic Muslim Caucasians from Georgia, Abkhazia and the North Caucasus left their homelands in the mid-19th century as Tsarist Russia took over the region.
Back home, their differences may run strong, but within Turkey, ethnic groups from the Caucasus often find that they have more in common than conflict.
The tension that marks Tbilisi's interactions with Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as well as with Russia, the main backer of the renegade regions -- shows no signs of abating in the near future. On December 1, for example, Georgia accused South Ossetian forces of violating a November demilitarization accord by holding military maneuvers.
The demilitarization process in South Ossetia, one of Georgia's renegade regions, is a mere two-weeks old, but it is already showing signs of fraying. A shooting incident on November 19 left two Georgia peacekeepers wounded. Meanwhile, Tbilisi has indicated that Georgian and South Ossetian forces would not be about to meet the established deadline for demilitarization.
