At the entrance to the cathedral in the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi, one Saturday this summer, women kissed the hand of the white-bearded Father Vissarion Apliaa, the self-declared “interim bishop of the Abkhaz Orthodox Church.” Devotional items were displayed on a table near the door, including small pictures of the slain Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
The Abkhaz capital of Sukhumi these days amply illustrates French novelist Marcel Proust's maxim that houses are a “fleeting” receptacle for memories. But local authorities are out to prove Proust wrong by launching a campaign to preserve historic homes and restore the resort city’s faded Tsarist-era grandeur.
The recent death of Sergei Bagapsh, the de facto president of Abkhazia, presents a policy challenge for the separatist territory, as well as for its political patron, Russia.
The unexpected May 29 death of Sergei Bagapsh, the de facto leader of the breakaway region of Abkhazia, is certain to shake up Abkhaz politics, but some Abkhaz observers say that the underlying question is whether or not it will lead to instability in the territory.
It’s Thursday night at the Soviet-era House of Culture in Agudzera, a village outside Sukhumi, the capital of the breakaway region of Abkhazia, and three Abkhaz rock bands are setting up for a concert. The lighting and sound system is professional and right out of the box, but guitarist Alexander Tsamruk of the band Ferumage must adjust the levels because there is no soundman.
Latin America may seem an unlikely diplomatic priority for Abkhazia, thousands of miles away from the tiny, breakaway territory on the Black Sea. But Abkhazia's de facto foreign minister, Maxim Gvindjia, on his fifth trip to the region, says Latin America is a key to the territory’s efforts to build diplomatic and trade ties around the world.
You could call it poetic justice. Thrown out of his own boyhood home in Abkhazia on the orders of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Valery Mizadei now is responsible for maintaining all five of the former Soviet dictator’s residences in the sub-tropical Black Sea territory.
Stalin's two-story Abkhazia vacation home, known as the Mysra dacha, sits at the end of a twisting 14-kilometer road amidst flowering magnolia, honeysuckle bushes and towering trees. The relatively modest, three-bedroom house offers little visual sense of the Stalin period, with most of the furniture having been shuttled to other buildings under ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Sergei Bagapsh, Abkhazia's reelected leader, is making economic development and strengthening the breakaway entity's independent profile the two top priorities of his second term.
Fourteen such schools, staffed mostly by teachers originally from Abkhazia, teach an estimated 5,000 children throughout Georgia. The schools fall under the administration of the Abkhaz Ministry of Education and Culture in Exile, part of the Tbilisi-loyal Abkhaz government based in the Georgian capital.
