Twenty-year-old Issac Nyengue, a defender from Cameroon, a football hotbed in Africa, was looking for a little payday and a chance to gain valuable experience in what he thought was a professional European league. So he seized on an opportunity to go the South Caucasus country of Georgia, which aspires to host the 2020 European Football Championships.
During the Soviet era, international athletic competition was often seen as an extension of politics. Fans exuded a similar vibe during a recent rugby contest between the Georgian and Russian national teams in Tbilisi.
More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, women in many parts of Georgia have become more outspoken on gender issues. But in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, a three-kilometer-wide, 30-kilometer-long valley that borders Russia, change is complicated.
It might not be Tbilisi’s oldest legitimate profession, but, arguably, it is its most idiosyncratic. And there are signs it may be dying out, for few people are interested in becoming masseurs in Abanotubani, Tbilisi’s legendary bathhouse district.
As would any farmer with 750 hectares of land to cultivate, 68-year-old Piet Kemp likes to talk crops with the locals. But Kemp usually needs a Georgian translator to do his talking. A continent away from his native South Africa, Kemp now runs a corn business in the southern Georgian region of Kvemo-Kartli, not far from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
A music group made of elders from western Georgia prepare to go on stage during the festival of Georgian traditional folk music at the Ethnographic Museum in Tbilisi on July 25.
Art Gene Festival was started by several Georgian friends in 2004 to preserve and popularize the traditional and folk culture of Georgia. The organizers travel to the country's regions to find local performers for the festival. For many people living in remote villages the festival offers the opportunity to perform on a live stage for hundreds of listeners.
Justyna Mielnikiewicz is a freelance photojournalist based in Tbilisi.
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