Day 184: Batumi

Oct 4 - Rain lets up today, so we do a long walking tour of the city. Stop by the archaeological museum, which is tiny but fairly well signposted in Georgian, Russian, and English.

Besides Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the north of Georgia, there is another portion of the country with a history of autonomy. That is Adjara, the region shown on the map below. We crossed into it yesterday, though it was impossible to know. Historically, this region has been closely associated with Türkiye, and the Muslim population is proportionally higher here. It was only ceded by the Ottomans in 1878 under pressure from Russia.

It was granted a degree of autonomy by the Georgian government, and when Georgia was assimilated into the Soviet Union, Adjara was administered as a separate soviet republic. It had a special status as a port with easy access to Turkish markets.

Upon the breakup of the USSR, Adjara again asserted its autonomy, under the leader Aslan Abashidze. The region lived in uneasy peace while the Georgian president, Shevardnadze, attempted to find some way to bring the region closer to Georgia. But there was a lot of power grabbing on Abashidze’s part, while Georgia was distracted with civil war elsewhere.

Shevardnadze was forced from power in 2003, and his successor decided to force more compliance from Adjara (apparently they weren’t enough paying taxes to the national treasury). Abashidze, in response, claimed Georgia was going to attack and began preparing for war. This did not go over well with the local population, and protests against his military stance eventually toppled his administration. He fled to Russia. This effectively ended the bona-fide autonomy of Adjara and since then, the majority of the Adjara representatives in the local legislative body have been pro-Georgian.