EUROPE STARTED HERE “The first myth through which Georgia became a part of European consciousness is the story of the Argonauts.” —president saakashvili In the aftermath of the peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution in post-Soviet Georgia, the reformist government of Mikheil Saakashvili introduced a new national branding slogan: “Europe Started Here.”1 The phrase brought together geographic proximity with historic legacy, cleverly playing on Georgia’s longstanding historical-cultural affinities with Europe and its location as an eastern frontier. Following independence, Georgia suffered a decade of deterioration and headed towards failed statehood. The country struggled to establish a stable political environment amidst corruption, absent state infrastructures, and the loss of control over its autonomous regions. The post-revolutionary Saakashvili government was therefore determined to reform the country, ridding it of its Soviet past and selectively reasserting Georgia’s historical “Europeaness.”2 New architecture and urban regeneration schemes were fundamental to the process. What followed under this government was a decade of rapid construction and national myth promotion in Georgia between 2003 and 2013. While the government employed various historic narratives to bolster its connection to Europe, one specific ancient myth—that of the third-century BCE epic Greek poem of Argonautica—featured heavily in the urban transformation of the county’s Western city of Batumi in the Adjara region. Formerly a regional beach destination, Batumi’s built environment underwent significant redevelopment in the post- Revolution years, turning into one of the Black Sea’s leading five-star leisure destinations. Here, alongside national myth endorsement, government-commissioned architecture served the political purposes of neoliberal market reforms, democracy promotion, and modernization targeted toward EU and NATO membership. Batumi’s transformed built environment thus speaks to Georgia’s broader desires to establish its place within the new world order. 1. For further reading see: Nino Patsuria, "Georgia Changes its Tourist Image," Georgian Journal, July 7, 2011, accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.georgianjournal.ge/business/5390-georgia-changes-its-tourist-image-.html; and Melissa Aronczyk, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. For further reading see: Donnacha Ó Beacháin and Frederik Coene, "Go West: Georgia's European Identity and its Role in Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Objectives," Nationalities Papers 42, no. 6 (2014): 923-941. 124 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00011 by guest on 27 September 2021 GEORGIA’S SELECTIVE HISTORIES In a bid to further distance Georgia from the hegemony of neighboring Russia a decade after independence, the young, charismatic and Western-oriented President Saakashvili began developing closer social, cultural, and militaristic alignments with Europe. Such ties were justified as historically natural by the president in-part through his references to Argonautica, the classic Greek poem that describes the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts from Greece to the ancient city of Colchis. Arriving on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, the Argonauts docked at what is considered proximate to present-day Batumi. Jason is assisted by the local Colchian princess and sorceress, Medea, who helps him acquire the mythical object of the Golden Fleece, required for Jason to claim the throne back home. Out of this ancient myth, the Saakashvili government redeclared an integral link between Europe and Georgia via Colchis as a core site of shared “European” history. According to Saakashvili, “the first myth through which Georgia became a part of European consciousness is the story of the Argonauts.”3 While a coherent investigation into the historic use of this myth in Georgia has not been conducted, government officials have drawn upon the myth’s legacy for political purposes numerous times over the past century. Prior to its utilization by the Saakashvili government, the Argonauts tale carried a Soviet-era legacy, from when it was utilized in the folk ritual of Colkhoba in the neighboring Georgian border village of Sarpi, some 18KM away from Batumi. Sarpi is a place also claiming to be a key location within ancient Colchis. The instrumentalization of the tale during the late 1970s under socialism was seen as working toward the Soviet goal of abolishing “harmful traditions and customs”— typically religious in content—and supplanting them with more secular historic practices.4 In the earlier Soviet rendition of the myth, no connection to Europe was drawn. The entire purpose of the resurrected folk ritual was to keep local civilian groups placated inside the Iron Curtain. Through Colkhoba, Sarpians took pride in their ability to participate in the larger network of Soviet folk festivals across the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and, as a result of the event, were further disassociated from their Turkish Laz counterparts immediately across the border. The Soviet rendition thus foregrounded the idea of Sarpi’s minority Laz community becoming more connected to their 3. President Saakashvili underscored this connection in a speech delivered at the opening of the statue of Medea, retrieved from the official web site of the Press Office of the Administration of the Georgian President, accessed 10 August, 2011. As further described in Tamta Khalvashi, Peripheral Affects: Shame, Publics, and Performance on the Margins of the Republic of Georgia (Ph.D. diss., University of Copenhagen, 2015). 4. Mathijs Pelkmans, Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, (Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2006). 125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00011 by guest on 27 September 2021 HARRIS - BRANDTS fellow Georgians. The Soviets grounded their introduction of Colkhoba in purported claims by village elders that celebrations of Colchis dated back to pagan times and were likely to have been handed down from the Colchians themselves, affording the myth a sense of historic legitimacy. In Soviet Sarpi, the tale of the Argonauts was reflected in maps, images, and the naming of restaurants on the coast such things as “The Golden Fleece” and “Argo.”5 In 1988, the last Soviet rendition of Colkhoba took place. After Georgian independence in 1991, the Adjara region fell under the control of despot ruler Aslan Abashidze, and the myth of Jason and the Argonauts ceased to be officially commemorated in the region. During the Abashidze era, the notion of Georgia as being characteristically European began to take its contemporary form through manipulations of the built environment. This was particularly exemplified through a focus by Abashidze on new architecture that followed European design standards and aesthetics, an approach that would continue (and be dramatically amplified) in the Saakashvili era of the 2000s. By utilizing the epic Greek poem of Argonautica without references to the Soviet celebration of Colkhoba, the Saakashvili government was able to bypass the complications of the country’s Soviet past. Here, the government selectively framed the ancient myth in a manner that validated Georgia’s European connection without mentioning its historic connections to Europe by way of Imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century, Batumi was known as a tariff-free port, or porto franco, within the Russian Empire and was a key destination for foreign trade. As the political administrative centre of Transcaucasia, Georgia absorbed various architectural styles from Russian cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. These surfaced in Batumi via European architects practicing their trade within the broader Russian empire. During the Soviet period, this influence continued, with European architects designing large portions of Batumi. Thus, a connection to Imperial Russia is integral to Georgia’s contemporary “European” narrative. Yet, since such ties to Russia have come to be entwined with negative memories of foreign occupation and Soviet oppression, in the government’s newly branded image of European Georgia, the narrative was selectively censored. Indeed, Georgia’s choreographed remembrance also overlooked the historic legacy of Russia’s own assertions of Europeanness over the centuries, which linked back to Moscow as the “Third Rome,” Peter the Great’s “window on Europe,” and claims of St. Petersburg as the “Venice of the North.” The complex ways through which Georgia has resurrected and 5. Ibid. 126 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00011 by guest on 27 September 2021 EUROPE STARTED HERE recreated the myth of the Argonauts over the decades can be understood in relation to what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “invented traditions.” Hobsbawm identifies three overlapping types of invented traditions, all of which can be seen within contemporary Georgia: a) those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour.6 Related to Hobsbawm’s first two points, Georgia’s post-Revolution transformation not only entailed the establishment of a new government authority in need of official legitimization,