Georgian culture trying to cancel its minister
Many of Georgia's cultural figures are convinced that Tsulukiani is on a mission to force loyalty to the government across various areas of arts and culture.

Georgian filmmaker Salome Jashi had just collected her order in a Tbilisi café when her real-life nemesis, Minister of Culture Tea Tsulukiani, walked in. The two women, who emerged as the main antagonists in a controversy surrounding the Georgian film industry, were standing a few feet apart from one another and were about to meet for the first time.
"I stood there with a salmon sandwich in my hand, thinking what to do," Jashi told Eurasianet. "I wanted to go up to her, but didn't want to get dragged away by security."
Jashi had good reasons to use this chance to confront the official. Screenings of her award-winning documentary "Taming the Garden" were scandalously canceled last year purportedly because Tsulukiani had taken a dim view of the film.
The documentary is a deadpan yet poignant jab at Georgia's richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who makes a hobby of collecting the nation's largest and finest trees for his private arboretum. Top Georgian officials, including Tsulukiani, proudly and openly declare their loyalty to the billionaire, who acts as the godfather of Georgian politics.
Tsulukiani recently triggered a wave of protests when she ordered the restructuring of a national mechanism of support for filmmaking. Already roiled by the banning of Jashi's film, much of the film community is convinced that the overhaul of the Georgian National Film Center (GNFC) is geared toward filtering out politically undesirable proposals and people from the publicly funded system that provides a lifeline for Georgia's film industry.
Jashi in fact stopped by that café as she was on her way to a meeting with colleagues determined to resist Tsulukiani and her reforms. But then there she was, the minister, queuing in a cafe. Jashi mustered the courage and approached.
In her telling, the encounter proved predictably awkward but surprisingly convivial despite Tsulukiani's reputation for vindictiveness and bluntness. "I introduced myself calmly and told her that we are both guided by the same goal, which is the success of Georgian film," Jashi said. "She was very polite. She said she loved the top I was wearing. I was wearing this laced blouse I got in a second-hand store."
Assuming that a return compliment was due, Jashi scanned the minister's outfit for anything she could commend, but eventually decided against it and simply asked for a meeting. The minister gave her assistant's number.
Tsulukiani did not speak to Eurasianet to confirm the story and to respond to accusations of censorship leveled against her, but Jashi said that she walked off with vague hope that there was room for dialogue amid all the controversy.
She followed up with the assistant, but the meeting never happened. A few days later, Jashi and all active participants of the protest movement were left out of a meeting that the minister held with dozens of Georgian film professionals to discuss reforms at the embattled film center. If anything, the controversy had become worse.
Museum wars
The filmmakers now rallying against the minister have taken the protest baton from other areas of Georgia's arts and culture that were earlier touched by the minister's reforming hand. Controversy has indeed dogged Tsulukiani, previously minister of justice, ever since she became the minister of culture, sports and youth in 2021.
The sweeping changes she launched sparked protests across a variety of cultural programs and institutions. The nation's museums were the first to be embroiled in controversy.
"The first time she showed up in our museum, she was shockingly rude to us," said Ekaterine Kiknadze, former director of the Fine Arts Museum, in a 2021 interview with Eurasianet.
In a cinematic allusion of her own, Kiknadze recalled a scene from a famous screen adaptation of the novel Heart of a Dog , Mikhail Bulgakov's biting satire of Bolshevism. In that scene, a busybody housing committee chief intrudes upon a renowned surgeon's home, demanding that he share part of his bourgeois-sized flat with the proletariat.
Similarly, Kiknadze said, the museum's learned, bespectacled guardians felt that their walls were invaded by philistines, who demanded reforms, pounded their fists on the table and displayed little reverence for the museum's collections, which include paintings by famous Georgian artists, medieval goldsmithery and enamel works.
Both then and now, Tsulukiani did not respond to Eurasianet's invitation to tell her version of events and respond to the accusations. In comments to pro-government media she alleged that part of the museum staff was hostile and uncooperative. Either way, matters went downhill since that first encounter, eventually escalating to a full-blown war between the minister and many museum workers.
Top curators who resisted the reorganization plans were relieved of responsibility for the collections and repositories that they had been caring for for years. Accused of insubordination, Kiknadze was demoted to an entry-level position. She and her colleagues alleged that they'd been punished for their efforts to protect the museum's collections and also because they were deemed disloyal to the government.
The last straw for Kiknadze was when the Ministry of Culture announced its (ultimately unrealized) plan to demolish her museum, a handsome 19th-century building and a cultural heritage monument.
Located just off Tbilisi's central Freedom Square, the fine arts museum now stands dwarfed by a massive, glassy business center that the billionaire Ivanishvili built next to it, in the heart of the city's historic district. Tsulukiani's office said that it was not financially viable for the government to maintain the museum, but the media alleged that the real plan was to make more space for the business center.
The plans left historians gasping with anger. Kiknadze publically lambasted the minister for plans to destroy one of the city's most valued historic buildings, endangering artifacts stored within.
"Cultural heritage is a spiritual message from the past that has reached us in a material form," Kiknadze told Eurasianet. "It cannot be measured in economic terms and does not belong to any single government or country, it belongs to humanity."
Law and order culture
Public outrage saved the building, but not Kiknadze. She got fired along with over a dozen longtime employees with specialized knowledge of the museum's collections. TV reports showed arts professors and curators collecting their belongings and bidding farewell to their cherished collections.
"I've spent 47 years of my life here," Nana Burchuladze, arts professor and curator of the medieval collection, told Mtavari Arkhi, an opposition TV station. "We have been declared enemies of the people," she said.
After dismissing seasoned professionals, Tsulukiani plucked law-and-order officials from her justice minister past to man key managerial posts in cultural agencies.
A thirty-something former justice official, Nika Akhalbedashvili, replaced Kiknadze as the director of the fine arts museum. Nino Chipashvili, former chief of the inmates' vocational training and education program, became the director of an ethnographic museum. This year, an ex-penitentiary official Koba Khubunaia was appointed as an acting director of the Georgian National Film Center.
Dismissively describing Tsulukiani's appointees as "prison guards," both museum and film professionals ardently resisted such unlikely appointments.
"My education is in film directing and architecture. Now tell me, should I be running the national economy?" prominent Georgian film director, Nana Jorjadze, complained in recent comments to the media. "Even if my intentions are good, should I be allowed to do that?"
The new appointees, for their part, engaged in vengeful exchanges with the old guard and respected cultural figures.
Kiknadze's replacement, Akhalbedashvili, proceeded to become deputy director of the Georgian National Museum, the mothership of Georgia's museum fleet. Last year, he publicly accused the museum's director and perhaps the best-known Georgian scientist, Davit Lordkipanidze, of neglectful stewardship of his collections. The new management of the film center recently castigated via Facebook the famous filmmaker Nino Kirtadze after she quit her post at the center as international programs manager.
Much of Georgian society recoiled in anger at the sight of perceived upstarts attacking towering science and culture personalities. An internationally acclaimed anthropologist, Lordkipanidze put Georgia on the global map as a key layover point in human migration and evolution. A seasoned filmmaker and promoter of Georgian cinema, Kirtadze has numerous international awards under her belt.
What drives Tsulukiani?
Many of Georgia's cultural figures are convinced that Tsulukiani is on a mission to force loyalty to the government across various areas of arts and culture. They claim that public cultural institutions are methodically purged of critical minds and ideas, and of anything that can pose a potential threat to the political establishment and the billionaire behind it.
Ivanishvili personally brought Tsulukiani to the cabinet back in 2012 when he served as the prime minister. The billionaire has since stepped into the shadows but all key government appointments and policies are believed to still be subject to his imprimatur.
Others believe that it is Tsulukiani's personal ambition to put Georgian culture under her thumb. "I don't think she was told by Ivanishvili or the government to do what she does," Jashi said. "I feel it's all about her personal ideas."
Still others say that the minister, whose background is in international law, and her retinue of ex-justice officials are simply out of their depth and are bound to fumble even well-intentioned initiatives.
Several arts, culture, and science figures, who don't publically rally against the minister and don't necessarily share accusations of censorship, privately told Eurasianet that it is primarily her personality that makes Tsulukiani the wrong choice to be handed the rudder of Georgian culture.
A stern-spoken, hard-charging disciplinarian with little patience for ceremony and diplomatic language, Tsulukiani by default seemed out of sync with what is largely a universe of delicate manners, free-thinking and intricate social connections. Even in any other circumstance, her personality seemed doomed to clash with mild-mannered types like Jashi and Kiknadze.
Tsulukiani herself argued all along that her goal is to clean up alleged inefficiency, corruption and nepotism from the areas of her purview. She recently alleged that the film center has been mired in nepotism and favoritism for years and that her goal was to remove such barriers to the success of Georgian film.
Critics counter that her reforms are alienating successful individuals and destroying successful institutions. Georgian film, for one, has long been punching above its weight, earning international awards and praise in recent years, not least because of support from the Georgian National Film Center.
"The Film Center is one of the most effective and highly professional institutions in Georgia," famous film director Nana Janelidze wrote in an open letter, listing all the successful projects the center supported over the years. "The unprofessional reorganization of this institution amounts to its destruction."
Still, Tsulukiani said that she does not understand what the protests are all about. Her recent comments to a pro-government news network suggest that she intends to do things her way no matter what. "I'm not looking for compromise, I'm looking for partners," she said.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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