New Year’s is the main winter holiday in the post-Soviet world, after the communists took Christmas customs and melded them into the more secular January 1. But Georgia’s mekvle tradition long predates this shift.
With a park, garbage trucks, and now a waste-processing facility, watchdog groups are questioning the city government’s many gifts from politically connected businessmen.
The Georgian government held a mass demonstration partly to claim that its supporters can outnumber protesters, a well-established tactic in Georgia’s political playbook.