Jan 8, 2024

Tbilisi’s Armenian Community Celebrates Christmas

Ethnic Armenians celebrate Christmas on 6 January in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Almost two weeks after Christmas was celebrated elsewhere in the world, and a day before Georgia celebrated Orthodox Christmas, Tbilisi’s ethnic Armenian community celebrated its own on 6 January this year.

According to the census in 2014, some 53,000 ethnic Armenians reside in the Georgian capital while some 168,000 ethnic Armenians make up Georgia’s second largest ethnic minority, not including those residing in the breakaway region of Abkhazia.

[…]

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili congratulated those citizens of ethnic Armenian background as well as the citizens of Armenia, the country’s southern most neighbour, referring to both as the “brotherly Armenian people.” Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili also wished the Armenian Apostolic Church and its congregation “Peace, health, and welfare.” Other officials in Tbilisi did the same.

The full photo story is here.

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Tbilisoba 2024

Oct 17, 2024

Earlier this month, Tbilisi celebrated Tbilisoba, the city’s annual harvest festival. Over the years it has changed significantly and seems smaller than before. I first covered the event in 2011 but the best so far remains 2014 when there was more representation of traditional Georgian folk dance and music as well as by ethnic minorities such as the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities. This year, that was held relatively far away from Tbilisi’s Old Town and Rike Park with very little publicity or in some media any at all. Nonetheless, those that attended appeared to enjoy themselves sufficiently and I managed to photo stories.

Can Armenia and Azerbaijan finally reach an agreement by COP29?

Oct 17, 2024

As this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku draws closer, negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to be drifting further apart. Despite hopes that the opposite would be true, a lack of clarity and confusion instead continues to reign. Does the draft Agreement on Peace and Establishment of Interstate Relations contain 17 points or 16? Initially, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had announced that consensus had been reached on 13 points while 3 were partially agreed and there was no agreement at all on a fourth.