I dedicated this memoir to 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili, the luger from the Republic of Georgia, who was killed on February 12, 2010 in a terrible training crash at the Whistler Sliding Center in Vancouver, Canada.
In the summer of 2007, I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to a remarkable language camp called Moscovia, about an hour from Moscow.
Moscovia is the brainchild of Yury Luzhkov, the powerful and controversial mayor of Moscow. It is truly is a remarkable place, where some three hundred students from thirty-three countries come together for three weeks every summer to study Russian
and get to know each other through an impressive array of cultural interactions. Students stay in youth hostel-like conditions and are divided into international groups of about fifteen. Delegation leaders stay in a hotel on the camp grounds.
The delegation from Georgia was one of the more popular delegations at Moscovia. I liked their leader, Ekaterina, very much. There was something regal about her, yet at the same time she was very down to earth. She was also smart, cultured, funny and still beautiful at 60. I often joined Ekaterina and the leader of the Armenian delegation, an equally charming woman, for a late afternoon coffee and cake.
Moscovia was not my first encounter with Georgians. While I was on sabbatical in Moscow in 1988, our group took a memorable trip to Tiblisi, the capital of what was then the Soviet Republic of Georgia. After the constant shortages in Moscow, we were surprised by how well stocked with fruits and vegetables the supermarkets were. We were charmed by the beauty of the city with its winding roads and buildings with pretty, colorful balconies, by the mild climate and by the Georgian people themselves. Their hospitality seemed even more generous than that of our Russian friends in Moscow. We drank Stalin's favorite wine, Kindzmarauli, from a horn, which we could not put down until the
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The Republic of Georgia and the Moscovia Festival of Cultures