Easter during quarantine

I can’t speak for the Church here, but for the most part it looks like they took their precautions. Not many people attended mass, and they did appear to actually be wiping the spoons (with at least a cloth, not sure if there was alcohol on that cloth). I was at home watching it on live feed. Which saddens me a little bit, as it is my favorite holiday in Georgia and at Church.

Orthodox Easter is celebrated at a different date than Western (Roman) Easter. I’ve mentioned the Christmas date controversy before – a pope had fixed the calendar and the Orthodox refused to fix it because pope. But after they realized ole Papa Gregory was right and that Christmas was, in fact, drifting off into the summer, they fixed their liturgical calendar and now the Orthodox Christmas is on January 7th (which is December 25 of the old calendar).

Trinity (Sameba) Cathedral at night

Easter on the other hand, is a bit different. By definition, Easter should be on the Jewish Passover, since the Last Supper was the Passover meal. The Orthodox have stayed true to this. The Catholics however, being clever with their calendars and all, invented some strange formulation that has to do with the square roots of the distance between Mars and Venus at the equinox of Alpha Centauri. Or something like that, It’s always a bit confusing. Sometimes these dates line up, other times not, but all that to say Easter is not determined by the regular Christian calendars, hence the dates making a bit of a temporal dance across the years.

Easter in a Georgian village

My favorite thing is to have Easter in a village. I’ll tell you a bit about that for normal years.

Normally, festivities would begin on Good Friday (not really sure the proper Orthodox term). Religious people are fasting during this time and don’t break fast until Saturday night after church. So if you’re not a girl, then you’ve probably started feasting and drinking and partying by this time, especially in Samegrelo, the big region in the West.

a village house

I’m often confused by this. Because I’ll ask, “When do we eat?”

“It is a time of fasting, Saint,” they reply.

“Yeah, but I see some guys outside barbecuing pork and drinking beer,” I say.

“It is a time of fasting,” they reply.

Preparations under way - technically not Easter, but no real difference

And then before I know it, there’s about twenty people over getting drunk. Heck if I know what Georgian fasting is, except that it involves "fasting cake" and "fasting ice cream" – it never makes clear sense to me.

Now, technically, you should hold off until after the midnight mass on Saturday night. Most people break down though, especially those who live in Tbilisi or elsewhere and haven’t seen their childhood friends in forever. Those guys are already 6 days into a 4-day bender.

The church is not far from my family’s house. We walk down at about thirty minutes till. Then there’s a lot of standing around. People chatting, getting reacquainted with people they haven’t seen in years or days or hours. Then finally some commotion, something like a church service begins. At this point I’m usually pretty toasted, so I’m hazy on the details. But some beautiful singing starts up. And then people start pulling out candles and soon I’ve got hot wax dripping all over my hands and shoes.

The Holy Fire has arrived. Here’s the big event.

The Holy Fire

Every year for Easter, the Orthodox have a big meetup in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they disappear into the chapel above the Empty Tomb. They emerge from the chapel with the fire. They light the flames of everybody present – representatives of different churches from around the world. Those representatives then take the Fire and go back to their home country, where it’s then distributed to each individual parish across the land. What a beautiful tradition! You are literally sharing in the same flame as people around the world. Now that is a Communion if ever there was one.

Holy Fire in hand, we shuffle out of the church. The nice churchy church that stands now was built recently. There is an older one on the other side of the center of the village. It was a house converted into a church used during the Soviet Union. So everyone takes their bit of Fire and walks in procession down to the old church, walks around it, eats some sunflower seeds, has a chat, some songs are sung, back to the first church, and then more singing. At this point, usually around 2 or 3 in the morning, we go home. Others stay as late as 5 or 6 even.

Next to Sioni, Tbilisi Old Town

It’s not over!

Now random neighbors start to arrive through the remainder of the night. In fact, they’ve been doing so while we’re gone at church, so every family has to leave some grandfolks or someone behind at the house during mass to host any guests that might pop in.

When you can’t stay awake anymore, you pass out.

Easter Day

Wake up. Easter’s here! The real feasting and drinking begins. If the pig hasn’t been killed yet, it’s killed now, along with a variety of other animals. You will wake to a slaughter. Fresh wine barrels are tapped, the food is set, neighbors start streaming in. Alternatively, we also disappear to other neighbors’ houses to eat their food and make a bit of a culinary round robin around the village. Last one to keep their sobriety loses.

Mornings in the village

Another game: They die hard-boiled eggs red for Easter, rather than getting too crafty with the colors. In the ancient days, once everyone converted to Christianity, they claimed that the eggs they had been dying for whatever pagan goddess all along actually represented the blood of Christ. True story. And because of that, they pock each other’s eggs upon arrival. Old Georgian tricksters will have made special wooden eggs, and they go around town defeating all the children, laughing as they leave behind a trail of broken eggshells and tears.

Sometime during the day, there's a visit to the graveyards of the different family members. Wine is brought. They pour one glass of wine and place it for the deceased. Everyone there drinks one. People visit the graves of friends as well. Repeat. In Eastern Georgia, they often have full feasts at the cemetery as well.

That’s the normal times. These aren’t normal times.

Now we sit in the apartment. Instead of Communion wine, I’m drinking some cheap scotch.

C’est la vie.

Shopping

People made much ado about the Church going on with Easeter. But Carrefour, the grocery store around the corner, leaves me in much more existential terror.

People are lined up to the street. “Socially distancing” while in line. But with lots of people and still, indoor air… does the virus care that much? You have to wait about 30 minutes to get into the store, and then the store is overcrowded. It’s complete nutso inside. People bumping each other, attendants stocking, kids playing rugby. A mess.

Not the end of the line

And an unnecessary one. The state instituted a curfew. Why? They want people in shops for only certain hours. That means that everyone must crowd in at once, rather than spreading the distribution across the day. I say open the shops for 24 hours, so that people can thin out. Don’t come all at once! Come when people aren’t coming. That makes sense, not the mess that they’re enforcing now.

Whatever. When I saw the line to the street, I immediately called the wife. “Can you do without bread?”

“I’ll try making some.”

She made some. And it was good.

Happy Easter folks.

A Lack of Complaints

It’s been a strange few days. The lockdown in Georgia has gotten a lot more serious, and in general, I think people are beginning to understand why it’s happening. And with understanding comes more compliance.

First there was a lady in the village of Marneuli who was diagnosed with covid. She had apparently been quite the busybody, going to the celebrations of the annual Azeri New Year (Marneuli is mostly ethnically Azeri), Novruz Bayram, then running off for the anniversary feast of a deceased friend. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, there was news of a Jehovah’s Witness in Zugdidi who had caught the virus. He refused to tell the government who he had been with (I guess for fear of ratting out his fellow Witnesses). On top of that, like any good JW, he was handing out flyers to who knows how many people, each one of those flyers having been handled by his unwashed hands…

Amidst all this, there was the ongoing controversy with the Church. Though many churches did willingly follow some social distancing measures, for the most part they were crowded and pressed inside the chapels (having to make room for the masses of media cameras and crew didn’t help). The Church also made it clear that they would continue using their single spoon during the Eucharist, saying that the Body of Christ was enough to purify the spoon. Other Orthodox Churches throughout the world have since switched to disposable spoons or said you can bring your own, but the Georgians have been very adamant about not following the recommendations of the health officials that seem to have taken charge of the country. Instead of understanding these recommendations for safety, they’ve tried to turn it into a war against the Church. A strange and bizarre time to take on the victim complex, unless they’re actually and literally wanting to become victims…

The thing is though, it would have been possible to get the health message across without it becoming confrontational. Instantly the media picked up on it, and atheists were at the front bashing organized religion and so on, which immediately made the religious posture into an overzealous defensive stance. There are Orthodox sects that don't even use spoons, so spoons are clearly not necessary. But they could have dropped that point and just highlighted the distancing measures – people can get sick by simply breathing the same air, or coughing next to each other. Many Orthodox faithful have already died in Italy in this regard, no spoon sharing required. This is what prompted the Russian Patriarch Kirill to tell people to stay and pray at home (a day later, the Georgian Patriarch announced the same... curious timing that).

Trinity Church (Sameba), main cathedral of Georgian Orthodoxy

When people deal with each other, they approach others with their own set of givens and understandings, often not trying to understand where the other person is coming from. At this point, it's not about winning an argument, it's about saving lives. We have to step back from our own posturing and confrontation in order to get through to the other side. If it means for an atheist to cease his argument, "Your silly spoons won't help, there is no God, you will die!" then obviously that's not going to help either. A religious person would rather die in their commitment to their faith, than to allow an atheist to win on the grounds of there not being a god. And of course, atheists can't understand that either...

Dealing with an entrenched religious organization and a growing realization that Georgian citizens were not going to be able to keep to social distancing on their own, the government decided to declare a State of Emergency. They set up checkpoints outside the major cities, and made a rule that you can’t be in public with more than three people (including in cars, including the driver). Some areas have even ingeniously thrown in the mask rule, to be followed while in a car, because it will obviously help you in filtering out all the recycled air of the people you live with.

Life during coronatime

The rules are understandably strict. No going out for any reason but grocery shopping and visiting the pharmacy or to work at a set of approved locations. No gatherings of more than three people. Supermarkets can only allow a set number of people in. The supermarket next door only lets in 10 people at a time, and they have a regime of sanitation for each incoming person. Some alcohol squirts, some plastic gloves and so on. The supermarket stays pretty well-stocked for now. Unlike in my American motherland, we have access to toilet paper, foodstuffs, and so on. The first immediate rush was for oats and beans – items with long shelf lives – but those have since been restocked. This indicates to me that Georgians will be around much longer than Americans, dirty asses aside.

Georgians are kind of used to these emergencies though. And they have a culture of stocking up for food for six months anyway, as everyone has their farm-grandma who goes nuts bottling, pickling, and/or jamming all the leftovers of each season. This constant stock of some 6 months means that in times of emergency like this, hoarding really isn't necessary. Always ready!

You better believe these two are stocked up already!

Free time?

Scrolling through Facebook has made me somewhat jealous. I see all these people going on about boredom and free time and getting the time now to hone skills that they didn’t have time for before.

I’m blessed enough to have a job where I work from home, but damn, I kind of want some forced vacation.

Actually, this whole ordeal has made me cancel a lot of downtime plans. First my parents were going to come to visit their newborn grandbaby – they were able to cancel, thank goodness, not because of the generosity of the airlines but because the Georgian government had closed the border, forcing their airline to cancel the flight and give a refund.

Then there was this three-person rule. We were going to go to the village and stay with the wife’s family. I had to wrap up a few ends work-wise, where I needed my PC, then we were going to go. Then bam, new rules and we’re stuck here. Of course, had we a car this wouldn’t have been a problem, but since we were relying on a family member to drive us, that would bring us over the 3 person rule. I’d tell my wife to take our son and go, but then they’ve canceled all mass transit, so I’m not sure how I’d follow. At this point, I’m worrying about not taking out the newborn into some fresh air, all of this fart air in the apartment must be getting to him, I’d think.

As these are the worst of my problems so far, I can't really complain. I mean, I can, but it'd be silly, because then I'd literally be complaining that I have a job and a healthy family. And yet, I'm writing this blog. I know what it is, the whiskey supply is running low... #tbilisi #coronavirus

Birjas, Spoons, and Rebellion

The reality of the situation set down upon me perhaps two days ago. The State of Emergency had yet to be declared, but the government had already been pushing the social distancing message. Shops were closing, banks were adjusting policies, the border had been closed, newcomers were subject to forced quarantines, and so on.

I had a package waiting for me at the post office. It’s not far away, just a couple of blocks, so I put on my rain jacket and scarf. Not that the scarf would really do anything, but it was a kind of psychological protection, I guess. That and it was cold.

Leaving my apartment was nothing unusual. It’s usually devoid of life: All cold concrete, a giant slab on one side and a line of cold steel garages on the other. As I wandered down some alleys to the main street, the eerie quiet gave me a vague feeling of the Resident Evil games, waiting for some sort of zombie life to emerge, but I was a bit let down when around the corner bolted a gang of laughing kids, tagging each other and playfully wrestling. A generally pleasant thing to watch on a sunny day, a bit disturbing when the city is trying to manage the spread of a highly infectious virus.

My beautiful apartment block

Then onto the main street. The only unusual thing were the empty buses passing. Otherwise there was regular traffic. Where were these people going? Most businesses had already closed their doors, bars shut down cancelling their events, restaurants converted to delivery operations. In short, there was pretty much nothing to do, unless you were visiting friends and relatives, the exact thing you shouldn’t be doing right now.

And up the main road… mass collections of guys in black clothes on the street, hanging closely together, chain smoking, sharing drinks, getting into cars together, getting out of cars together, sloppily eating street food… what is here termed “birja”, meaning a kind of social marketplace or what have you, going on with full vigor and energy. This was the population that was about to be culled, that’s for sure. Looking from their grimy, black caked hands that have never been washed to the way they sucked down those cheap cigarettes, they seemed to be prime candidates for the upcoming death row. And by the way they seemed to take life grimly serious, never smiling even when joking, it was strange that they wouldn’t take this seriously.

I passed them and continued on my way, reflecting on Georgian society. If the coronavirus hadn’t already hit, it was going to hit Georgia hard. They have a fundamentally social society, few having any clue how to be in self-isolation, and I can’t imagine the despair that would cause one of them. In the course of one day, the common Georgian has probably kissed 20 people, shook hands with 20 more, held his close friends in his arms, kissed them, shared cups, drunk at overly public water fountains, visited no less than three households, and ridden transit in aimless circles for about 50 kilometers. And that’s on a day where a Georgian would answer, “Nothing” if you asked him what he did today. Throw hanging out in a crowded church in the mix and BAM, you’ve got 100 percent of the population infected, except for that handful of weirdo expats who have never met a Georgian and only hang out at strip clubs.

Church during quarantine, pic going around FB lately, source unknown

A state of emergency has now been called, which is great, as that gives the government more power to enforce the 10-man rule. But the Church has decided to take this as an affront to its authority, and as Georgians love any reason to rebel or show off, people are flooding into churches today. Some priests are attempting to be responsible, encouraging their parishioners to maintain some social distancing (in a church without pews, this isn’t an overly difficult thing), but the numbers of parishioners have overwhelmed most of the more practical priests, and then there are the firebrands preaching on about the end of days and others going on about magic spoons, certainly not helping the situation (it’s been a somewhat amusing month on Orthodox FB boards where people have been voraciously debating the theology of magic spoons, an argument I would have thought the Moscow Patriarch Kirill had ended when he proclaimed the spoons to, in fact, not be magic – the Goergians on the other hand maintain their stance – and the more conservative Orthodox accuse the MP of caving into Western Gayropeans and CIA infiltration, and no I’m not making any of this up).

From the boards today

It is what it is. I’ll probably take an effort to not be around any of my religious friends for at least a month though. If they could only have held out until Easter… It's not the time to be heroes. It's the time we should all act if we are sick, as we very well might be, and we don't want to spread the infection to others.

#tbilisi #coronavirus