Cup of Kindness

Cup of Kindness - Transitions Online 
In Georgia’s ethnically mixed communities, Azeris and Armenians come together over tea.

BILISI/MARNEULI | Up the street from the popular Turkish baths in Tbilisi’s Gorgasali Square, the Petrosyan family runs a teahouse. There is no sign outside, but every customer knows the place as "the Azeri teahouse."

The woman in charge is an ethnic Armenian, Margarita Petrosyan, who says she learned the art of tea from her Azeri mother-in-law. “We cannot live without tea, even for a day,” she says.

If territorial and ethnic tensions have driven a wedge between the countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan, tea helps bind the nationalities together in Georgia’s ethnically mixed communities. In Tbilisi and nearby Marneuli, Azeris, Armenians, and Georgians have co-existed for generations, and still congregate to relax and talk in teahouses or shop side-by-side in local markets. We visited some of those places ....

Not far from the teahouse is Marneuli's main marketplace. Because of the wholesale trade center in the town, the selection of goods for sale is large and diverse. The same is true of the merchants and the crowd. Azeris, Armenians, and Georgians work and shop side-by-side. We hear conversations in several languages, Merchants hail customers in Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian.

Avonik Miskaryan, 39, sells fruits and vegetables at the Marneuli bazaar. An Armenian, she conducts business in both Azerbaijani and her native language. She is surprised to be asked where and how she learned Azerbaijani.

MISKARYAN: How can we not learn this language? Our neighbors are Azeri. And we use this language to communicate with each other in the bazaar.

While relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been tense since the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1993, Miskaryan says that in Marneuli Azeris and Armenians get along the same as they always have. The same appeared to hold in the teahouses here and in Tbilisi. Everywhere we went, questions about the relationship among ethnic groups were met with puzzlement and surprise.

While we are talking to Avonik Miskaryan, a merchant from a neighboring stall, Qanira Valiyeva, joins the conversation. She is Azeri. But for her too, the question of tension between groups simply doesn't come up..

VALIYEVA: This is Georgia, after all. There is not any discrimination among nationalities.

 Photos from: http://5nata5.livejournal.com/3078.html