‘They want us to stop seeing each other, to lose contact, to feel alone,” the Icelandic writer Sjón told me. By “they”, he meant the dark forces rising across the world: populists, fascists, fundamentalists.

That was in September 2025, at the Tbilisi international festival of literature, attended by more people than ever before. The halls were full, and I think everyone present felt grateful to the foreign guests for coming – in defiance of “them.”

I don’t think coming to Tbilisi is an act of great heroism – yet. But already I have countless examples of people no longer coming – people who hold this city and this country dear, people who understand the context, who don’t need things explained to them. Their absence gives me a completely new and unfamiliar feeling of abandonment.

Europeans who put down roots here over decades are leaving Tbilisi. Most of them came in the 1990s on humanitarian missions. My father jokingly called them “cultural refugees”. They fell in love with this place and stayed here for ever. But nothing lasts for ever, and their departure feels like an alarm bell to me.

Our young people are leaving, too. Quietly, without fuss. You think someone is still here because they remain active on social media, and then it turns out they are already trying to settle in Lisbon, Dublin or Berlin.

There are too few of us to create communities and diasporas abroad. We will simply dissolve, scatter across the world, and disappear. Or rather, the part of us that loves thinking and is incapable of flattery will disappear.

For those of us who remain here, literary festivals and similar cultural events are places where it is possible to breathe freely. You see like-minded people and tell them how glad you are to meet them somewhere other than one of the protests that have continued since the government called a halt to Georgia’s EU membership negotiations. The festival doors are open to everyone, but regime conformists have no need to meet foreign or Georgian authors. They already know everything.

There was an empty chair for poet Zviad Ratiani at the book festival. Two months earlier, he had effectively forced his own arrest by repeating the act of another political prisoner, the nonconformist journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli, who slapped a police officer.

Ratiani believed........

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