On September 27, 1993, after a week and a half of fierce fighting, control of Sukhumi, the largest city of Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia, passed from Georgian units to Abkhaz formations supported by the Russian military.
Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee as a result. Some estimates put the total who left at 250,000, while thousands died.
Thirty years have passed since the conflict ended, yet those who fled still cannot return home and Abkhazia remains internationally isolated. Only Russia, Nicaragua, Nauru, Venezuela, and Syria recognize the region as an independent state, while the rest of the world views it as part of Georgia.
Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, spoke with ethnic Georgians and Abkhazians who survived that momentous summer in Sukhumi in 1993.
Nanuli Anchabadze, 73: 'We still can't forget our city'
Nanuli Anchabadze was 17 when she entered university and moved from Ochamchira to Sukhumi. She married in the seaside city and had three children. During the Soviet period, Anchabadze taught Russian at one of the most respected schools in the city.
She remembers Sukhumi as being “full of intelligent and noble people. Georgians, Abkhazians, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, and people of many other nationalities lived there,” Anchabadze says. “I always liked that it didn’t matter to anyone who you were or where you came from. The main thing was human decency and some kind of 'Sukhumi zest.'"
Nanuli Anchabadze (center) with fellow teachers
Among the Georgians and Abkhazians living in Abkhazia, “there were always radicals, but only very few of them,” Anchabadze says.
When a major clash between ethnic Georgians and Abkhazians occurred in July 1989 over the authorities’ decision to create a Sukhumi branch of Tbilisi State University, many activists traveled from elsewhere within Soviet Georgia to take part in protests.
“These people did not understand the customs and traditions of the people or the relations between those living there," she says. This, Anchabadze says, destroyed the goodwill of the Abkhazians who intermingled and, in some cases, intermarried with ethnic Georgians.
The fighting in Abkhazia that broke out in the summer of 1992 paused in July 1993 when the warring parties signed a cease-fire that Moscow was tasked to enforce. That summer passed calmly, Anchabadze remembers, and schools were already preparing to reopen.
At the time, the teacher was looking after her 2-year-old grandson Temur. Anchabadze’s eldest daughter was pregnant and had traveled to Tbilisi to avoid “giving birth under bombs.”
On September 16, 1993, ethnic Abkhazian fighters broke the cease-fire and launched an attack on Sukhumi. There were only two ways out of the surrounded city: through the mountains toward Georgia's Svaneti region or by sea.
Relatives helped Anchabadze and her grandson get to Svaneti, but she soon returned with the baby.
Nanuli’s 17-year-old son, as well as her son-in-law, had remained in Sukhumi.
“At 17, everyone thinks they’re a hero,” she says of her son, who remained as war engulfed Sukhumi.
Anchabadze reached Sukhumi with her grandson by walking and hitchhiking. There was heavy artillery fire on the approaches to Sukhumi, but the teacher managed to reach her house, pick up her son, and help evacuate him out of the city. The teenager eventually reached Tbilisi, where he stayed with relatives.
Temur, the grandson of Nanuli Anchabadze
Anchabadze was then faced with the risky journey back out of Abkhazia as winter closed in, while caring for her 2-year-old grandchild. Several times she heard artillery shells whistling overhead.
“Many times death came so close that you could feel its breath,” she says.
The teacher met an ethnic Svan family crossing the pass on horseback who said that an evacuation helicopter was supposed to land nearby. The family promised to put her and her grandson on board.
The helicopter landed at a hut where shepherds usually spent the night. But when she arrived with baby Temur, about 200 refugees were sheltering in the hut and it wasn’t possible to leave that day. Everyone rushed the helicopter and many women and children were pushed onto the aircraft by their men. Anchabadze had no one to help her.
She spent about a week in the hut, unable to board each subsequent chopper. There were always more people than places. She begged a Svan pilot to take her earrings and promised to give him her daughters’ jewelry in Tbilisi if he would let her on board, but he refused to take the earrings. He took it as an insult.
People who fled fighting in Abkhazia, photographed in the Svaneti region of Georgia in October 1993
When another helicopter flown by the same Svan pilot was about to take off, Anchabadze managed to get close. She handed her 2-year-old grandson to someone inside and, in desperation, lied that the boy’s mother was inside the helicopter, telling people in the crowd, “Give him to her.”
After Temur was taken, Anchabadze fought to get into the helicopter herself.
“While I was pushing through, I heard the engine start and I realized that I could lose my grandson. He doesn’t know anyone. He won’t be able to say anything -- not his last name, nothing. I screamed so much that the men who were standing nearby covered their ears.”
Then the pilot who had refused her offer of jewelry saw Anchabadze and said in the Svan language: “Throw her here.”
Several men then picked her up and tossed her onto the floor of the helicopter.
“I remember that I hit my head and blacked out for a moment," she says.
The helicopter took the pair to Kutaisi in western Georgia. They then took a bus to a sanatorium in Tskaltubo where many other internally displaced people were housed. There, Anchabadze, who was probably concussed, realized that she had forgotten her last name and why she was even in the spa town.
The amnesia turned out to be temporary and her memory soon returned.
Anchabadze lived with her family in Tbilisi for a little over a year, then emigrated to Moscow.
“I was in a country that had contributed to my expulsion from home. But the world is full of good people. These people gave me a lot of good -- both spiritual and material," she says of her time in Russia.
Now, Anchabadze is back in Tbilisi living with one of her daughters. She dreams of reconciliation between Georgians and Abkhazians and of returning home.
In Tbilisi, Anchabadze organizes meetings of Sukhumi residents, both online and in person. Several years ago she created the project Children Of Sukhumi in which locals who fled, and those who stayed, share memories.
“We still can’t forget our city. Is it possible to love it still, yet get used to the idea that this life was all in the past? We can’t do it,” explains the Sukhumi native.
One elderly mother of Anchabadze's friend asked her daughter to bury her in such a way “that it would be easier to dig her up when the Georgians returned [to Abkhazia]” and to rebury her alongside her son, who died in Abkhazia.
“People leave with a dream to return to their native land. If not alive, then at least dead,” Anchabadze says.
Tengiz Tsulukiya, 56: 'During the war, I met Murtaz. We both had guns. He’s on one side, I'm on the other.'
When the war in Abkhazia began, Tengiz Tsulukia was 25. He worked as a veterinarian in the Ministry of Agriculture and lived in a village in the Ochamchira region.
On August 14, 1992, when Tsulukiya learned that the Georgian military had entered the territory of Abkhazia in tanks, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Then, as the first victims of the war became known, he says he “couldn’t stay away.”
He joined the ranks of the Abkhazian militia and fought the incoming Georgian military.
Tengiz Tsulukiya (right) with other Abkhaz fighters during the war
Tsulukiya becomes nostalgic when he talks about life in Abkhazia before the war. His uncle, who served as an officer in the Soviet Army, had ethnic Georgian friends who often visited their house. One of those friends, Murtaz Guteridze, was a keen accordian player.
“During the war, I met Murtaz. We both had guns. He’s on one side, I’m on the other. He started crying. He hugged me and asked how my mother and father were. It’s very sad, but the war happened. It can't be helped,” he says, adding, “If I met Murtaz now, I would definitely hug him and speak with him."
“There were many family relationships between Georgians and Abkhazians. I had wonderful Georgian and Mingrelian friends, and then what happened happened,” he continues.
Tengiz Tsulukiya (in black jacket) photographed alongside his wife, Sharizan
According to Tengiz, in his youth, even before the war, he and some Georgian acquaintances had disputes about “who owns this land and where the Abkhazians came from.”
He recalls a scene from his childhood during a trip to a youth camp in Pitsunda. “I remember how Georgian children painted the phrase ‘Abkhazia is Georgia’ in Georgian script on the trees. I don’t know why they did that.”
Another time, he witnessed a fight on a bus that began after two Georgian men objected to two other passengers speaking to each other in Abkhazian.
But these were isolated incidents. Tengiz believes that if “the Georgians had turned against the bandits and Mkhedrionites (a notorious ethnic Georgian paramilitary group involved in the attempt to recapture Abkhazia), the Abkhazians and Georgians on the disputed territory would have been able to come to an agreement and live again as a big, friendly family.”
Irakli Adamia, 37: 'Dad covered my eyes with his hands and told me not to look.'
When the war began, Irakli Adamia was 7 years old.
“I remember how shells were constantly flying in 1992, and it always seemed to me that our house was about to be hit. And I prayed, 'God, please not here,'" he recalls.
On September 27, 1993. Adamia’s father gathered his family and 10 colleagues and prepared to leave the city through the mountains of Svaneti. Adamia remembers the date well because the next day was his birthday.
“At first, we drove by car from Sukhumi,” but somewhere near a small village in Svaneti, they were held up by bandits who pointed a gun at the driver, Adamia’s uncle, then made off with the family’s 1989 Honda.
A childhood photo of Irakli Adamia
The boy continued on foot through the mountains with his family.
Adamia remembers how his shoes broke apart and he continued barefoot, then how there was no water for long hours. When he finally managed to find a stream and drink from it, his lips immediately cracked in the cold. Helicopters carrying humanitarian aid sometimes flew over the refugees and dropped food packages.
“When we were walking, we saw corpses lying along the road,” Adamia recalls. “There were a lot of them. My dad covered my eyes with his hands and told me not to look.”
People fleeing Abkhazia through the mountains in October 1993.
Eventually, the family moved to Tbilisi. Adamia’s parents were divorced, and for seven months the boy did not know where his mother was or whether she was alive.
Adamia’s mother, Olga Morozova, a Ukrainian from Kharkov, had sheltered at home in Sukhumi with her sister and parents. Twelve days into the attack on the city, Russian troops entered Sukhumi with Cossacks, Chechens, Circassians, and the notorious Abkhaz battalion, “which was the very last,” Morozova says. “We were all almost shot in the basement.”
Morozova eventually managed to fly to Moscow with her parents and sister. Seven months later she learned that her children and their father had reached Tbilisi through the Svaneti mountains.
“I remember when we received a letter [from my mother], I was so happy!” says Adamia.
In the summer of 1994, Olga took the children on vacation to Moscow. Soon, she met her future husband, a Georgian Jew, and in 2001 they moved to Israel, and Adamia went too. The family still lives there today. Now, Adamia is married to a woman from Sukhumi who he met in Israel. Early in the relationship, the pair discovered that they had been born in the same maternity hospital in Sukhumi, then also lived in the same area in Tbilisi.
The last photo of Davit Adamia, seen with his sister
Adamia’s father, Davit, died during a partisan offensive that attempted to recapture Sukhumi in 1997. Davit was a civil engineer but couldn’t find work in post-war Georgia. Adamia thinks that this influenced his decision to return to Sukhumi with the partisans.
“He kept saying, 'How can we look our children in the eyes when we have lost their home?” Adamia says.
Davit and his fellow fighters reached Gulripsha, just south of Sukhumi, where Davit’s sister had a house. The two siblings took a last photo together before Davit disappeared.
"My father's name was not found on any lists of the living or lists of the dead," Adamia says. "At first, to be honest, I didn't believe he'd died, that perhaps someone helped him and he simply couldn’t find us.”
TikTok And 'Treason'
In the summer of 2023, the Abkhaz language was heard for the first time in the European Parliament when the co-founders of the Amra movement, Mikhail Kvatashidze and Daur Buava, spoke from its podium. They talked about reconciliation between the Abkhaz and Georgian people.
"Amra" means "sun" in Abkhazian. The founders say the goal of the organization is “to establish communication between Abkhaz and Georgian youth.” Like many Abkhazians, Buava initially believed the official position of the Abkhaz authorities, that Georgia “wants to bring Abkhazia to its knees and exterminate its people.”
But Buava wanted to see for himself. Arriving in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, in 2021, he experienced kindness and hospitality.
“No one told me that Abkhazians don’t exist. There were no Georgian tanks on the border waiting to enter Abkhazia,” says Buava.
Mikheil Kvatashidze (left) and Daur Buava outside the European Parliament in Brussels
Buava then learned that the Abkhaz language is included in the constitution of Georgia and has the same status as Georgian, and that Tbilisi operates the Inguri hydroelectric power station that supplies Abkhazia with its electricity. Buava shared his discoveries on TikTok. Buava had never intended to leave Abkhazia permanently, but as a result of those TikTok videos he is now unable to return.
One Abkhazian official called Buava a “traitor,” and the region’s de facto minister of foreign affairs called for him to be imprisoned. In the spring of 2022, a criminal case was opened against Daur in Abkhazia for treason. Meanwhile, in Russia, a case was also reportedly launched against Buava for “illegal acquisition and storage of narcotic drugs on a large scale.”
The activist considers accusations of betrayal to be unfair and says he believes the authorities reacted so explosively "in order to show people who would want to follow my example [of promoting reconciliation] that the same fate awaits them.”
Daur's uncle died in the war, and his grandfather went missing. Referring to conversations he had with Abkhaz veterans with whom he spoke while still living in his homeland, Daur says: “Half of them said that they did not need this war and it only brought death."
Buava hopes Abkhazia will one day return to Georgia, but as an autonomous republic.