A Rainy Day in Georgia: Time to Head to the Museum

Metal heads in bowls. Now at the Georgian National Museum.

It was a rainy morning in Georgia.  It was pouring down rain hard with lots of loud claps of thunder.  Not ideal tourist conditions.  But when you on vacation on a rainy day, that means it is a great day to go to the museum.

I went to the Georgian National Museum, which -- and this is important given that it was pouring rain -- was only a 10-minute walk from the hotel.  The bottom floor has the anthropology section.  Skulls, like above, and animal bones, such as these:

There once were rhinoceroses in Caucasuses.

Ostriches too.

Are these what I think they are?

Historic, even prehistoric, jello molds.  From so long ago they were from a time before jello came powdered in a tiny box.

And this is a belt.  For a man.

What fascinated me about this was just how tiny the men's waists must have been from when that belt was new.

Hunting scenes on the side of the belt:

And here is a metal female head in a metal bowl.

It's like the metal male head in a metal bowl up top, only female.

And this is a small piece of gold ornamentation:

There also was an interesting exhibit of Georgian Orthodox church art that, for some reason, forbade photography.  So I took no photographs.

All in all, the national museum was not very detailed on the history of Georgia, with one notable exception.

The exhibit covering the period of Soviet occupation of Georgia, which is roughly from 1921, when the Bolsheviks conquered Georgia and ended the First Republic of Georgia up through the fall of the USSR in 1991.  Georgia had a treaty with the Soviet Union to recognize Georgian independence, but once the communists had full control over Russia, they broke the treaty.  And proceeded to go on a massive killing spree.

The communists slaughtered the Georgian elite, the religious leaders, artists, anyone of prominence in the Georgian community.  Why?  Because they were communists and communism is evil.  Satanic evil.  If you know anything of the history of Bolshevism and communism, you know that is not hyperbole.

The exhibit consists mostly of photos are writings of those slaughtered by the communists,  It tells the story of the evil of Soviet communism more eloquently than a timeline ever could.

This is an exhibit of the first in Georgia to be murdered by the Soviet communists:

Never again.