BATUMI, Georgia -- "You can't even speak Georgian in Georgia anymore," the delivery driver fumed. He had been trying to drop off a shipment of mineral water at the Oriental Bakery in Batumi's quaint historic district, and the Belarusian barista with his basic Georgian-language skills was struggling to communicate.
Eventually the driver stormed off, and when a reporter pursued him to follow up, he only had one thing to add: "We don't need the Russian language here."
Like many coastal settlements, the old town in Batumi, Georgia's largest Black Sea city, has long been diverse and cosmopolitan. In its current iteration it is home to halal Indian restaurants, Turkish barbers, and Thai massage parlors, along with the many Georgians and their businesses.
Over the last year and a half that mix has grown to include dozens of new cafes, bars, and other establishments opened by Russians who fled here following the launch of the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Batumi's colorful mix the new Russian spots are relatively inconspicuous; the signs are typically in English, and if there is any indication of a nationality it is a Ukrainian flag hung in solidarity. They are recognizable mostly by trendy interior designs or perhaps a lengthy menu of craft beer or exotic coffee varieties.
Subtle as they are, these recent arrivals have roiled Batumi. To many Georgians, the new Russian businesses represent an economic expansionism into unfriendly territory.
The Russians who have flocked to Batumi, along with large numbers of Belarusians and Ukrainians, have quickly made themselves at home. They have set up what is largely a parallel economy that includes not only cafes and bars but beauty parlors, handymen, yoga studios, and real estate agencies, both run by and serving the new residents of the city.
'A City Within A City'
Many Batumi natives see it as a threat.
The new business ventures amount to "a city within a city, or a country within a country," said Irma Dimitradze, a journalist with local news outlet Batumelebi. In many of the new Russian businesses, "you can go there and forget that you're in Georgia."
To many in Batumi, the new Russian arrivals are representative of a state they consider their enemy: Georgia and Russia fought a war in 2008, and Moscow continues to prop up the two Georgian breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Tensions have further soared since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, spurring hundreds of thousands of Russians to flee their country -- many of them to Georgia.
The Oriental Bakery in Batumi is owned by a Georgian, Raul Putladze, who said he hired the Belarusian barista, Aleksey Losev, after failing to find a Georgian for the job.
Batumelebi and other local media have written several exposes about Batumi's new Russian-run businesses. Many of the enterprises, the investigations found, appear to have violated laws requiring businesses in Georgia to serve customers in Georgian (or, theoretically, in Abkhazian -- the other state language -- according to the Georgian Constitution).
The exposes have borne fruit. The Georgian National Competition Agency (GNCA), a body tasked with enforcing the language law, announced on August 1 that it had launched investigations into 11 Batumi businesses that were alleged to have violated the law. The announcement added that the number of businesses being investigated "may increase."
The agency declined to identify to RFE/RL what language the businesses in question were operating in. Dimitradze said her sources at the agency said the businesses were Russian-run.
The Oriental Bakery is owned by a Georgian, Raul Putladze, who said he hired the Belarusian barista, Aleksey Losev, after failing to find a Georgian for the job. Many young people in Batumi study outside the city and so his target labor pool is small, he told RFE/RL. As a result, he picked Losev, who was a kindergarten teacher in Belarus before fleeing with his family to Batumi soon after the start of the war, which Belarus's government has supported. "We didn't know if Belarus was going to get involved [in the war] but we wanted to leave before it happened," Losev said.
Asked about the incident with the water delivery driver, Putladze defended Losev, explaining that the barista is learning Georgian and can handle most transactions in the language.
He said one journalist has repeatedly come into the cafe to try to expose Losev's imperfect Georgian skills, for example filming the barista while posing tricky vocabulary quizzes, or grilling him on what ingredients were in all the cakes on the menu.
In general, however, Putladze said he approved of the drive to enforce the language law. "When you come to a country you need to speak with locals and understand what they are saying to you," he said. He blamed the government for being too "loose" with regulations allowing virtually anyone to open a business.
But the journalistic exposes were too much, he argued, adding he suspected the journalist who visited his establishment probably worked for an outlet based in Tbilisi, rather than Batumi. "People in Tbilisi are much more aggressive about this issue. In Batumi you don't see as much aggression…. People here are taking it seriously, but without that much aggression."
Many of the recent arrivals to Batumi agree that interethnic tensions are lower than in Tbilisi, where anti-Russian graffiti is ubiquitous in the city center and the Russian presence is the source of regular controversies. The polite standard for Russians in Tbilisi is to first try to communicate in English, which isn't the norm in Batumi.
People relax on the beach in Batumi.
"Batumi is much more relaxed about these things," said Nikita, a Belarusian tech worker in Batumi who asked that his last name not be used because of a lingering fear of publicity in his home country "where people can be thrown in jail for any little thing."
"In Tbilisi you have to ask which language to speak. Here you can just start in Russian, and I never faced any bad reaction because of that," he said. Thanks to the relaxed atmosphere, he said, "After one month in Batumi I already felt like a local. Except I don't speak Georgian."
To many Georgians in Batumi, the new Russian-speaking arrivals are getting a bit too comfortable.
"The atmosphere in the city has changed," said Salome Gorgiladze, a Batumi-born tour guide. Speaking to a reporter in the city's Central Park, she surveyed the surroundings and gestured around to other visitors. "They are not from Georgia, they are not from Georgia," she said. "Sometimes if you sit and listen, you hear more Russian than Georgian, or any other language."
An aerial photo of Batumi
She recalled her grandmother speaking, in addition to fluent Georgian and Russian, bits of Armenian, Greek, and Turkish, because she had neighbors of all those nationalities.
"Batumi has always been a cosmopolitan city, so it's not unfamiliar for us to have foreign people here and to hear foreign languages." What has changed, she said, is the sheer scale of the new Russian-speaking population. "Now, they dominate. That is the difference."
Identify Struggle
Batumi has long been the subject of anxieties about its identity.
Until 1878 the city was part of the Ottoman Empire; the population of the surrounding Adjara region was largely Georgians who were Muslim and spoke Turkish in addition to Georgian. After the Ottomans ceded Adjara to the Russian Empire, Batumi also gained significant Armenian, Greek, and Russian populations.
The city continued to be contested by the Ottomans during World War I and the 1921 Turkish-Soviet Treaty of Kars, which established the two states' mutual border, stipulated that Adjara be granted autonomous status based on its Muslim identity.
A Russian tourist from Saratov basks in the sun in Batumi.
Though its Muslim character steadily declined over the decades, Adjara retained its status as a peripheral "other" whose Georgianness was in doubt well into the post-Soviet period, writes anthropologist Tamta Khalvashi. In the immediate post-Soviet period it was a lawless state-within-a-state, until Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power following the 2003 Rose Revolution, managed to reassert central government control.
Under Saakashvili, Batumi witnessed an ambitious urban renewal program that consciously sought to create a more European identity for the city, leveling a Soviet-built school and replacing it with a mock-Italian piazza and erecting monuments highlighting the region's ancient ties with Greece.
The remade city proved especially popular with Turkish tourists, and by the late 2010s a section of the old city had filled up with Turkish restaurants and the Turkish government was exerting its influence in the region, prompting a backlash among conservative Georgians. At one point, a right-wing party, the Alliance of Patriots, had erected campaign billboards depicting Adjara as "occupied" by Turkey.
The Russian Influx
Now, it is the Russians.
Numbers on the Russian influx are hard to come by, but Gorgiladze estimated there could be up to 30,000 Russians in Batumi, a city of 180,000 according to official Georgian statistics. A study by Georgia's National Bank found that the share of Russians making real estate purchases in Batumi shot up sharply following the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, significantly more than the equivalent figure in Tbilisi. In November 2022, Russians represented 18 percent of real estate buyers in Batumi, according to the bank study.
Batumi and the surrounding beach resorts are popular summer destinations with Russians and other post-Soviet tourists, as well as with Georgians. Anecdotal observations suggest the proportion of Russian tourists here has significantly increased this season.
A Georgian man sells inflatable toys on the beach in Batumi on June 29.
The number of Russian visitors to Georgia as a whole has increased sharply this year over last year, growing at a significantly faster pace than visitors from European Union member states, official data show. (The data don't indicate numbers specifically for Batumi.)
Gorgiladze explained the Russian tourism boom by the fact that war-related restrictions means traveling Russians have fewer options in other parts of the world. And that has in turn driven away tourists who don't want to be around so many Russians while the war in Ukraine is still raging, she said. That includes many Georgians, a sensitive point among many in Batumi.
Videos depicting the supposed Russian takeover in Batumi have spread on Georgian social media, but many here argue they are being unreasonably targeted.
"It's very unfair. There are a lot of Russian businesses in Tbilisi too, and there are more Russians there than in Batumi. But they are attacking us [by saying] 'You all love Russians,'" Gorgiladze said. She said it recalled the Turkish panic.
"People hadn't even been in Batumi and they were claiming, 'Oh it's a Turkish city now, we have lost Batumi.' And now they are saying 'We have lost Batumi' again," she added.
Gorgiladze allowed that she might be in the minority among Batumi residents, many of whom welcome the Russian boom for the economic benefits it has brought.
Tourists in Batumi.
Views on the issue track with domestic politics. Supporters of the ruling Georgian Dream party tend to see Russia as an economic opportunity and are more inclined to see Turkey as a historical enemy, while opposition supporters tend to be more anti-Russian. Opposition politicians have sought to institute a visa regime for Russians and restrict real estate purchases by Russians.
Gorgiladze mocked the idea that Turks could be a threat. "We have some mythological understanding of them, something that happened 10 centuries ago is as important as something that happened 10 years ago," she said. "It was 1878 that they finished here in Batumi."
And she despaired that the government did not appear interested in cracking down on the Russian businesses, the GNCA investigation notwithstanding. "As a citizen, I don't feel like they will ever solve this problem. There is no will from the government," she said.
Tensions linked to the growing Russian presence spiked at the end of July when a Russian cruise ship -- with some outspoken war supporters among the onboard entertainers -- made a port call at Batumi and was greeted by nationalist protesters, some of whom threw eggs at them.
Many Russians in Batumi said the episode was not representative of their experiences in the city. The ship's appearance in Batumi seemed to be a calculated provocation from the Russian side, and that the number of Georgian protesters was relatively small, said an Irkutsk native who runs a popular Telegram channel for Russian speakers in Batumi under the name Kate Vesna.
Protesters greeted the arrival of a Russian cruise ship at the Batumi port by throwing eggs on July 31.
She, like many of the new arrivals in Batumi, said her experiences in Georgia have been positive. (Not so with her home country: last December, she was tricked into appearing on a Russian state TV program in which interviews with her and other Russians in Georgia were selectively edited to make their lives here appear as squalid as possible.)
She recalled an episode soon after she arrived in which she and some friends got caught in one of Batumi's frequent downpours. A Georgian man, seeing them outside his door, took them in out of the storm. She saw it as symbolic: "All of the people who have businesses here now, they realize that Georgia is now our roof -- we don't have a roof anymore," she said.
Representative or not, the cruise controversy drew widespread media attention in Georgia, and the GNCA statement came out the day after the second and last port call. "My personal opinion," Dimitradze said, was that the timing was not a coincidence.
Flouting Georgia's Language Laws?
In 2015, Georgia adopted a law stipulating that signs and advertisements for businesses must be in the Georgian language at least as prominently as in any other language. Another law on consumer rights, passed in 2022, requires businesses to offer services in a state language. The law specifies that lack of knowledge of the state language is not a justification for not offering services in the language.
The GNCA investigates businesses' violations of the language laws based on tips it gets from the public, then works with the businesses to get them to start following the law, said Sergo Sanikidze, head of the agency's Consumer Rights Protection Department, in e-mailed responses to RFE/RL's questions. If a business continues to not comply with the law, it can be fined, he said.
The laws on requiring service in Georgian are widely flouted, not only at businesses run by Russians. In Batumi's old town, a customer is no more likely to be served in the Georgian language at an Asian restaurant or by a Thai masseuse than he or she would be at a Russian cafe.
Asked about reports that only Russian businesses were being investigated, Sanikidze said that "the agency is committed to ensuring fair treatment and upholding consumer rights, irrespective of the language used in service provision."
But many in Batumi are happy for Russian businesses to be singled out.
The many Turkish establishments, for example, don't represent a threat, said Dimitradze, the journalist. "Turkey is a different case; Turkey is our friend. The bad blood with Turkey was from before it was even Turkey, so it's a totally different situation," she said. Focusing on Russian businesses "is not about racism. It's about real security threats."
Some Russian business owners argue that the law is unreasonable. Aleksei Antonenko, a Russian who has lived in Georgia since 2015, opened the Back Door bar in Batumi shortly after the war started. He strives to make the bar a "safe space" for all of Batumi's new arrivals; there are Ukrainians and Belarusians on staff, and the weekend RFE/RL visited the bar was hosting a Ukrainian-language stand-up comedy night.
The interior of Back Door
But he only hired his first Georgian bartender a week earlier. He had been looking, but until recently couldn't find anyone qualified, he said. The lack of any Georgian staff also meant that he also couldn't have a Georgian-language menu, given that the list of offerings frequently changes and he would constantly have to get outside editing help. As a result, the menu is only in English: "It should either be in all three languages [English, Georgian, and Russian] or only English," he reasoned.
Likewise, the signs at the door of the bar, just off Batumi's seaside promenade, were only in English. He acknowledged that violated the law, but said his target clientele, including Georgians, speaks English anyway. He estimated the share of Georgian patrons of the bar had grown from around 10 percent initially to roughly 20 percent and said there had not been any language-related conflict except from occasional provocateurs who come in to make a point about the issue. The regulations were pointless, he said: "The market should decide itself."
As one bartender at a Russian-run bar in Batumi put it, asking that his name not be used because he wasn't authorized to speak for the bar: "There is the law, and there is reality."