Georgia on my mind
Continuing with the Orthodox theme I would like to comment a bit on the recent Georgian conflict by sharing a bit of this country's culture. Georgia along with neighboring Armenia were some of the first countries to establish Christianity as the official religion around the 4th century A.D.
I have saw a Georgian movie in my Soviet Cinema class at college. The language is very different than Russian complete with its own alphabet and artistic heritage. Here is an example:
შენ ხარ ვენახი, ახლად აყვავებული,
ნორჩი კეთილი, ედემს შინა ნერგული,
(ალვა სუნელი, სამოთხეს ამოსული,)
(ღმერთმან შეგამკო ვერვინა გჯობს ქებული,)
და თავით თვისით მზე ხარ და გაბრწყინვებული.
The above is a medieval Georgian hymn to the Virgin Mary which you can listen to here- Thou Art A Vineyard.
P.D.
Of course one can never forget the most famous Georgian of the 20th century- Stalin. They help to highlight the delicacy of the Russian-Georgian situation. But that's a story for another time.
1 comment:
Dear Antonio449,
I accidentally stumbled upon your blog. It might be of interest for you to learn that Georgian is in fact totally unrelated to both Russian and Armenian, belonging to the Kartvelian language family of the Caucasus. Armenian and Russian, in turn, are both part of the Indo-European family, along with English, Greek, Latin etc.
Btw, even the Armenian and Georgian writing systems have no clearly discernible commonalities.
Just two more observations: Rasputin is not a Georgian; he is Russian and was born in Sibiria. -- And the last, completely unrelated observation: The domain name and motto, "dilige et vis quod fac", happens to be incorrectly quoted, in fact, it is not correct Latin at all. It must be "dilige et quod vis fac", word-by-word: "love and what you-want do". It is often found as "dilige et fac quod vis", which is not a literal quote, but at least correct Latin, too.
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