Caucasian twins

Georgia, or Gruzija in local lingo, holds a special place in the heart of Lithuanians for reasons that presumably go beyond a love of good wine (Georgia’s wines are not to be sneered at, for sure). Vilnius and Georgia’s capital Tbilisi (not, as some might have assumed, Atlanta) are “twinned”, and among the exquisitely carved wooden houses in the venerable Vilnius district Žvėrynas lies Tbilisio Skveras – a small park from 2015 dedicated to the city. A websearch suggests that a corresponding park dedicated to Vilnius can be found in Tbilisi. In any Vilnius supermarket, Georgian wines stand alongside bottles from France and Italy, and Wizz Air offers direct flights from Vilnius to Georgia’s third city Kutaisi – located between the ski resorts of the Caucasus and the beach resorts on the Black Sea, and travel agents list Georgia’s tourist hotspots alongside more traditional Mediterranean or Red Sea options. Generally, spending a year in Vilnius, you’ll see and hear a lot more about Georgia than their rather distant geographical relation would suggest, and no Lithuanian I’ve met has yet offered a fully-fledged explanation of why the two are so closely linked beyond some mutterings about Soviet times or Lithuania’s medieval Grand Dutchy, which stretched all the way to the Black Sea. Whatever the reason, the Georgian-Lithuanian link is an exotic twist to this little country.