Bread baked in someone else’s oven

Bread baked – A street duet in Kraków turns into a lifelong study of Georgian—its languages, its grammar, and the way culture survives occupation. From puri baked in Tatar Square to protests in Tbilisi after the suspension of EU accession talks, the story follows how a peop

You hear Georgian before you understand it.

In the late 1990s, one August afternoon, I stopped in the middle of Kraków’s Main Square. Two lads—one short with black. curly hair and eyebrows like the Polish actor Włodzimierz Press. the other tall and bald—used their voices to produce an extraordinary and stirring harmony. I stood there dazed, unable to recognize anything in that polyphony from the sound of words I had heard before.

Only later did I realize how right I had been: I couldn’t place Georgian inside any cultural or linguistic group I knew. The reason was simple—no such group exists. Georgian and its more archaic variants. all the Kartvelian languages (from Kartveli. as Georgians refer to themselves). are a separate linguistic group. Perhaps one day Poland and other nations will free Georgia and Georgians from this toponymic colonialism and speak of the Kartvelians and Kartvelia—just as Polish poet Julian Tuwim did when. with the help of a Georgian friend. he translated the prologue to Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth-century epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.

Kartvelian languages. which in addition to “Georgian” include the languages of Svan. Mingrelian and Laz. are unrelated to any other language. living or extinct. By way of comparison. the Indo-European family—which also includes fifteen Slavic languages—comprises a total of 450 languages spoken by 3.5 billion people. Georgians, therefore, have every right to feel singular in their identity, shaped by a uniqueness matched only by their isolation.

It was music that began the chase. but what I found—again and again—was the feeling that language is not a tool. It’s a home. The Georgian word sopeli. meaning both “village” and “world. ” refers to that double sense: a place with nooks and crannies where extraordinary and surprising things can be found. enduring through epochs and generations while expanding its boundaries ad infinitum. It’s what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote that the limits of one’s language are also those of one’s world.

A week of listening led to a different kind of journey. “It turned out. ” as the story kept insisting. that the artists I had heard in Kraków were cousins from Tbilisi. They earned a living by playing in clubs. and on that day—deciding to earn a bit extra—they had been busking on the street. They invited me to a gig. The tall one looked at me intently, making sure I’d come.

At the time, Georgia had just emerged from three brutal, Russian-backed civil wars. The country was slowly recovering from its collapse—devastated by conflict. grappling with an economic crisis and constant power outages. yet at the same time brimming with new energy and eagerly open to the world. Georgians had freed themselves from Soviet hegemony and were looking outwards towards Europe, in the hope of a better future. Borders were opening; one could enter Poland simply with a letter of invitation. Those musicians were among the first Georgian migrants to arrive in search of a better life.

My future partner—one of the musicians—didn’t want to return. He kept saying life there was too difficult, that the reality would be too much for us. I had my way in the end. I wanted to immerse myself in this extraordinary language and music. to decode the meanings. to understand the principles that governed them. I sought answers in academia but found a total void. In Poland. both linguistic anthropology and musicology were still waiting to discover and study the Kartvelian domain. which had been jealously guarded first by Russian and then by Soviet science and ideological doctrines. Georgia had been isolated from the rest of the world. and its profound culture was reduced to the level of an ethnographic curiosity.

In literature, the situation was even worse. Much like the case of the Executed Renaissance in Ukraine. many of Georgia’s most outstanding writers had fallen victim to Stalinist purges. Their names and works. consigned to a hastily dug pit. had to wait nearly a century to be rediscovered by contemporary readers. both in Georgia and abroad.

So I learned the language the way you learn a difficult melody: by living inside it. As I delved into Georgian language and culture. words and concepts shed their masks and veils—revealing unknown facets. leading me deep into the heart of the language. into the places of their birth. into archaic sources and roots.

Learning Georgian also brought me face-to-face with Benjamin Lee Whorf and the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” tied to linguistic relativity. The idea is that human thought is dependent on the language used: language shapes our thoughts. and its characteristic structures serve as a template for our minds. We always think within a specific language.

As a literary translator—someone who constantly switches between languages and the worlds created within them—that perspective stayed close to my heart. Analysing and deconstructing a source text and reconstructing it in the target language always brings one question to the front: how faithfully these patterns are reproduced. and what consequences follow on the other side of a given language.

But there was another obstacle. Describing these phenomena meant confronting a lack of specialist literature on the Georgian language. Very little, if anything, had been written in Poland about the grammar of the Kartvelian languages. That’s why I draw on Latin or English terms and, when necessary, coin my own. The time, I believe, will come for proper study. In the meantime, the language itself keeps offering the lessons.

When I moved to Tbilisi twenty-five years ago, I was swimming against the tide driving thousands of Georgians into exile. Today, around 27,000 people in Poland speak Georgian, making it the third-largest group of foreign nationals employed by Polish companies.

And every return to Poland makes it tangible. I realize this every time I land at Okęcie and call a taxi. The app’s chat feature often displays those familiar, rounded letters of the Mkhedruli alphabet, with curls like vine tendrils. My phone doesn’t translate Georgian, so I’ve added its alphabet to my keyboard options. I am informed “Merab will be with you shortly.” Or Zura, Giorgi or Vakhtang.

We start chatting and they ask where I’m from. No, I’m not Georgian, but I live in Tbilisi. The taxi drivers invariably react with amazement; few foreigners in Georgia manage to speak Georgian well enough to even buy bread at a bakery.

It’s Georgian bakeries that have become one of the most noticeable signs of the Kartvelian presence in Poland. People have come to love puri, a name rooted in the Sanskrit word for bread. If you’ve been to Georgia. you know it’s hard to find something more heavenly in appearance. taste and aroma than puri baked in a traditional wood-fired oven.

One of Tbilisi’s best bakeries is located next to Tatar Square. opposite the former inns. in the basement of the Tiflis Theological Seminary—the same one from which a young Stalin was expelled for failing to sit his exams. In that basement, the dough becomes a kind of choreography. Boys in Tatar Square dive deep into it. pressing it against the hot belly of the oven. with lightness and acrobatic grace.

In other countries, puri is not baked with Georgian flour. It seems to turn out the same, but no longer reflects the lightness and grace of those boys, the way their bodies understand the heat.

Literary translation. too. is a bit like bread baked in someone else’s oven: it’s impossible to convey something that exists exclusively in a given language. Georgian, as it turns out, consists primarily of idiosyncrasies. Its grammar has nothing in common with the logical matrix of any other language.

Georgian is notable for its lack of grammatical gender and for a very complex verb system. Instead of traditional categories, it is built on eleven forms known as “screeves,” indicating both tense, conjugation and subject. These are split into three series.

There’s a way to describe the system: like a box structure. A single verb can contain up to four people or things at once, with pronouns taking the form of infixes. The sentence “I am singing this for him” can be expressed in Georgian with a single word: vmgheri. The result is conciseness—and, consequently, communicative efficiency. A single word spoken quickly replaces an entire sentence.

Even reported speech works differently. To indicate someone else’s words, you add the letter “o” at the end of the verb. Quick, discreet, and effective.

And then there’s the tense that makes the language feel like it’s eavesdropping on itself: a “gossip tense.” Georgians enjoy gossiping. considering it a way of strengthening social bonds. They created a separate grammatical category for it—turmeobiti. The name derives from turme. meaning “it turns out that. ” pointing to a past state in relation to the present. something that happened that you are only just finding out about now. “But shush,” the language seems to whisper, because it turns out the language is full of secrets.

Georgian grammar also rewards people and things that have successfully completed a given action. A brave subject in the past perfect tense has a special case form—known as the ergative. If a person has achieved something, it should be acknowledged. In this case. the person receives a proud suffix that glimmers at the end of the word like a badge on the chest of a star employee.

That absence of grammatical gender creates a practical kind of equality: a grammatical dream come true for non-binary people. I’ve found myself hounding my authors on the phone—asking whom they were referring to—because Polish grammar demanded clarification with brutal certainty. Sometimes Georgian authors play with the convention and conceal characters’ gender identity to build suspense. In the end, it turns out that no one was who we originally thought they were.

Kartvelians also love to speculate and argue. The condensed forms of the language allow for rapid exchange of information and maintain a dizzying pace of discussion. The impression of verbal machine-gun fire is intensified by phonetics: the language contains characteristic “explosive” sounds, known as ejective consonants. When spoken with a vehement tone. they seem to rip open the speaker’s larynx and the listener’s ears. like a beatbox from broken speakers.

I first experienced the power of ejectives twenty-five years ago. when two aggressive young men accosted my Georgian friend on a bridge in Kraków. His response was graphic—he listed in his own language what he would do to them and their mothers if they didn’t back off. The aggressors’ expressions darkened as they listened, and then, with a muttered grunt, they left.

Like every sound, ejectives possess word-forming power. But an untrained ear and speech apparatus can’t perceive or express differences between nuances of eruptions in the larynx. Back when Georgian was still a dark forest to me. inhabited by monsters of inflection. I made a mistake while exchanging one such sound for another instead of offering greetings to a certain family. I managed to say I would subject them to brutal sexual violence. It became a lesson for life: ejectives can become invectives, and they must be handled with care.

Then there was etymology, the rabbit hole that pulls you in and keeps you there. tavi means “head” but also “beginning. ” “source” and “summit.” From it comes tavmjdomare. literally “sitting at the head of the table. ” colloquially meaning “chairman.” From the same root comes mtavari. meaning “principal. ” “most important. ” “leading. ” and tavadi. meaning “a person of high birth.” From the same world of roots comes utavo. meaning “a person without a head. ” simply “a fool. ” and t’vishi meaning “one’s own. ” “belonging to a given person. ” or literally “from the head.”.

From this root, the Kartvelians coined tavisupleba, or freedom. Literally. it is “one’s own law” or “the law of the head.” ufleba. meaning “law. ” derives from ufali. meaning “god.” Freedom thus becomes. in the language itself. “being one’s own god. ” one’s own sovereign. Freedom in Kartvelian is the right to self-determination—something Georgians constantly have to fight for with each successive empire.

Because there has always been an empire: Achaemenid and Safavid Persia, Byzantium, the Mongols, the Arabs, Ottoman Turkey—and, for the last two centuries, Russia.

That’s the question beneath the vocabulary: how has the language and culture endured. rather than being swallowed by the maelstrom of successive powers that have occupied the strip of land between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea?. The answer. I’ve come to believe. is in the strength of cultural codes. interpersonal bonds and identity embedded in the language.

Fate, too, has a word in Georgian: bedi.

A lucky person is one who has good fortune. A bednieri is a happy person. literally “possessor of good fortune. ” while someone without luck is an ubeduri—an individual experiencing misfortune. or literally “lack of fortune.” Bad fortune must be fought. The word for courage and boldness, gambedaoba, means “readiness to change fate,” the will to overcome fate.

And now the language returns to the streets.

Over a hundred courageous Georgian citizens are serving long political sentences for resisting a government that is tearing the country from its European orbit and brutally pushing it back into the Russian sphere of influence—an escape that many are desperate to make. Mass public protests have been ongoing for a year, ever since the authorities announced the suspension of EU accession talks.

Protest rallies gather daily on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main street, in Batumi and other Georgian cities, despite government bans and draconian penalties for participating.

During these protests, police arrested journalist and independent media founder Mzia Amaglobeli, actor Andro Chichinadze and poet Zviad Ratiani. Along with other prisoners of conscience, they have been imprisoned for many years.

Still, the protests continue. The Kartvelians keep fighting against the “perfidious fate” that has placed them in the vicinity of Russia and against the “evil fate” that has condemned this ancient and profound culture to exist as a colony of the most primitive of empires.

The next time you walk into a Georgian bakery to buy bread, the greeting matters. The Georgian greeting gamarjoba literally means “may you win.”

In a world where translation can be bread baked in someone else’s oven, victory starts with getting the language—and the life inside it—back to its own heat.

Georgia Georgian language Kartvelian languages puri translation Mkhedruli Rustaveli Avenue EU accession talks Mzia Amaglobeli Andro Chichinadze Zviad Ratiani protests cultural identity