The Night I Got Trapped in Abkhazia

My flippant desire for a daytrip to this breakaway region in the Republic of Georgia devolved into swilling vodka with border guards, hauling furniture for a local family, and desperately trying to get the heck out.

Photos by Stephen Robert Morse

Before midnight on February 5, 2011, I leave my friends Jan and Evelien’s apartment in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia, for the train station. I’ve booked a berth on a train that will take me to Zugdidi, the last place in the Republic of Georgia that one can go before the train tracks slam into a militarized border with Abkhazia, a former Georgian territory that now aligns itself with Mother Russia.

Americans don’t visit Abkhazia, because on our globes, Abkhazia doesn’t exist. That’s what fascinates me about it: a place that is only recognized by a few nation-states (Russia, Nicaragua and Venezuela), one island in the Central Pacific (Nauru, population 9,000) and a few ex-Soviet territories which themselves fail to exist on Western maps (Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria). Georgia and its former territory had been in intermittent states of war since the USSR dissolved in 1989. Think of it like historical arthritis: there’s fighting that flares up…