GabPreda

I've been coming to Batumi for about a decade and the city's transformation is one of the great stories of the Caucasus since the collapse of the USSR. Almost none of the buildings you can see in this photo above five stories was there in 2016. There's more tall buildings to the east of this. This was originally a relatively small city, the center of the mixed Muslim-Christian region of Adjara. When the Georgian government lost control of Sokhumi, the center of Black Sea tourism in Georgia, Batumi was the obvious city to build up. The liberal nationalist Saakashvili government built it up as a showcase of their economic reforms, but before the last decade the scale of construction was visible but not clear all over the city. Now the city has a booming population and buildings taller than what you find in Tbilisi, a vastly wealthier and more important city. It's surreal. The city has always had a unwholesome aura - it's a center of gambling and various unsavory forms of tourism - but whatever core identity of the city from before 1991 seems gone. After the 2020 crackdown in Belarus and the start of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the city has become a major center for Eastern European migration, and Turkish construction money is everywhere - the street I'm staying on is covered in advertisements for various Turkish pop musicians I've never heard of. The city now resembles nothing so much as Night City in the Cyberpunk setting - an artificial, newly constructed, libertarian port city where various powers and corporations bump elbows in a dysfunctional, chaotic urban environment defined by cultural incoherence and wealth inequality. I used to love this city. Not sure if that's true anymore. The Georgian Neoliberal Magnitogorsk has become another way for a construction elite in a corrupt right-wing government to entrench themselves across an entire society.