"It's shameful that Adzharia is barring entrance to Georgia's President, and Georgians are speaking to Georgians in the idiom of weapons. Aslan Abashidze descends from one of Georgia's noblest families, and he ought not to stoop to that kind of things," Constantine Cholokashvili, president of the Georgian Assembly of the Nobility, said to a news conference today.
"There is no room for frontiers between Georgia and Adzharia, an ancient Georgian land," Iya Bagrationi-Mukhraneli, Tsar's Crown leader, said to the same conference.
The Abashidzes are the foremost Adzharian princely family. They were Adzharia's eristavis, sovereigns, since 1463. As the Ottoman Empire seized Adzharia in the 16th century, sancak begs, governors, of Batum and Trebizond were appointed solely from their midst.
Memed Abashidze, Aslan's grandfather, was prominent man of letters and political activist. Speaker of Adzharia's first parliament in 1918-21, he spared no efforts for his native land to rejoin Georgia after three centuries in the Ottoman Empire.
