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From the early 1990s through the 2008 “Russo-Georgian war,” waves of armed conflicts in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali regions of Georgia forced thousands of residents, mainly ethnic Georgians, to leave their homes. More than two decades of protracted internal displacement, marked by tough economic and social problems, led this vulnerable community to a common trap in reckoning with the past: an overwhelming sense of the fundamental ruptures between the idealized past and current, miserable reality. Failures of the displacement policy and “side effects” of numerous humanitarian aid projects hinder internally displaced persons’ social integration and leave them on the margins of Georgian society with almost a singular option: to constantly recall meaningful life in the lost homeland, which they remember as free of ethnic phobias and economic problems. In this article, we suggest that for persons who are internally displaced, memories are defined not only by their past lived experiences and present hardships, but also by the official historical narratives that argue that Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian “endemic” unity and cohabitation was destroyed by Russian imperial politics. Living in constant pain also narrows the future expectations of the internally displaced persons. However, it is the past and the memories that are supposed to be useful in achieving the utopian dream of a return.

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Territorial integrity is one of the central tropes in contemporary Georgian cultural memory and historical imaginaries. The article traces when, how, and why the narrative of the “miraculous victory” of medieval Georgian King David IV the Builder over Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Didgori in August 1121 and his seizing of Tbilisi entered the Georgian “realms of memory”. This complex and often contradictory mnemonic legacy, shaped by medieval, imperial (Tsarist and Soviet), and nation-state (the First Republic and post-Soviet Georgia) conjunctures, feeds the current representations of this military success as a symbol of the unification of the Georgian state. In the Soviet and post-Soviet “regimes of memory”, the story of Didgori and reconquering Tbilisi became intertwined with territorial nationalism. In the unilinear Soviet Georgian narrative, these victories appear as “progressive” and unifying occurrences. In the post-Soviet period, ethnoreligious nationalism and re-sacralization of David’s image and the challenges to the country’s territorial integrity motivated Georgians to zoom in and magnify selected images of the glorious past. These historical events represent a fateful and luminous episode in the nation’s history that fed hope for an analogous victory and restoration of the country’s territorial integrity.