ABSTRACT
I t was another first night back in Tbilisi; after a memorable ‘supra’ (a feast completely covering the table surface) I walked home with a new Georgian friend Nanuli, along Gamsakhurdia Street, named not after the failed president, but his father, the novelist Constantine
Gamsakhurdia. The city had changed again — but this had been expected. Indeed the copy of Georgian Economic Trends borrowed on the plane over had predicted a 14.7 per cent growth in GDP for Georgia in the last quarter of 1997 (in early 1998 the IMF would place Georgia at third position for the most rapid GDP growths in the world).
