Representing fateful events and imagining territorial integrity in Georgia: cultural memory of David the Builder and the Battle of Didgori

Abstract

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.