How a Scottish Town Stood by Abkhazia

Walk through Sukhum today and you will come across a street sign that surprises most visitors: Scotland Street. It is not a whim of the town planners. It is the Abkhaz half of a friendship that has lasted forty years, and its Scottish counterpart sits far to the north-west, in a quiet public park in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock. There, for more than two decades, a small stone carried the Abkhaz flag and a short inscription remembering the people of Sukhum who died in the war of 1992 to 1993.

This is the story of that stone, and of the town that raised it.

A Soviet-era friendship

Kilmarnock and Sukhum became twin towns in the mid-1980s. The exact founding date is recorded a little differently depending on who is telling the story. The local council's own accounts from the period date the link to December 1985, and note with some pride that Kilmarnock and Loudoun was the first Scottish local authority to twin with a Soviet area. Abkhaz officials remember the formal agreement being signed on 2 October 1986. Either way, the friendship began while the Soviet Union was still standing and Abkhazia was still an autonomous republic inside Soviet Georgia. The first mayors to bring the two towns together were Konstantin Bigvava in Sukhum and Thomas Ferguson in Kilmarnock.

Getting there took a little manoeuvring. According to Victoria Argun, a former assistant to the Sukhum mayor, the pairing was arranged through the Moscow society for friendship with foreign countries. Sukhum's planners had hoped to twin with a town in the Basque Country. Tbilisi intervened in the talks, and Kilmarnock was offered as the alternative.

Whatever its origins, the link became a warm one. For years the two towns took turns visiting, one travelling out one year and hosting the next. Abkhaz delegations were shown around Kilmarnock and met not just the provost but ordinary councillors and residents, who turned up simply because they were curious about a small country most of them had never heard of. Sukhum's schoolchildren wrote to Scottish pen pals about their lives and their homeland. When a large group of Scottish visitors came to Abkhazia, around forty of them, the pipers among them put on national dress and struck up an impromptu concert in the centre of Sukhum, drawing a crowd. Their hosts drove them out to the villages of Duripsh and Lykhny, where families laid long tables and everyone wanted a look at how the Scots lived.

An Abkhazian delegation from Sukhum visits Kilmarnock, Scotland, then Sukhum’s twin town, shortly before the outbreak of the Georgian-Abkhazian war on 14 August 1992. Nodar Khashba, the mayor of Sukhum at the time, is pictured in the silver suit beneath the Abkhazian flag.

War, and a flag handed over

The last easy visit came in August 1992, when a Sukhum delegation was in Kilmarnock for the town's celebration of its 400th year. The visiting mayor presented Provost Danny Coffey with Abkhazia's newly created flag. It was, the local paper noted, the first time the flag had been seen outside the country. Within days of the delegation returning home, war broke out between Abkhazia and Georgia.

An Abkhazian delegation from Sukhum visits Kilmarnock, Scotland, then Sukhum’s twin town, shortly before the outbreak of the Georgian-Abkhazian war on 14 August 1992.

Kilmarnock did not look away. The council launched a Sukhum Appeal on the last day of 1992 and set up a committee to gather money, tying its effort to a national UNICEF campaign. The sums were modest at first, a few hundred pounds, then they grew. Kilmarnock's football supporters ran a raffle that raised more than £2,400. By the spring of 1994 the town had collected close to £10,000, with a further donation from Kilmarnock's German twin, Kulmbach. When a Sukhum delegation returned in June 1994, led by Mayor Nodar Khashba, it brought photographs that spoke plainly of what had happened: burned bodies, rows of coffins, shelled buildings. The mayor told his hosts the city's population had fallen from around 140,000 to 90,000, and that at least 600 orphans were now registered in the town.

There is a painful footnote to all this generosity. Argun recalls that the money Kilmarnock raised was sent through an international organisation and routed via Tbilisi, and that it never reached Abkhazia. The town gave what it could, in good faith. The blockade and the war did the rest.

Kilmarnock Standard - 29 April 1994

The stone in Howard Park

In 1995, Kilmarnock did something almost no other place in the world was willing to do at the time. It put up a permanent memorial to Abkhazia's war dead. The stone stood in Howard Park, near the town centre, bearing the Abkhaz flag, the years 1992 to 1993, and the words: "In memory of those from our twin town of Sukhum who died in the Abkhazian/Georgian conflict."

Sukhum's mayor at the time, Garri Aiba, himself a veteran of the war, travelled to Scotland for the unveiling. In return, Sukhum renamed one of its streets after Scotland. It is worth pausing on the timing. This happened when Abkhazia was recognised by no one and cut off almost completely from the outside world. A Scottish market town chose to name Abkhazia's grief and to keep it in a public park, among its own memorials.

The years that followed were hard, and the visits grew fewer. But the letters kept coming. Officials on both sides say the two towns went on writing, marking each other's holidays, keeping the thread intact through the leanest years.

Georgia's objection, twenty-two years on

In November 2017 the stone became news again. The Georgian embassy in London, led by Ambassador Tamar Beruchashvili, pressed the British and Scottish authorities to remove it, objecting in particular to the Abkhaz flag and arguing that the memorial ran against UK policy on Georgia's territorial integrity. The move fitted a wider Georgian strategy of challenging any sign abroad that treated Abkhazia as a country in its own right. Early that month the ambassador announced that the memorial had been taken down.

The reaction in Abkhazia was immediate. The Foreign Ministry called the removal an act of vandalism and set it alongside the burning of Abkhazia's Institute of Language, Literature and History and the state archives during the war. Kan Taniya, then deputy foreign minister, launched a petition to save the stone that gathered close to 1,900 signatures. George Hewitt, Abkhazia's honorary consul in the United Kingdom and a longtime advocate, threw his weight behind the campaign, calling it part of a pattern of Tbilisi shutting down any advertisement of Abkhazia's existence.

What is often forgotten is that Georgian voices joined them. Jaba Devdariani, a former Georgian diplomat, called the ambassador's push a rigid application of non-recognition policy that worked against reconciliation, and suggested she could have spoken at the memorial or placed a message of peace beside it rather than have it removed. A group of international specialists made a similar case, arguing that a war memorial should remind us of the cost of war, not be treated as a political banner.

East Ayrshire Council, which had inherited the memorial after a local government reorganisation in 1996, was caught in the middle. It described the Sukhum link as a friendship rather than a formal twinning, and it agreed to reinstate the stone, though with revised wording. That compromise satisfied few. Abkhaz officials replied that changing the inscription would empty the memorial of its meaning, which for them amounted to demolition by another name.

What the stone still says

Strip away the diplomacy and a simple fact remains. A small Scottish town looked at a small country in the Caucasus, at a moment when the wider world had turned its back, and decided its dead were worth remembering. It raised money it could barely be sure would arrive. It carved Abkhazia's loss into stone and set it among its own monuments. When Sukhum answered with a street sign, the gesture was returned in kind.

The official label on the link has softened over the years, from twinning to friendship, and the fate of the stone itself has never been fully settled. But Scotland Street is still there in Sukhum, and the memory it points to has proved harder to remove than a piece of granite.