Ҳаҭыр зкәы сҩызцәа! Мшы бзиақәа!

This is George Hewitt speaking from Yorkshire in the north of England, where I have been Abkhazia’s Honorary Consul since 1993.

I am delighted to have been invited to participate (albeit virtually) in the opening of the Foreign Ministry’s Media Centre because several of us have long felt that such an initiative should have been undertaken many years ago. In the age of 24-hour news-services and instant mass-communication, the importance of disseminating one’s message for a country which suffered years of isolation following a destructive war, which remains poorly known to the outside-world, and which is largely viewed, if viewed at all, through the distorting filter of a foreign power cannot be emphasised too strongly.

Some of the volunteers who came to defend Abkhazia were still very young, indeed one of them was still a child -- Valery Berkhamov, a Circassian, who exchanged his school desk for life on the front line.

Valery was only 16 years old when he left his native Kabardino-Balkaria without informing his family for the war in Abkhazia. Musabi Berkhamov began searching for his son in various places of ill repute.

От обеспокоенного гражданина Абхазии

English version: Peace is for Abkhazia, war is for Ukraine? by A Concerned Citizen of Abkhazia

24 февраля ровно в четыре часа (по украинскому времени) Киев бомбили, нам объявили, что началась военная спецоперация. Вот так строки советского поэта Бориса Ковынева, с минимальными изменениями под обстановку, актуализировались 80 лет спустя.

In 1989 at the start of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict the late Academician Andrei Sakharov in one of his last articles called Georgia a ‘mini-empire’ (Ogonёk 1989, 31).

Later, describing the relationship between Abkhazia and Georgia, he wrote: "I tend to justify the Abkhazian position. I think we should regard with special attention the problems of small peoples: freedom and rights of big nations should not be exercised at the expense of small ones" (Znamya, 1991, No.10, p.69).

Joseph de Baye (1853-1931), French archaeologist and traveller. Baron Joseph de Baye (French) was initially a keen amateur archaeologist. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ministry of Public Instruction sent him on a mission to collect pottery in the Russian Empire. He gave public lectures in Paris on his return and furthered knowledge of Russia's archaeological and ethnographic treasures through his publications - gathered under the title "Souvenirs d'une mission en Abkhasie, en Crimée, en Géorgie, en Lituanie, en Nouvelle Flussie, en Petite Russie", and by presenting the collections he brought back at the Musée Guimet, and building up an exceptional collection of photographs.