Trademark Caucasus

David Stepanyan, Yerevan-Tbilisi-Yerevan. Exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza

City Day in October in Tbilisi – Tbilisoba – is accompanied with the bright Festival of Tea and Honey this year. Numerous visitors of the festival, which took place in the historic center of Tbilisi, could taste and compare honey varieties from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Georgia.

Tea producers were presented at the festival as well, including Caucasus Tea – a blend of teas, herbals, phyto-teas from various regions of the South Caucasus. The brand Caucasus Cheese unites Georgian, Armenia, and Turkish cheese producers; Caucasus Bouquet is a collection of wines from wine-producing regions of the South Caucasus. Almost all products marked Caucasus were approved by its numerous visitors who tasted honey, tea, cheese, and wine varieties.

The festival was organized by the Caucasus Business and Development Net (CBDN) which was founded in 2005 as a net of regional offices in Yerevan, Baku, Gyumri, Kutaisi, Cars, Tbilisi, Sukhumi, Tskhinvali. As the result of the festival visitors voted for winners which took the first and the second place. The winner in the category “Best Honey” is David Movsisyan, a 56-year old beekeeper from Beniamin village of the Shiraksky region of Armenia. The second place was taken by a Turkish beekeeper from the company of Antik Ani Bal from Cars, Adem Ertash. Honey and tea producers from the Zakatal region of Azerbaijan, Muluddin Gurbanliyev and Abdulmedzhid Shabanov, and tea producers from Kutaisi under management of Alu Gamakharia picked up awards.

Director Executive of the Association Tea-Planters of Georgia, Tengiz Svanidze, said that along with peacemaking, the Festival’s mission was encouragement of joint economic projects in the sphere of tea planting development in the whole South Caucasus. The Festival had the motto “Transformation of Regional Conflicts into Mutually Beneficial Cooperation.” In fact all initiatives by CBDN which is supported by the UK government follow the principle “do no harm.”

The festival was attended by representatives of Georgian, Armenian, Muslim clergy of Georgia, the Georgian government’s representatives, businessmen, journalists, there were a lot of tourists from all over the world, including Australia. Georgian MPs came to the festival, Georgy Targamadze, a candidate to the president of Georgia, was among them.

The initiators tried to combine peacemaking with commercial interests. “We are glad to present instead of a report on our successful work a tea packet of Caucasian Tea. This is the best confirmation of effectiveness of our efforts on improvement of the dialogue and cooperation between businessmen and societies of the South Caucasus. We don’t try to interfere with the process of political settlement of conflicts, which are still unsettled in the region, unfortunately. Our goal is to contribute to the dialogue between the South Caucasian societies, involving new and new participants in it,” the top manager of projects of the Program on Eurasian of the international non-governmental organization International Alert, Oskari Pentikainen, noted.

Summing up this interesting, bright, big, and generous all-Caucasus festival in Tbilisi, I should state that its main goals were reached. This is confirmed at the very least by the amazement of its visitors who tasted fine tea and honey produced by Armenian and Azerbaijani colleagues who were not separated by artificial borders at the festival.