These People Are Stranded—in a Soviet-Era Luxury Hotel
Having fled a forgotten war two decades ago, three women live in a twilit limbo.
In the heart of Tbilisi, Georgia, sits a grand hotel that was once one of the most luxurious in the city. Now, instead of pampering Soviet-era illuminati as it did during its former years as a Ritz Carlton, Hotel Georgia stands as an emblem of a grimmer post-Soviet reality: one half of the building has been walled off by the Georgian government to accommodate a tiny fraction of the over 200,000 ethnic Georgians displaced by the 1992 Georgia-Abkhaz war. The other half lies largely empty save the top two floors, where a staff of three elderly women—also displaced by the war—tends to the occasional guests in perfectly maintained rooms.
Alexandra Rose Howland, who is working on a long-term project about refugees,
