In the small Georgian village of Shukruti, houses are cracking at the seams and the soil is subsiding, exposing the deep wounds of industrialization. Dozens of houses have already been destroyed, while others await their fate.
At a depth of 70-100 meters, industrial manganese mining is taking place under the villagers' feet. The company that extracts the wealth from the subsoil claims that the current woes are just an echo of the Soviet past. But every new crack in the house, every piece of sagging land screams the opposite.
The hunger strikes and demonstrations in Tbilisi are a call for justice echoing from the mountains of Georgia to the walls of parliament. Memorandums and selective symbolic compensations have proven to be only an attempt to fix reputations, not a solution to people’s real problems.
The story of Shukruti is a poignant struggle for the right to call a place home, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, when the ground gives way.
