About 20 members of the Conservative Movement/Alt Info party did not allow Levan Berdzenishvili to hold a public lecture - “Ilia, our European father“ on January 15, in Kvareli.
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Representatives of the pro-Russian party blocked the access road to EuroClub Kvareli and did not allow Levan Berdzenishvili to enter the building. The rally participants chanted that “Levan Berdzenishvili is a traitor and because of insulting King Erekle, Kakheti will not accept him”.
“You are a traitor! You are contaminating the Georgian nation! Why did you insult King Erekle? You are a scoundrel and a traitor! Do you understand?”, said Giorgi Karchauli, the head of the Alt Info Telavi organization.
“Get out of here! Kakheti will not accept you and will not listen to you. Kakheti will not accept those who insult King Erekle and Davit Aghmashenebeli. You are not the one who Kakhetians should listen to. You are not the man that Georgians should respect. You are a traitor, an insulter of King Erekle, of holy things, an insulter of the Patriarch. Get out of here! Every Georgian will pee you on your grave when you die. You come here now because you want to defile our posterity, the next generation. What? Do you want to receive a grant for contaminating kids?! You can't get it.”
From the approximately four-minute video shared by the members of Alt Info, it can be seen that several policemen on the spot did not even try to clear the road. “Are you a cool guy only on TV? Get out of the car and show us what u can”, the rally participants addressed Berdzenishvili.
“If I got out of the car, I don’t know what could happen, because they were quite aggressive. The police watched this event calmly, but none of them came to me. They didn’t even make an attempt to create a corridor, there was no such thing.
The government that does this without a doubt is doomed, but it should still have the courage to give the citizen a chance to lecture. After all, I wasn’t there to kill a man. I wanted to tell what merits Ilia Chavchavadze had. By the way, I could also tell them what Ilia Chavchavadze thought about the treatise - for example, that he said that it was the death of Georgia, and he wouldn’t participate in such a case, in its celebration. Why does the Russian organization forbid me to give a lecture about the number one Georgian patriot in Georgia?
The government should think about this... Maybe they should honor Ilia Chavchavadze because, besides me, he was also affected today,” said Levan Berdzenishvili in an interview with TV Pirveli.
According to Berdzenishvili, the “Georgian Dream” party thinks that contempt against him is beneficial for the ruling party from an electoral point of view.
“It seems that now they are going to select individual citizens, instill hatred towards them and thereby make their voters happy. I do not believe those people who are happy that the lectures will not be held in Telavi, Kvareli or Sagarejo, and instead, these illiterate people will be shouting something on the street. I don't believe the voters of the "Georgian Dream" who like such behavior. I think they are worse than the government and this government is like this because it has such voters. “Georgian Dream” voters do not object to such a thing. They don’t like it , but say that we should have the right to read a lecture. They like this kind of behavior, and those who like it, even if they have more education, are with "alt info" and are equally unacceptable to me. The number of people who dislike me may increase, but I remember there were other places in Georgia where they told me that I would never be able to go there, and where I go now and give lectures. In time, I will also go to Telavi and Kvareli and hold lectures as long as I am alive. I hope so.”
EuroClub Kvareli announced Levan Berdzenishvili's public lecture ten days before, via Facebook. According to Nika Gurini, the founder of the EuroClub, many children were waiting for the lecture, but after a picket organized by “people brought from different areas”, they had to cancel the meeting for security reasons.
In May 2022, the founder of the “Republican Party”, philologist and literary critic Levan Berdzenishvili criticized the King of Kartl-Kakheti Erekle II for signing the Georgievsky treaty with Russia in 1783. Berdzenishvili in one of the interviews said: “Until King Erekle is not declared a traitor, Irakli Gharibashvili will have the audacity to come out and say, “Do you want war?!” Well, Erekle also said that, “what - you want war, man?” He was a warrior, he won 80 wars. I didn't want war, no one wanted it. When he surrendered all of Georgia when he was only controlling Kakheti, who gave him the right to do that? His own son wrote to him - who gave you the permission? They didn't listen. They don't listen to Baratashvili.”
On May 28, in Telavi, near the Erekle II palace, a rally “to protect the king” was held, most of the participants of which were employees of the Telavi State Theater, activists of Alt Info, and civil servants.
