2018 has been a year of many experiences and events. Thank you, all friends and colleagues that I have shared it with. I would like to wish all a great New Year 2019!

2018 has been a year of unusually many conferences and meetings, celebrations of “круглые даты”.  It started with the conference in Tbilisi, celebrating the 100 year’s of Tbilisi State University. In Malmö RUCARR marked the 100 years of the declarations of independence in different parts of the Caucasus in May of 1918, and were happy to greet all three South Caucasian ambassadors to Sweden at this event in Malmö.

Summer time in Batumi. A special day when Sabina’s “Stranger” echoed over the port of Batumi!

During the summer I spent time in archives at Blekinge museum and Blekingearkivet, tracing documents relating to a Swedish woman who travelled in the First Republic of Georgia in 1920 with Batumi as her base, and even met her 90 years old son. Such encounters bring history alive! The 1920 journey was the topic of my talk at the Caucasological Congress in Tbilisi in September.

I’m most grateful to colleagues in Nalchik who decided to commemorate the 90th birthday of Prof. Mukhadin Kumakhov, with whom I had a long collaboration,  organizing a conference in Nalchik in October. Apart from meeting many new colleagues, I was also happy to meet Prof. Kumakhov’s daughter Zarema, and Nata, that I haven’t seen for so long.

In this connection we gave our old Caucasus Studies series a new online format and published Caucasus Studies No 5 with earlier unpublished materials by M.A. Kumakhov and myself.

Georgia was “Guest of honour” at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, which was reason enough to visit the event and the beautiful exhibition halls and Georgian book production. The book that attracted our special attention was the Basque-Georgian-Russian dictionary authored by Revaz Tchantouria.

November – time for our Third Annual RUCARR conference in Malmö, and for the Kartvelogical conference and 120 years’ celebration of academician Arnold Chikobava in Tbilisi.

At this year’s last conference, ‘Promoting International Dialogue and Protecting Cultural Heritage’ in the Caucasus, we were happy to greet so many participants from all over the Caucasus and beyond, coming to Malmö University.

With best wishes for 2019!