Gori: Jugashvili and EU troops

The name Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili may not ring a bell, but the man known as Josef Stalin surely isn't just famous in his home town of Gori.

Gori must be one of the few places in the world where there still are Stalin statues standing. It also boasts a quite interesting museum dedicated to the life and works of its famous son. Apart from a temple-like construction surrounding his house of birth, the train carriage he travelled in to the Yalta conference and a mass of busts and paintings, there are a lot of pictures, documents and personal items on display.
It's all good fun, rather interesting but it fails completely at giving a balanced picture of the man: he is displayed as a master politician, a well-doer and a war hero. No mention of the Gulags, the forced labour, the millions who died or his "devils pact" treaty with Hitler...

On more recent events, Gori was in the world news as one of the places where Georgian-Russian fighting in the 2008 conflict was most intense. None of that really shows anymore, though: we didn't see any buildings with bullet holes, no rubble from collapsed buildings or anything like that. What we did see, however, was the EU-mission "military observers", who stayed in the same hotel as we did (in fact, we slept in a room previously used as their field office). Not that there was so much to observe, really: most of the soldiers seemed primarily concerned with the coffee breaks and with chatting in the lobby...