From Russia to Georgia, a Lesson in Relativity

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Jana Romanova has been compiling a handbook of rules for relatives. Unconditional support is one of the big ones. So, too, is your duty to fix another relative's mistake as soon as you can. And her favorite?

“You can tell the truth to your relative anytime. Even if he becomes angry, you will not lose him,” she said. “A relative is yours forever. Nothing changes.”

These insights came to her the hard way, 13 years after her paternal grandparents, Keto and Peter, were murdered. Though Ms. Romanova grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, her grandmother Keto hailed from Georgia; she moved to Russia after marrying Peter, an army officer. For years, Keto remained the linchpin for the Georgian side of the family, an extended clan that Ms. Romanova never met. A few years ago, she got to thinking: who were all these people back in Georgia?

Jana Romanova “A studio portrait of Keto, my grandmother,” Jana Romanova writes. “Probably the image was made shortly after her wedding. These photographs were sent to Georgian relatives by Keto from St. Petersburg and other places where she traveled with her family during the period from 50th to 80th. All the information about the dates and places is missing.”

“In Russia and Europe, the idea of family is something small,” Ms. Romanova, 28, said. “It's your parents, your grandparents, your children and uncles. It's not really big. There's a lot of them you won't even meet. But in Georgia, it's completely different. For them, family is something really big. If you are a relative, it means you are accepted into a big community. It's very, very important. It's more important than the government or friends.”

Her exploration of her Georgian roots resulted in a handmade book and multimedia project titled “Shvilishvili” - child of a child, or grandchild. It consists of a series of portraits, each linked to the next by a common relative. It also features many of her grandmother's photographs of her life in St. Petersburg, and it is capped by a back story that turns the titular concept on its head.

After deciding to embark on the project, Ms. Romanova traveled to Georgia in January 2012 to connect with her grandmother's cousin and daughter. They were the two relatives she remembered as being closest to her grandmother, and also the first contacts she found.

They received her warmly.

“It was like, ‘Oh, you finally came! We've been waiting for you!' ” she recalled. “They were really fantastic. I was astonished. How should I act? What should I say?”

Jana Romanova “All the images that Keto sent to her relatives to Tbilisi and other Georgian towns and villages were kept by these families in old plastic bags for many years. By looking though piles of these photographs, I was trying to find any chronology to build her lifeline, but in the end realized that due to the lack of information it's no longer possible, and everything I can do is just look at them as they are, old photographs, probably with my grandmother. So I put them back into the plastic bags.”

If anything, she listened and looked. One relative led to another, some close by and others in distant cities. She suggested her idea of a series of “chained portraits.” The logistics seemed daunting, but they worked themselves out on subsequent trips.

“In the end, the chain was who could go with me to another relative; who wanted to be in a photo with people from different towns,” she said. “Usually, it was the person who wanted to see somebody they had not seen in some time, or who just wanted to go to another city. It was a very organic thing.”

Word got around fast, so by the time she arrived in another town or village, people were ready and waiting. A lot of them remarked that she looked like her grandmother, especially in the eyes. Many knew about her grandmother's life in St. Petersburg because she had constantly written letters and sent pictures. In every house she entered, the pictures and postcards were ready to be shown.

Jana Romanova The last image in Ms. Romanova's series - her uncle at her grandparents' tombstone, with the same jar of sand that appears in the first image.

“I had no idea how she lived,” Ms. Romanova said. “Looking at those images was like an offline Facebook. This was, to me, the way she wanted to present her life to her relatives. It looked like a happy life. Walking with her children - my father and my uncle. Travel shots and photographs of her home. Regular life, but very warm.”

Just as ubiquitous as the pictures was the question posed to her: How did her grandparents die? All that these relatives had known, from a letter sent by a friend, was that the elderly couple had been killed. And with the one common connection between the Georgian and Russian sides of the family gone, all that ensued was silence.

“They were upset that neither my father or uncle had told them,” Ms. Romanova said. “It was a complete misconnection. They asked me all the time, but I couldn't tell them. It was not me who had to tell them this fact.”

But once she told her father, Archil, about the incessant questions, he went to Georgia and told the relatives what had happened.

“My grandparents were killed by my cousin,” Ms. Romanova said. “That's why I called my project ‘Shvilishvili,' because it was a grandchild, a child of a child. In the end, you find out they were killed by their grandchild. When you close the book and go to the title, ‘Grandchild' - what does it mean to be a relative? It all changes. It becomes a different story.”

But, as the rules she is writing in her handbook say, blood endures even after blood has been spilled.

“They forgave everybody for this,” she said of her Georgian family. “Now they're calling each other. They write to me on Facebook. Now, I suddenly got a lot of new people in my life.”

It's all in the pictures, from beginning to end. In the first image of the series, an older relative is shown with a glass of sand from the grave of Ms. Romanova's grandmother's grandmother.

“They gave me this bottle of sand from her grave and asked me to bring it to St. Petersburg, to the grave of my grandmother,” she said. “That's how it appears in the last picture, with my uncle at her grave. It's a chain, but it's also a circle.”

Jana Romanova “My grandparents Keto and Peter with Keto's father Archil, and their children Oleg and Archil (named after his grandfather).”

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