Twenty-five years after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Georgians are still adjusting to life in the new economy. On the outskirts of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, an bandoned
military hospital from the bygone era serves as a refuge to some 150 families unable to find jobs and affordable housing. Refugees from the Abkhazia War in the early 90s have used the seven-story complex as shelter for the past two decades. Local government pays little attention to the building, and when they do it’s to cut off electricity and water, which residents have diverted through a jerry-rigged lattice of wires and pipes. Modern Georgian society as a whole seems to willfully overlook the Soviet architecture littered across the city, trying to forget a past which still crumbles before their eyes.