President Andrzej Duda and his wife attend Georgia’s Independence Day celebrations in Tbilisi. “Few countries and nations are as close to each other as ours. We share the same values, the most important of which is the love of freedom and sovereignty. We have them deeply rooted in our souls for centuries,” said the Polish President.
President Duda is the only President of another country to attend the 30th anniversary of modern Georgia’s independence.
Andrzej Duda referred to 1918, when Georgia regained its independence, pointing out that the people of this country made a fundamental choice then and opted for self-determination, freedom and democracy.
He pointed out that although Bolshevik Russia, with its aggression, thwarted the dreams of a modern and independent Georgian state just a few years later, “the memory of those sublime events is permanently inscribed in the collective memory of the nation”.
“Therefore, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union several decades later, Georgians knew exactly that they wanted independence, they wanted their state. That is why in 2021 we can celebrate together the 30thanniversary of regaining independence” – he said.
Duda added that recalling these events makes him realize how “clearly close, even brotherly, the Georgian nation is to Poles”.
“Although there are over 2,000 kilometres between Warsaw and Tbilisi, there are few countries and nations as close as ours. We share the same values. The most important of these is the love of freedom and the love of sovereignty, which have been deeply rooted in our souls for centuries,” stressed the Polish President.
He recalled that the representatives of Georgian emigration after 1921, members of the Georgian elite at that time, had made an extremely valuable contribution to the life of reborn Poland in 1918.
“I pay deep tribute to the Georgian heroes who fought and fell in defence of our Fatherland in September 1939, those who fought and fell in the Warsaw Uprising, as well as the Georgian victims of the Soviet Katyń massacre,” he added.
After the main ceremony Andrzej Duda and Agata Kornhauser-Duda laid a wreath in front of Lech Kaczynski’s monument in Tbilisi.