Former president Mikhail Saakashvili, who modernized Georgia with a strong arm, oversaw a crackdown on Svaneti’s most recalcitrant clans in the 2000s. Many arrests were made and guns confiscated. A new police station was established in Mestia as an emblem of the changing times
The first major influx came in the early 1920s when throngs of refugees from a crumbling Ottoman Empire disembarked onto Marseille’s port. Around 60,000 of them were settled into squalid camps, causing unease among Marseillais at the time