Tbilisi Podcast · Eat This! Food & Wine Tours Georgia

Red Eggs and Family Feasts: Celebrating Easter the Georgian Way

·41 min·2 clips

In Guria’s village of Shuhuti, two villages fight over a 2.5-kilo ball made of leather, grass, and sand.

Tom welcomes Baya from redfedoradiary.com, a travel blogger and writer from Tbilisi, Georgia, who offers a local's eye view of Georgian Easter. They draw on her background to move through the holiday from Lent to Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, keeping the focus on what people actually do rather than on abstract tradition. Feasting is part of it, and so are cemetery visits and the small customs that tie the holiday to Georgian life. The conversation stays relaxed, which lets them drift naturally from timing to food to the practical question of what a visitor will notice first. Boiled eggs come up early. Cake takes over from there, especially the special Easter cake that needs a mold for shaping but is otherwise easy to buy across Tbilisi. Baya makes the point that tourists do not need to hunt one down. The city sells them everywhere, in cheap versions, fancier boxed versions, and even leftovers that hang around well after the holiday has passed. That detail gives the episode its usefulness. Instead of presenting Easter as a distant cultural fact, it shows how seasonal food marketing, street level shopping, and shared ritual all meet in one stretch of the calendar. The cakes start showing up weeks before Easter, much like holiday stock in Western shops, which gives the whole thing a slightly comic, very familiar rhythm. The episode keeps things plain, with pronunciation checks, practical explanations, and a couple of relaxed jokes about how widespread the cakes are. That tone suits the material. A listener gets enough context to understand the holiday and enough local texture to picture walking through Tbilisi and seeing it all for themselves. It is the sort of conversation that answers a traveler's next question before they have time to ask it. By the end, Easter in Georgia feels less like a holiday on a page and more like a season with food, movement, and shared ritual built into it.

As heard by us

A practical look at how Georgian Easter shows up in everyday life.

Georgian Easter is treated as a set of lived customs, not a formal ceremony: Lent, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, cemetery visits, family feasting, and the Easter cakes that begin showing up well before the holiday.

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Why you'd press play

You want Easter in Georgia, not the postcard version.

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