Zoom Qartulad May 2026

It started as a necessity. In March 2020, as the world slammed its doors against the pandemic, Georgia—a country of supra feasts, polyphonic singing, and fierce face-to-face negotiation—found itself suddenly, eerily silent. The tamada could no longer clink his glass. The supra table, the gravitational center of Georgian social life, vanished overnight.

Desperate, families and friends turned to a corporate video conferencing tool: Zoom.

Older relatives, seeing their own video for the first time, panic. “Why am I so old? Why is my hair like this?” The result is an explosion of beauty filters. Grannies in the village of Sighnaghi suddenly appear with cartoon butterfly crowns and smoothed skin, toasting Stalin-era wine while looking like anime characters.

Diaspora families, for whom a supra was once a once-a-year luxury, now hold weekly digital feasts. A cousin in Chicago makes lobio , a grandmother in Tbilisi watches, correcting the spice mix via laggy video. Weddings are live-streamed. Funerals, too. The “Zoom qartulad” has become the country’s second living room—a place where you can drop in unannounced, interrupt a meeting about quarterly reports with a story about your neighbor’s goat, and no one will kick you out.

When the pandemic forced this ritual online, Georgians refused to let the app dictate the rules. They hacked it.

Companies have adapted. Georgian businesses now hold “Zoom Shaurma breaks.” Universities conduct oral exams in Qartulad —meaning the professor and student spend the first ten minutes arguing about whose internet is worse.

So the next time you join a Zoom meeting and hear someone shout “Ra ginda, ara me munda?” (What do you want, I’m not muted?), don’t be annoyed. Be honored. You’ve just been invited to the digital supra . Pull up a chair. Pour a glass. And for the love of all things holy—turn on your camera.

Suddenly, grandmas who had never used a smartphone were learning to “raise a glass” by lifting their laptops. Uncles were toasting with chacha in one hand and muting themselves with the other after a particularly loud “Gaumarjos!” The Zoom gallery view became a digital supra table: 20 faces in squares, each with a plate of khachapuri visible in the frame, each with a story.