Americans can understand that cars carry great cultural weight and that the bond between an owner and their car can even cross over into fanaticism. The car also has had great symbolic value in more than just American culture. In the country of Georgia, the car was an import and it shows in their language about cars. There are practically no native words about cars in the Georgian — everything they say about cars use loan words from other languages. Many Georgians think most of the words have a Russian origin but the vast majority of the words come from French and English, as you would expect.

One of the earliest treatments of cars I have seen in Georgian literature was in the book called Ali and Nino. The book setting is mostly in Azerbaijan but it the title character of Nino is from Georgia and the book makes some very insightful comments about Georgia and Tbilisi of the era. The key part, for us, comes when Nino has been seduced away from her true love, Ali, by the Armenian Melik Nachararyan. Melik is modern and European in outlook and seduces Nino at the Opera promising her all the wealth the West has to offer. In a moment of weakness Nino agrees and they flee Baku in a car. Ali discovers this and steals a stallion, a true war horse, bred from generations of war horses in the mountainous valley of Nagorno-Karabakh.