LETTER FROM BATUMI/David Shanks: Letter from where? We are in post-soviet Georgia, a country that has three "autonomous republics". Batumi is the capital of one of them, Adjara.
In this Ruritarian spot, old liturgy, guileless hospitality, frequent daily power cuts, snow, and the human richness that so often goes with poverty set the scene for a political play that may well beggar your belief.
It began to beggar mine last Sunday night. I am one of a dozen, mainly British, journalists that have realised that they are on no ordinary weekend junket.
We have gathered in the government building for a press conference, and Adjara's loquacious head of state, Aslan Abashidze, is playing us a tape of a telephone conversation that he says his security service intercepted about an hour earlier.
In it, one army officer tells another that outside Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, tanks, troop carriers and 500 soldiers have been put on a train that could reach Adjara in under six hours.
It looks like bitter differences between regional and national government are about to be settled by force.
Abashidze (65), popularly known as "Babu" (grandfather), certainly has reason to feel threatened by demagogic noises off from Georgia's new national president, Mikhail Saakashvili (36), who replaced Eduard Shevardnadze in last November's "rose revolution". In December, he told a rally "we have four walls, a cell waiting for" Abashidze, whom he accuses of corruption and of running Adjara like a personal fiefdom.
However true or false that might be, the real threat may be one of his good example. Abashidze clearly cares about his people, and under his leadership, Adjara promises to be something of an economic miracle.
On the Black Sea, Batumi's natural deep-water port has attracted foreign investment to a new joint venture oil terminal and other developments that could make it an axis of trade between Asia and Europe.
"Babu" also has a better record on pensions and social welfare than the central government.
Meanwhile Tblisi and Batumi trade accusations about each owing the other money.
Abashidze accuses the international community of validating fraudulent elections in Georgia and of propping up successive bad central governments.
Saakashvili portrays Abashidze as a separatist, a charge he denies strenuously, adding that the Georgian president is intent on setting up a "totalitarian" state.
He says Saakashvili's anti-corruption campaign is a tool to undermine political opposition, as Georgia prepares for parliamentary elections on March 28th.
Our visit coincides with another by Walter Schwimmer, secretary general of the Council of Europe, which validated the elections that helped keep the discredited Shevardnadze in power.
It also validated last month's 96 per cent victory for Saakashvili.
Since then, however, there has been growing criticism of Saakashvili's methods - of pressure on media freedoms, of police abuses, and claims that he is stage-managing political unrest.
Amnesty International has asked him to take decisive action to improve basic freedoms and the secretary general of Saakashvili's own party resigned last week, saying that his rule was raising the prospect of an "authoritarian regime".
Schwimmer has come to Batumi urging "dialogue" and adherence to democratic values, but he witnesses clashes between pro-Tblisi supporters and those of the local government in which a pistol is fired and arrests made.
Suddenly, in a place that has been relatively placid these past 13 years, political offices are trashed - those of the Georgian National Movement, the Tblisi government party, and the pro-government youth movement, Kmara.
Abashidze's party, Revival, is blamed but at his government offices it is strongly suggested the attacks are the work of out-of-town people unknown to the obviously shocked activists standing about in the debris.
"It was done by animals," says one local leader.
In an echo of post-Soviet trauma, this "disorder" in the streets of Batumi is reported on national television - in order, says Abadshidze, to give Georgians outside Adjara the impression that central government intervention is necessary.
Last Friday Saakashvili promised that the media had nothing to fear from him, but the following day he closed the New Epoch newspaper in Tblisi, not on grounds of editorial offence, but of its owner's alleged involvement in a cigarette corruption scam. The owner is a Revival party MP.
Abashidze reminds us in gentle but steely tones of the invasions in the early 1990s of Georgia's other autonomous republics, Abkazia and South Ossetia.
"Shevardnadze was tearing apart his own nation and this process has not stopped," he says.