John Heers begins by clinking a glass. “Tonight, we’ll go to Georgia,” he says to the twenty-five of us, mostly strangers to one another, seated at an L-shaped table at his Greenville restaurant, Keipi. Already, amber wine fermented in underground clay pots is flowing. Already, after just half an hour of mingling, it’s clear Heers knows how to work a table. Here in the unlikeliest of places—upstate South Carolina—he is about to lead us through a supra, a social dinner steeped in rituals of hospitality and community and a longstanding cultural tradition in the Republic of Georgia.
We start with a vocabulary lesson. Heers is called the tamada, the host and toastmaster. A man named Bobby is the merikipe, tasked with the key job of keeping wine glasses full. After a toast, all of us are expected to say gagimarjos—“to you the victory”—a word we practice with the exact struggle you would expect from a room full of eager but fumble-tongued Americans.
Then Heers explains how the dinner works: He will give a toast on a general theme. That might be beauty, friendship, or love. The participants will provide the specifics—like coloring in a drawing—with a toast to some detail of their life related to that theme. Traditionally, after each toast, you’d drink your full glass of wine down, but Heers mercifully absolves us of that particular Georgian quirk, presumably to keep us alive.
Before we begin, Heers shares some details about his own life, and why he’s here today. In the nineties, after a stint in the Peace Corps and other projects abroad, Heers traveled to Georgia to volunteer in the aftermath of a brutal civil war, where widows he worked with in the Caucasus Mountains introduced him to supra. The experience profoundly changed him, and he brought the supra home to his family and friends in New York.
Twenty years later he founded a nonprofit, the First Things Foundation, which sends field workers to impoverished and isolated communities globally. Its first mission is to have workers live as respectful guests in their new culture, absorbing the language, eating the food, and shedding preconceptions of what the host community might need. Only after two years, when they’re fully assimilated, do they identify and help local entrepreneurs kickstart grassroots business and service projects. Keipi, which is open like a normal restaurant and usually conducts supras on Fridays, serves as the office for the nonprofit and showcases the foundation’s work abroad.
Heers’s first toast goes to the creator. Even though it’s eloquent, it’s unpretentious and he’s happy to slide in jokes among the poetry. His next toast is to unexpected beginnings, to new experiences. The merikipe chimes in and shares a little of how he came to work at Keipi. In between toasts, conversation flows between the guests, some of whom have come from out of town for the experience. Heers fills a horn of wine, called a khantsi, and asks me to deliver it to the end of the table, where I meet a group of four friends who came together to experience something new. Heers gives another toast to friendship, old and new and unexpected or otherwise. All the while, plates of food from Ukrainian chef Irina Tarasenko appear: salad heaped with beets and feta; pesto in round little balls; broth-filled dumplings and cheesy bread with a baked egg; roasted pork; delicious rolled eggplants stuffed with a filling I can’t name.
Heers proposes a toast to women; someone stands, raises her glass, and says that her mother has just celebrated eight years cancer-free. Another is to struggle, and to getting through dark times; my seatmate stands and shares how isolated she felt when she had just moved to Greenville, before finding her community here. At some point Heers leans over and tells me: “The Georgians have perfected the art of hospitality. There’s something about this toasting dinner that touches the design of the human person. It’s about seeing your neighbor.”
He’s right: Considering such lofty themes makes you consider the people and places and moments that have shaped you. It shakes loose memories and reminds you how universal moving through life really is. And then, when Heers invites you to do something like stand up, link arms with him, drink some strong liquor while everyone chants, and then empty what you couldn’t finish on your own head, you’re brought back to earth. Tradition, it turns out, can poke fun and be fun.
Of course, it crosses my mind that if a native of Georgia were observing our supra, they might not be impressed with our stiff toasts, mispronunciations, and weak livers. On second thought, maybe they would understand—because there is something touching about the way we’re all gathered here, stumbling through a tradition that isn’t our own, with foods most of us have never tasted on our plates and strange words in our mouths. Heers calls for a toast to the dead, a vital element of any supra. We say aloud the names of those we’ve lost, and that quiet moment feels as unifying as anything could.
After a fluffy, light cake laced with layers of icing arrives for dessert, and after a man Heers met at a supermarket the day before plays piano for us, beautifully and spontaneously, people begin to make their way home. But a few of us linger until after midnight, talking about the trivial (a cat that’s been coming around the restaurant whom they call Shadow Daddy Purrez) and the not so trivial (religion and science). Even during moments of disagreement, we keep toasting. Somewhere in the wine and passed plates and moments of laughter, and in the brief windows into people’s lives, I think I’ve started to understand the fundamental message of Heers’s work both here and abroad: Maybe hospitality, connection, and conversation can have a hand in transforming the world.
Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
