Abkhazia

The motivation of this post is to attract Permies to Abkhazia.

What it has to offer:
- Great water
- (good air if you are in the mountains, people burn their trash in the cities causing air pollution)
- Low cost of life: no health insurance, no income tax, no property tax (if you are lucky enough to have one))
- A climate from subtropical at the coast over temperate low in the mountains to alpine high in the mountains
- People from all over the world
- Plenty of challenges

Challenges:
- Recycling is currently not existing. Trash not separated and burned with a lot of smoke. Rocket stoves that dry it first and then burn it cleanly would already improve things a lot.
- Trade work needs to be rebuild from scratch. This needs people who are masters in their trade to come to Abkhazia and teach young people.
- The old Abkhaz culture does no longer work and has been forgotten by some Abkhazians. Capitalism is not a good replacement for it. A new culture is needed.
- Infrastructure is old and barely supports the current situation. New projects will have to build their own infrastructure.
- The country is not internationally recognized as an independent Nation. This makes it depend on Russia, giving Russia and Russian people living in Abkhazia far too much power.
- A lot of knowledge has been lost since the war. Many people have forgotten how nature works.
- Roads are … sometimes present. Without a car with all wheel drive and good ground clearance, one can't leave the coast. Or a horse.
- Only people with an Abkhazian passport can own land. Getting an that passport requires having lived here for 10 years, speaking Abkhaz and more.

Please ask! (However I am new here myself and don't know everything yet.)

This is interesting to me as I have ethnic Armenian heritage, oddly enough being only 1/8 of my blood is the only culture I've inherited from my parents at all. So from time to time I dream of going back to where my ancestors came from, but most of the region historically inhabited by Armenians is now hostile. My great grandmother fled Syria about 100 years ago during the Armenian genocide.
I can understand that the area desperately needs knowledgeable settlers, but I'm concerned that anyone immigrating there would be in danger. I don't even know whether I'd be permitted to enter with my American passport. I think that it will have to be native Abkhazians to actually change the culture, who wants to listen to outsiders who don't understand the culture or speak the language? Maybe if you can recruit youth to come workstay at permaculture farms, then you can change culture through them. Outsiders cannot purchase land so Abkhazi people need to be the landowners in the first place, so it's not as if I could bring a lump of money and make a difference by purchasing land. Maybe if you can find Russian-speaking permies they will have an easier time integrating and learning the language. Does anyone know a Slavic-oriented permaculture group? I think it would be beneficial as Russian permies would be able to go toe-to-toe with those Russians who are throwing their weight around/taking advantage of their power to exploit others.
Anyway I think there is a lot of risk involved in settling in a country that is in so much political turmoil. This is a job, in my opinion, best suited for patriotic natives of the country rather than outsiders.
If we can help youth to learn, that's the long-term solution. It sounds like it would be difficult for young people there to leave and study abroad, with so few countries accepting their nation as legitimate. So I guess what you need is people who are able to teach, rather than a critical mass of settlers who don't have the right to purchase land.

There are many Armenian people living here, in fact the owner of the house I live in is an Armenian man.
Trying to circumvent the existing laws is – in my opinion – a pretty terrible idea. There is one village of mostly Russian people who tried that. It is now empty.

Building up a new culture will definitely need to include the Abkhazian people. However there are experiences and knowledge from Europe that – I think – would be wise to include.

For me, the Abkhazian people are not foreign people, nor am I foreign to them. There is mutual respect and interest, even though we don't speak the same language.