One Festival Ends With You Toasted Into Unconsciousness, the Other Ends With a Llama Sacrifice Reenactment

🇬🇪 Georgia vs 🇵🇪 Peru

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Festival culture is where a country stops being polite about its history and just performs it, loudly, at you, whether you're ready or not. Georgia's festival calendar revolves substantially around wine, toasting, and the supra — a feast-slash-ritual that will outlast your liver's goodwill long before it outlasts the toastmaster's list of subjects requiring commemoration. Peru's festival calendar, meanwhile, centres on ceremony, ancestry, and spectacle, none more dramatic than Inti Raymi, Cusco's re-enacted Inca festival of the sun, staged with a scale and solemnity that makes most Western public holidays look like a long weekend with fireworks attached.

I have been toasted at a Georgian supra until I genuinely lost track of the subject matter. I have also stood in the Sacsayhuamán ruins at altitude, lightheaded from both the elevation and the ceremony, watching a llama sacrifice re-enacted with more gravity than most countries manage for their actual independence days. Neither experience left me entirely the same person.

Do's & Don'ts: Georgia

Do's & Don'ts: Peru

Georgia: The Toast Is the Institution

The Georgian supra is not a dinner party. It is a structured, almost liturgical event, presided over by a tamada — a toastmaster whose job is to guide a lengthy, specific sequence of toasts, each one dedicated to a subject: peace, family, the deceased, love, the host, Georgia itself, occasionally the specific virtues of whichever guest happens to be sitting closest. You do not toast out of order. You do not leave your glass unfinished when a toast concludes. And you absolutely do not underestimate how long this can run — a proper supra during Rtveli, the autumn grape harvest, can stretch across an entire evening, wine flowing from clay qvevri vessels that have been fermenting since the previous year's harvest.

What took me longest to understand is that this isn't excess for its own sake. The toasting sequence is a genuine social technology — a structured way of expressing gratitude, grief, love, and community that Georgian culture has clearly decided works better ritualised than left to spontaneous conversation. Declining a supra invitation, or worse, declining to participate properly once seated, reads as a real rejection of hospitality, one of the most seriously held values in the entire culture.

Rtveli season transforms whole villages into informal festival grounds — grape harvesting by day, feasting and toasting by night, an entire region operating on wine time for several intense, glorious weeks each autumn.

Peru: Ceremony as Ancestral Memory

Peru's festival calendar operates on an entirely different register — less conviviality, more reverence, with Inti Raymi as its unmatched centrepiece. Held every June 24th in Cusco, it re-enacts the Inca winter solstice festival honouring the sun god Inti, staged at the Sacsayhuamán fortress with hundreds of performers in elaborate traditional dress, culminating in a ceremonial (thankfully symbolic, these days) sacrifice that draws tens of thousands of spectators from across the world.

The scale is genuinely staggering, and so is the planning required — Cusco accommodation for Inti Raymi week books out months in advance, and the ceremony itself demands a level of physical readiness that catches a lot of visitors off guard, given Cusco sits above 3,400 metres and altitude sickness is a very real, very unglamorous risk for anyone who hasn't acclimatised.

What separates Inti Raymi from a purely tourist spectacle, though, is how seriously it's held by Peruvians themselves. This isn't a re-enactment staged solely for outside cameras — it's genuine, if adapted, ancestral memory, a living connection to Inca cosmology that predates Spanish colonisation and has survived centuries of suppression to be performed again, publicly, unapologetically. Smaller regional festivals throughout the year — many far less touristed, far more local — carry the same reverence at a village scale, and they reward the traveller willing to seek beyond Cusco's headline event.

The Verdict

Georgia wins on sheer conviviality — nowhere else have I felt so thoroughly, deliberately included in a ritual built to make strangers feel like family within a single evening. Peru wins on scale and historical weight — Inti Raymi is one of the most genuinely moving public spectacles I've witnessed anywhere, altitude sickness notwithstanding.

Georgia will make you drunk on wine and gratitude. Peru will make you lightheaded on altitude and ancestry. Plan for both accordingly, and don't schedule anything important the following morning either way.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/expats — "My first supra I tried to sip a toast instead of finishing it. The tamada noticed immediately and gently but firmly corrected me in front of the whole table. Learned fast."

Internations Tbilisi — "Rtveli season turned my quiet rental village into a nonstop harvest festival for three weeks. Nobody warned me, and it was honestly one of the best surprises of living here."

expat.com Peru — "Booked my Cusco hotel two weeks before Inti Raymi. Rookie mistake — paid triple and still ended up staying forty minutes outside the city. Book by March if you want June."

Conclusion

Georgia and Peru have each built festival cultures that function as genuine cultural memory rather than mere celebration — one preserved through ritualised hospitality and wine, the other through re-enacted ceremony and ancestral reverence. Both demand real participation, not passive observation, if you want to actually understand what you're witnessing. Show up to a Georgian supra ready to toast, drink, and mean it. Show up to Inti Raymi acclimatised, booked well ahead, and genuinely respectful of what you're watching. Either way, you're not a spectator here. You're a guest, and both cultures expect you to behave like one.