



1 / 16 Chevron Chevron Myriam Meloni Maca, who got married at sixteen, is the mother of a six-month-old child and is pregnant with another. Imereti region, Georgia, 2016.

Megi, at sixteen years old, looks like any schoolgirl in love as she embraces a lanky young man, smiling and whispering up at him. Samaia, one year older, has inquisitive eyes, and looks like she ought to be doing her homework. But these teen-agers, two of the nine girls whose lives the photojournalist Myriam Meloni documented during a trip to the Republic of Georgia earlier this year, are also wives—among the estimated seventeen per cent of Georgian women who marry before the age of eighteen.

Although early marriage is often associated with longstanding tradition, in Georgia the practice increased dramatically during the period of war and economic instability that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—which, for all its faults, had increased women’s access to education and work outside the home. In rural areas of Georgia, which has one of Europe’s highest rates of early marriage, young brides today are still kidnapped, a practice that was forbidden in Soviet times and has been punishable with a prison sentence since 2004.

Pink or red bows mark the house of a new bride or fiancée. At sixteen, Samaia became engaged to a twenty-five-year-old man whom she’d never spoken to and had seen only once, in the street. Meloni sat with Samaia in a room decorated with her engagement gifts, carefully arranged reminders that the girl’s future had already been decided. A plastic-wrapped sugar cake with two white birds would be saved until Samaia bore her first child; during the celebration for the newborn, the cake would be cut and served. In a wedding-party photo, Samaia stands behind another young girl in heavy makeup and a tiara. This other bride, Samaia’s relative or neighbor, could pass for an adult if not for the petulant expression on her face—a teen-ager’s trademark sulk. When asked what she thought of her fiancé, Samaia repeated what her family had told her: “He’s a good guy and he comes from a good family.” As Meloni puts it, “There’s not much you can say when you don’t know someone at all.”

The expectation that brides should be virgins, and that women should live with their parents until marriage, pushes teen-age couples to wed. Young brides often become pregnant immediately after marrying, and they are more likely to suffer serious complications in childbirth. When Megi, who lives in Batumi, gave birth to a baby last year, her body was still too small to allow for a vaginal birth.

In order to talk to each of her subjects, Meloni usually had to seek permission first from the family-in-law, then from the husband, and, last, from the girl herself. Many of the photographs show the young brides gazing into the distance, as if meditating on the lives they never had. But most poignant are the women who remain invisible. In place of a portrait of Naila, who was married at sixteen and is now the mother of a five-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son, Meloni offers a photograph of a cluster of pale pumpkins on a concrete floor. Naila’s husband wouldn’t allow her to be photographed alone.

As part of its effort to meet European standards, Georgia recently abolished a provision allowing marriage with parental consent at the age of sixteen. Next year, another provision allowing early marriage with court consent is to be abolished. But many early marriages are unofficial, and take place within religious and ethnic-minority communities—Muslim, Chechen, Azeri—that stand apart from mainstream Georgian society. Legislative change alone is unlikely to put an end to the practice. Local authorities are often reluctant to interfere in family affairs.

Tamuna, who once dreamed of becoming a professional dancer, was married at fifteen. In keeping with common practice, she and her husband lived with his parents; she says that they forbade her to dance in the house. After three years, Tamuna, now mother to a young child and pregnant with another, left her husband and returned to her parents’ house. During Meloni’s visit, Tamuna’s father, a wedding musician, took out his accordion; Tamuna jumped out of her chair and started dancing.

Georgia mandates that children attend school through the twelfth grade, but some families see no reason to educate a girl whose life will consist mainly of marriage and childbearing. Still, some girls persevere in their ambitions. Ia, from the Imereti region, married at seventeen despite her mother’s objections; it was her own choice, the result of great love for her husband. Unlike many young brides, she continued studying with the support of her mother-in-law, and plans one day to become a pharmacist.