There are six of them. If you want to meet them, you must pass through a dark and cold corridor in the cellar and, having ascended a flight of stairs, open the door…
 
    It brings to mind one of Tolkien's fantastic plots in which guards are watching over the treasure that has been forgotten by people. But in reality people have forgotten that this treasure represents their spirituality…
     These six people show great tenderness for, speak to and generally try to cheer up those valuable fragile creations that have been packed in boxes and consigned to oblivion and decay. These people belong to those odd species who never betray and who know that betraying the past means loss of the future.
     It all began back in 1937 when Tinatin Tumanishvili founded a toy museum in Tbilisi. Prior to that she was first a nursery school teacher and then the executive secretary of the Children's Toy Committee under the People's Commissariat for Education.
     After the opening of the toy museum, Tinatin Tumanishvili together with her like-minded people set about creating the magical and infinitely kind world of the museum.

     This world had no dark colors in it. It was a world where good prevailed, a place where children's dreams came true. The dolls spoke with one another, danced and giggled, drank tea and blew soap balloons. It was like the dream inspired by the tales of Andersen, Hauff and Hofmann about the shepherd girl, a soot-covered boy or the Chinese emperor smiling down from the porcelain teapot.
     Nino Brailashvili, Nino Beliaeva, Ludmila Gilchevskaya, Rapiel Bektabegishvili - this is an incomplete list of the masters who were like the supreme demiurg at the dawn of the creation of the universe, when the fatal error had not yet been committed.
     At first the museum was housed in the kindergarten building, but was later transferred to the Pioneers' Palace, whose mirrored walls and glittering floor reflecting the light of dancing sunbeams still remembered the music of the balls held here by the family of the Tsar's viceroy. The dolls were skillfully and tastefully seated on the specially designed shelves in the hall filled with the scent and charm of the past. Here you could view a unique nineteenth-century mechanical singing toy - the nightingale in a cage, sitting on a perch, like live bird who had accidentally flown into the cage.  Here the gracious Georgian women played the chonguri and then elegantly bowed to the delighted audience; Ukrainian dancers featured in Gogol's stories performed their national folk dances; peasant girls and boys frolicked and soap balloons glistened in all seven colors of the rainbow…
     Apart from individual authors' works, the collection also contained folk toys, exhibits purchased from the population, and gifts brought from foreign countries. Evgeni Kharadze, in particular, loved to present such gifts  - he used the old Georgian word 'tikinas' for toys. After every foreign trip he would delight the museum employees with the words “I have brought tikinas for you.”
     Eventually around two thousand folk and a thousand author's toys were collected.  Every new toy to be added to the collection first had to pass a strict examination by the Art Council. Only after passing this procedure could the item gain its place in the collection. A collection of such refined taste and high culture can scarcely be found in the world.
     Vasil Bagrationi, the present director of the museum, has held this position since 1967. He probably could not have imagined that moving the toy museum from the Pioneer Palace to the Elene Akhvlediani Children's Picture Gallery would signal the beginning of its end. Wasn't it all too natural for the toys to exist right next to the children's painting?
     In 1998 the dolls were made to leave the bright hall of the gallery - temporarily, as their 'guards' were Eter Buchukuri, Eliso Kotrikadze, Tamar Chaniashvili and Vasil Bagrationi were reassured. But 'temporarily' has stretched on for several years already.
     Over this period the museum has been robbed several times. The thieves have stolen twenty-five unique nineteenth century exhibits.
     Due to the lack of basic conditions for safekeeping, the mechanisms of the toys stacked in the boxes are now out of order and the fine garments of the dolls have been eaten away by moths.
     The toys are gradually being ruined. They are falling apart because it is impossible for them to exist inside the dark and cold boxes. And while the five selfless guards bear the pain of being imprisoned in a virtual dungeon, the humiliation of useless visits to various authorities, and keeping watch over virtually empty, barren halls, the 'tikinas' are slowly dying. Those who are capable of ending their plight probably do not realize that these toys are our past, and the present of the children who are our future. It is the world that we have forgotten twice: once when we grew up and then again when we deprived the museum of its right of existence. By so doing we have deprived our souls of the chance to preserve purity and innocence. After all, as ancient wisdom says, the most difficult thing is for an adult to remain a child.
     The toy museum is the museum of the brightest period of life: our childhood. For the Ministry of Education, under whose patronage the museum existed for so many years, it should not be such a daunting task to at least return it to its old home. Especially as President Shevardnadze himself has signed a resolution to settle this matter in the shortest order.
     However, that resolution signed in 2000 remains on paper, while the dolls still remain packed away in boxes in a damp room with fractured walls…
     Unlike the faithful guards still waiting and hoping for a change, time is not willing to wait …