The strictly regulated banquet known as supra, structured by drinking toasts and led by a toastmaster, stands at the center of this book as one of the most popular stereotypes of Georgian national identity and a classic of Georgian ethnology. By embedding it within recent performance theories, providing a historical contextualization of the supra in the process of nation-building, and combining case studies with quantitative methods, a complex picture can be drawn that challenges previously taken-for-granted assumptions about the subject of investigation as well as ritualization and performance in general. As the first and second chapters demonstrate, the supra operates on two temporal levels simultaneously. On one hand, pre-coded procedures are activated during the performance, creating continuity and tradition.