President Saakashvili said after attending Orthodox Christmas midnight mass in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi that Georgia should not allow itself to slide back into the past.

“I’d like to wish not to allow undermining what we have been building for all these years with great care, not to allow destruction that we are being threatened with, not to allow the country to go backwards into the past, a rendezvous with the past that has started and to end this unwanted rendezvous once and for all,” he told journalists.

“We should be oriented towards the future. Christmas is a celebration of future, beginning of the new and we should never be returned back into the past… In this regard Georgia of course faces serious challenges today,” Saakashvili said.

“I am a realist, but at the same time I am an optimist and I believe that we will overcome all the difficulties; Georgia will evade all the possible risks and it will continue development, because our people deserve it,” he said.

Meanwhile, PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, who attended Christmas service in a church in his native village of Chorvila in Imereti region, said: “Christmas is birth of the new and I believe that we will build together with new vigor Georgia that we all dream about.”