The pair later tracked down their birth mother as well, who revealed how her children were allegedly sold to their parents without her permission.
A teenage girl in the country of Georgia was seeing double after a friend sent her a video of someone on TikTok who looked just like her — only to later discover the other girl was, in fact, a long lost twin sister she never knew existed.
The wild saga was highlighted in the BBC World Service special Betrayal at Birth: Georgia’s Stolen Children, which documented the country’s far-too-recent history of mothers being told their newborn babies were dead, only for the living children to then be sold on the black market.
Identical twins Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania were two such children, separated at birth in 2002 and sold to different families who lived just 200 miles apart for most of their lives.
While Amy first learned of Ano when she saw a dancer who looked exactly like her perform on Germany’s Got Talent when she was 12, her family brushed it off at the time. Then, 7 years later Ano was sent a video Amy shared to TikTok by a friend, before Ano went to work trying to track down her look-alike. After finding someone on WhatsApp who knew Amy, they were connected via Facebook.
At first, they weren’t sure how — or even if — they were related, as their birthdates on their birth certificates were several weeks apart. “Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger,” Amy told BBC, noting how they not only had the same face, hairstyle and similar interests, but were also both diagnosed with dysplasia.
“I can say that even on the first day we started talking, I was feeling like I had known her for like 90 years, I knew her my whole life,” Ano told The Sun in another interview. “It didn’t feel like meeting a stranger.”
After they met up in person, they decided to confront their families and learned the “crazy story” behind their connection.
Both of their mothers couldn’t have children of their own and were told about “unwanted” babies at their local hospital, paying doctors to take them home. They thought the adoptions were above the line because doctors were involved; neither knew their daughters had sisters.
The two then joined a Facebook group aimed at reuniting Georgian babies with their birth mothers, started by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after learning she too was adopted. On the page, they were connected with another young woman — who they later learned was their sister — whose mother thought she had lost twin girls at the same hospital in which they were born in 2002.
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BBC cameras were rolling when the two sisters met up with their bio mom Aza at a hotel in Germany. Once reunited, they were told Aza went into a coma after giving birth and awoke to the news the twins died. That, of course, was a lie.
They also learned they had three other older sisters, including 22-year-old Anna — the one who they connected with on Facebook — as well as 24-year-old Nika and 25-year-old Lana.
All this because of a TikTok video of one of them piercing their eyebrow!
Watch the full BBC special above.
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