A rock music festival in the former Soviet republic of Georgia headlined by the Swedish band TIAMAT was disrupted by ultraconservative Orthodox Christian activists Saturday evening (June 4).

According to Georgia Today, a group of people led by several radical priests tried to shut down the two-day event on the outskirts of Georgia's capital city Tbilisi 30 minutes after the concert began.

"They were yelling and accusing us of organizing a mass sex orgy," the organizer of the event, Vladimir Unanyants, told the local web site Netgazeti. "Then, suddenly, the electricity went off. From what I've been told, the owner of the venue cut it off."

Unanyants added that the local Orthodox parish in the Tbilisi suburb of Zahesi demanded an end to the concert because they claimed that the festival was desecrating a nearby cemetery.

JINJER, one of the groups that were scheduled to play at the festival, wrote on their Facebook page that their performance was canceled "due to an attack by a group of religious fanatics." They added: "Tbilisi JAM! Fest was disrupted because a nearby monastery didn't like it. The priests brought an angry crowd of extremist supporters and attacked the festival area!!! It is sad to realize that in Georgia, a country that appears to be civilized, religion has more power than the law."

The police reportedly prevented the protesters from entering the main staging area of the festival and convinced the priests to leave the premises without further incident.

Edita Badasyan, a fan who witnessed the events, posted on Facebook that the festival was immediately shut down after the power cut.

"The electricity suddenly went out and the power company? EnergoPro Georgia says they don’t have any information about the cut. P.S. New information. The festival has been shut down," Badasyan wrote in her post.

The TIAMAT frontman also expressed his surprise at the lengths to which the radical priests went to get the festival canceled.

"What I heard from a band that played yesterday — we had dinner together — [was that the priests] were even quite violent; I mean, physical," he said. "They actually attacked people. And I don't really understand what that's about."

Advocates of "traditional" values in Georgia – including nationalists and social conservatives – have become more vocal of late, with fundamentalist Orthodox Christian groups and neo-Nazis targeting venues or events that they consider to be Western cultural threats.

The Georgian Orthodox Church, whose followers represent more than 80% of the population, has long been a significant player in the country's political landscape.