Tbilisi is the capital of Georgia, known as Tiflis in Russian. Tbilisi has a lively dining, nightlife, and social scene, a far cry from the days of the Soviet era. The capital’s beauty lies in the melting pot of architectural styles spanning from Persian to mediaeval. Brutal constructivist buildings sit next to shiny skyscrapers and western-inspired neighbourhoods. Tbilisi is both an ancient and cosmopolitan city; you can find a synagogue, a mosque where Shia and Sunni Muslims worship together, a Georgian basilica, an Armenian church, and a Zoroastrian Fire-Worshipper’s temple all within a 15-minute walk of one another.
The old town lies roughly between the River Kura or Mtkvari and the Narikala fortress on the hill. A good place to start is Liberty Square (where there’s a metro station) with a tall column at its centre, called the Monument of Freedom and Victory, with a statue of our old friends St George and the Dragon on the top. Near here is the Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin on Gia Abesadze Street. In the opposite direction, along Shota Rustaveli Avenue, is the Georgian National Museum.
The most amazing artefacts at the museum are the prehistoric human remains found in Dmanisi, which date back 1.8 million years and are the oldest in the world outside Africa. There are bones from at least 5 hominids and animals, such as the giant cheetah, short-necked giraffes, and giant ostrich.
The collection of treasures contains many intricate metalwork pieces. Gold mining began in Georgia in the 4th millennium BC; in the 3rd millennium BC, the Barrow Culture of the Trialeti Plateau produced pendants and cups including a gold bowl from about 1800 BC encrusted with jewels. After a thousand years, the Colchian culture produced stunning jewellery items for over 500 years, and these are well-represented here. Then it was the turn of the Kartli-Iveria culture represented by the treasure buried with a royal family dating from the second Century AD.
The exhibition of the Soviet occupation covers the period from 1921 to 1991, detailing how the leading families of the country were killed when in their prime, after the First World War. There’s a very graphic exhibit of a railway carriage that was machine-gunned by Soviet soldiers while full of Georgians. It made me sad to see all the photos of handsome families killed because they might prove influential in any resistance to Soviet rule. Prominent musicians, poets, and artists faced persecution, in particular. The statistics are grim: 80,000 Georgians were executed, 800,000 deported, and 400,000 died during the period of the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945.
