I have always been drawn to cities. To a detached mind they offer unparalleled scope for observation; there is simply more stuff to consider in the course of a walk than can be found in the countryside. They also provide the individual with a greater opportunity to have what might be called “positive unanticipated social interactions”, or as James Howard Kunstler puts in his work The Geography of Nowhere,

“You are able to see other people along the way. You may even have a conversation with a stranger. This is called meeting people, the quintessential urban pleasure. (Or else it is called a mugging, the quintessential urban calamity.)”

I have further been drawn to cities as laboratories for how built environments influence human activity- how they affect how we work, how we socialize, how we express our political rights (or lack thereof!). Visiting six different national capitals in a short period of time offers the amateur urbanist a great opportunity to examine what, in the physical landscape, is privileged and prized in each and to consider what this may say about the societies that built them. It is even more interesting, to my mind, to be able to case study five capitals of countries that all received their independence, from the same central government, at the same time. Interwoven in these relatively new national capitals (though most were SSR capitals) is a story about the past 26 years, about fledgling countries coming to grips with their independence and with their relationship to their history, to Russia and to the rest of the world. So let’s begin with the first one appropriately first.

Tbilisi 

Our arrival into Tbilisi was at the truly unholy hour of 4:45 AM. After braving the backseat of an airport cab into town we presented ourselves at the door of our hostel. Seeing as we were 10 hours before check in time our nice private room was unavailable, but the fellow behind the desk kindly offered us the use of a glorified broom closet. He also told us that the water was safe to drink, which my stomach quickly unmasked for the lie it was. So it was a pretty rough introduction to the town.

However it wasn’t long before Tbilisi was able to throw its spell on us.

Our time in Tbilisi was almost always enjoyable- as it is the transport hub for the whole country we returned there over the course of our journeys around the country and it was a welcome urban respite from our sweatier mountain activities. We were given a good lay of the land at the start of our visit by taking a free “Tbilisi Hack” walking tour around the Old City, looking in at churches (including one of two Roman Catholic Churches in the whole country), parks, and wine cellars, where I was challenged to a drinking horn contest and easily emerged the victor over a Latvian youth.


Domination: a photo essay in 4 parts

From our hostel we could see Liberty Square, with a column topped with a gold statue of St. George (from whence the country’s name comes, it being apparently more memorable than Kartlos) slaying the dragon (the statue used to be Lenin, obviously).


Walking up from Liberty Square we travelled up Rustaveli Avenue, a grand tsarist boulevard lined with museums (including the exceptionally good National Museum, filled with the treasures of Georgia’s ancient kingdoms), theatres and government buildings, including the former parliament building (MPs are still pretty pissed they got moved to Kutaisi). Rustaveli Avenue is named for Shota Rustaveli, a medieval poet so beloved that up to the mid-20th century a bride’s traditional dowry included a copy of his epic The Knight in the Panther Skin. 

Further on was Vake Park, a large and pretty park where we learned an important lesson: the Soviet Union loved fountains. A town is noplace if it doesn’t have a fountain, and the quality of fountain was an easy indicator of a place’s current prospects.

A working fountain and massive but non-working WWII memorial fountain, Vake Park, Tbilisi


High-quality fountain in the prosperous town of Mtskheta


Remnant of fountain, Gori


Some solid fountains in Kutaisi

We climbed to the top of a tall hill in the park and could suddenly see where the Soviet Union had left its mark: rather than destroy the attractive parts of the city, it had built its usual charming 10 story mega-blocks on the hills stretching north and east.

Soon though, it was time to leave Tbilisi. We hopped on the metro (clean and easy to navigate like all Soviet metros) and got dumped off at Didube station. We were quickly overwhelmed by what faced us: a teeming, sun-blasted collection of ramshackle buildings, with minibuses filling every spare inch. There was no signage indicating where one had to go, not that we would have been able to read any of it, and we were almost instantly swarmed by taxi drivers who would have charged us many times the price of taking a minibus. We wandered vainly until someone overheard our plaintive wails of “marshrutka Mtskheta“,  pointed out that we were mispronouncing both, and led us over to where our minibus would leave from.

Although that marked the beginning of our travels through the rest of Georgia, our successive visits to the town brought their own share of surprises. Upon  returning from our trip to the mountains in Svaneti, we stayed at Fabrika, the coolest (and certainly the most expensive) hostel in Georgia. Approached from the city’s main train station, it sits like a hipster citadel towering above a fairly rundown neighborhood. It was renovated out of an old sewing factory and has been renovated in what might be described as “International Hipster Moderne” style- unpainted cement columns, irreverent wall art, mismatched furnishings. Around a courtyard festooned with fairy lights were cool restaurants and bars. A dive bar called “Dive Bar” was serving overpriced (for Georgia) beer and playing After The Moment, by Craft Spells. It certainly was in a way like going home, but it was filled by the young and the interesting, particularly in the relatively cool evening when the courtyard jammed full of revelers.

The neighborhood to the east of this hostel was anchored by a grand Beaux Arts-era commercial boulevard, David Aghmashenebeli Avenue, packed with shops and restaurants. Curiously, while the old city across the river was filled mainly with western tourists, the shops on Aghmashenebeli appeared to be mainly aimed at Middle Eastern visitors. It was as if two different tourism agencies had been given oversight of the two sides of the river.

It was along this avenue that we made the foolish traveler’s error of trying to pick a restaurant with no information whilst hungry; starving and not liking the surly Turkish cafes we had passed, we allowed ourselves to be solicited into a “traditional Georgian restaurant” with nary a Georgian on staff- everyone appeared to be Russian. Grace was forced to content herself with eavesdropping on a nasally American family loudly beginning every sentence with “Well, in Ameeerrrica…” I settled into watching Georgian X Factor and a dubbed version of The Heat.

On our last visit to Tbilisi, we stayed in a fantastic apartment let out on Airbnb in the middle of the old city; we were the first guests. The apartment came with a roof terrace with nearly 360 degree views of all of the major sights of town.


Breakfasting on the roof

We spent our last days in town visiting some more sights: the Dry Bridge Market, a flea market with a bizarre array of items from antique drinking horns to some pretty heavy Soviet-era weaponry, the Sameba Cathedral, a massive modern cathedral that reminded me of Sacre Coeur in its too-hugeness and the feeling that it had been built for secular rather than sacred reasons, and the Narikala fortress, the 16th and 17th century fortifications that replaced successive forts dating back to the 4th century. It was rather emasculatingly named the “Narin Qala”, or “little fortress”, by the Mongols when they invaded.


Sameba Cathedral

Walking along the ridge of the hill from the fortress one reaches Kartlis Deda, the “Mother of Georgia” statue. Built in Soviet times (along with other mother statues, such as Mother of Russia and Mother of Armenia), the 20 meter statue holds a sword in one hand and a cup of wine in the other. While this is intended to symbolize that Georgia is open to friendship while prepared to defend itself, I prefer the alternate characterization our free tour guide gave us: “We will get you drunk and kill you.” If there is a Father of Georgia, it must be billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, about whom more later, whose massive home is built just down the road from the statue.


Karelia Deda at sunset

The lay of the land

The city’s old town wraps around a bend in the Mt’k’vari river. According to legend, it was founded when a king, on a hunting trip, noticed a felled pheasant cooking in the sulfurous hot springs around which the old town built up, Tbilisi being derived from “warm spring”. I’m not sure I would found a town in a place just because it saved me having to boil water for dinner, but the fledgling city made good use of the water, erecting baths and ordering that all merchants wishing to enter had to clean themselves off before coming into the city. The city stretches mostly north and east from the medieval town, with grand tsarist avenues lined by large and attractive institutional, cultural and commercial buildings. Even the more stolid Soviet contributions in the center of the city had the good fortune to be built from a local stone that is radiant in the sun and renders them stately rather than gloomy. Mikheil Saakashvili, who was elected following the bloodless Rose Revolution in 2004, invested money to add to the architectural legacy of the city, including the Presidential Palace, the pedestrian Peace Bridge, an unfinished concert hall known colloquially as the “dismembered legs” and a building that looks like a futuristic cluster of mushrooms but apparently houses a large number of citizen-facing public services.


The “Shiny Legs”, with oddly-domed Presidential Palace in the background


Public Services Building

The Public Services Building is constructed open-plan, to deter bribe-taking, and we were told that things were so efficient there that you could probably get married, divorced and married again several times in one day. Saakashvilli built a number of these centers across the country in high modernist style. While the specifics of the architecture may not suit one’s preferences, what a laudable notion: that government services should be delivered efficiently in an environment that gives them, and their recipient citizens, dignity. It seems like all such buildings in the US and UK have been discarded by their respective governments as a waste of money and turned into luxury flats or left to decay under the weight of successive stopgap renovations. A concrete box with mouldering carpets is good enough for you to get a drivers license or pick up your welfare check, citizen.

I may be accused of arrogance in this view- why waste the money on a building when it can be spent on people? I believe that architecture is reflective of people’s values- that an activity is imbued with worth and respect when we place it in a well-built and attractive setting. If public services are only worthy of shitty buildings, who cares when they get cut? Similarly, if the only thing worthy of good architecture is wealth, doesn’t that mean we are bereft of civic or intellectual aims, of a soul, as a society? What does it say when a billionaire receives millions from a cash-strapped local and state government to build a sports arena that he will own free and clear, laden with “luxury boxes” that he will extract massive profit from? What public good is entailed from such spending? (Do not dare say “oh it generates economic benefits”- there is mountainous evidence in economic literature that stadiums are a very poor investment). The fabric of a society is rooted in the fabric of its polities, and it seems to me a good thing when a government’s obligations to the people are solemnised in a place that is itself worthy of respect.

At any rate, Saakashvili, despite reducing corruption and modernizing Georgia’s state and private sectors, used the impressive political capital he had amassed to centralize power and misused state power to eliminate rivals. In 2012 his party got the boot in parliamentary elections. After leaving office, he was charged with crimes relating to exceeding his constitutional powers and fled the country. In a strange turn of events Saakashvili became friendly with the president of the Ukraine and was named governor of Odessa oblast, being given Ukrainian citizenship (which automatically stripped him of his Georgian citizenship). After getting frustrated with his lack of influence and openly criticizing President Poroshenko for enabling corruption, he quit, tried to form a new political party in Ukraine without much luck (in 2017,  only 2% of Ukranians had a “very favorable”  opinion of him compared with 44% “very unfavorable”) and, while traveling in the US, got stripped of his citizenship on the grounds that he lied on his passport application (he claims that the published application has a forged signature). And that is the curious tale of how a man can go from celebrated modernizing president to stateless vagabond in less than a decade. The party that replaced him is run by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in Georgia, who came out of nowhere (by which I mean quiet oligarchy in Russia), bought land from the national botanical garden to build a 108,000 square foot Bond villain house (featuring shark tank, penguins and indoor waterfall) that can be seen from all over Tbilisi won the 2012 election, got bored of being prime minister after a year and retired to let his lackeys take over. His party is called Georgian Dream, after a song written by his son, albino rapper Bera. Bidzina was extremely well-represented in the Panama Papers leak and only 10% of people said they would support his party in the next election if it came to it. So Georgian politics is a bit quirky.

Back to Tbilisi. If there is a cliche that could sum up the physical character of the city, it would be “dress for the job you want.” Even before the 2008 conflict with Russia, Georgia looked west, to Europe and the United States, for friends. To that end they have worked very hard to make Tbilisi a modern European city- a scrubbed up old city (slightly over-scrubbed in parts), beautiful institutional and cultural buildings, long and attractive main boulevards, a smattering of starchitecture. They even have a Europe Square, with the EU flag hung up, and long avenues with American flags hung up (George W. Bush Highway runs from central Tbilisi to the airport). They have made their aspiration to join the EU clear and if you only look superficially they look ready.


A proud European at Europe Square. Note that Ireland has been rudely omitted from the relief. 

Lifting back the veneer, Tbilisi either still has a way to go or retains a significant amount of its old character, depending on the spin you prefer. A street away from the main drags you can find buildings in a state of utter dilapidation, broken up roads and sidewalks, parks that missed out on the recent largesse. There is beauty of a different sort in such places although I’m afraid I don’t truck with those nostalgic for it- I would prefer people have decent places to live than that I end up with some edgy instagram photos (“really authentic street scene here”). And of course not all of the building is so worthwhile. Crowding out the attractive parts of the old city along the river are hideously garish casinos built to the usual soulless standard, which may symbolize a new era of development after the high-minded Saakashvili period. Indeed, the “dismembered legs” concert hall remains unfinished, no longer prioritized by the Georgian Dream government. They did realize they needed to at least enclose the building to prevent it from completely wasting away, and apparently it is very occasionally used for exhibitions.

But it’s a start. With a finite amount of money, the government went out and bought a nice suit to wear to the interview with Europe. Cross fingers they get the job, because otherwise the suit won’t pay for people’s needs.

Tbilisi is a fascinating microcosm for the Georgian state as a whole- at a crossroads between east and west, caught between embracing modernity and tradition as a way of escaping its Soviet past, beautiful and messy and eager to please. The center of the city itself weathered the Soviet era well, retaining a great deal of its older beauty and charm, which now serves as both the focal point for tourism and as a counterpoint to the extremely modern building occurring all over town. Consider this one to watch over the next few years; it’s changing fast.