The Many Faces of Tbilisi
Tbilisi is famous for its diverse architecture that occurred due to the blend of different cultures. Tbilisi has always been a fragmentary city, a cosmopolis for Azeri merchants, Armenian carpet weavers, holidaying Russian painters, Silk Road traders and Syriac holy men.
The city had good and bad times. It has been sacked and burned to the ground countless times. The history of Georgia is all invasions, yet the country has survived with its own language, alphabet, religion and culture.
Tbilisi feels European, medieval and completely foreign all at once. Two things make it unique: its geography and the dilapidated beauty of the old city. It’s on the banks of the Kura River, and to the south the old town climbs up a high ridge, on top of which sit Narikala fortress. In the old town, every building seems to house a dozen storeys, and every third one seems to be crumbling. Vines grow up the walls and flowers from every crack. The houses are characterized by deep, elaborately carved, wooden balconies painted white, ochre, and pale blue. Everything looks both familiar and like nowhere else. It’s like a European city that’s grown in a slightly different universe.
History has played rough with Tbilisi. Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russians and Soviets have all had their way with her. Each has left a little of its best self-there. The result is a city that Boris Pasternak called a chimera – a fanciful beast with a Western head and an Eastern body.
Tbilisi has gotten even more fanciful recently. Italian architects have been busy with glass and steel, adding the sleek vernacular of modern capitalism to the city’s “Babel” of building styles.
The new buildings are striking. It seems that Georgia’s these new buildings have become pawns in a power struggle over its place in the world. And I’m wondering. Does this city belong in the cosmopolitan sphere of the European architects who built them? Or should it remain somewhere lost in time, “a city as if not of this world,” as Pasternak puts it?
The Many Faces of Tbilisi
Tbilisi is famous for its diverse architecture that occurred due to the blend of different cultures. Tbilisi has always been a fragmentary city, a cosmopolis for Azeri merchants, Armenian carpet weavers, holidaying Russian painters, Silk Road traders and Syriac holy men.
The city had good and bad times. It has been sacked and burned to the ground countless times. The history of Georgia is all invasions, yet the country has survived with its own language, alphabet, religion and culture.
Tbilisi feels European, medieval and completely foreign all at once. Two things make it unique: its geography and the dilapidated beauty of the old city. It’s on the banks of the Kura River, and to the south the old town climbs up a high ridge, on top of which sit Narikala fortress. In the old town, every building seems to house a dozen storeys, and every third one seems to be crumbling. Vines grow up the walls and flowers from every crack. The houses are characterized by deep, elaborately carved, wooden balconies painted white, ochre, and pale blue. Everything looks both familiar and like nowhere else. It’s like a European city that’s grown in a slightly different universe.
History has played rough with Tbilisi. Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russians and Soviets have all had their way with her. Each has left a little of its best self-there. The result is a city that Boris Pasternak called a chimera – a fanciful beast with a Western head and an Eastern body.
Tbilisi has gotten even more fanciful recently. Italian architects have been busy with glass and steel, adding the sleek vernacular of modern capitalism to the city’s “Babel” of building styles.
The new buildings are striking. It seems that Georgia’s these new buildings have become pawns in a power struggle over its place in the world. And I’m wondering. Does this city belong in the cosmopolitan sphere of the European architects who built them? Or should it remain somewhere lost in time, “a city as if not of this world,” as Pasternak puts it?
