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LRB blog

In Tbilisi

Gillian Darley

The moon rises behind the Presidential Palace in Tbilisi

I arrived in Tbilisi in the small hours of the night. (I was on my way to the Tusheti to go trekking, partly in aid of the Roddy Scott Foundation.) The road from the airport passes a blazing, undulating glass building. My taxi driver made me guess what it might be. Askating rink or art gallery, perhaps? But no, it was the new Interior Ministry and Police Headquarters, which, for all the symbolic transparency, has a solid, blocky core.

Next, on a hilltop dominating the Georgian capital, comes the Presidential Palace: a crude White House lookalike topped by a glazed dome borrowed from the modern Reichstag. Even at 4.30a.m. Mikheil Saakashvili’s official residence shimmers with superabundant power. Then, heading over theriver towards the Old Town, an exploding pea pod of twisted glass and metal, kinetically lit, comes into view: the Bridge of Peace. All three, designed and built between 2006 and 2010, are the workof an Italian architect, Michele de Lucchi.

In daylight, Tbilisi is revealed to be in need of urgent (but careful) repair and a reliable water supply. The city mixes unassuming vernacular buildings with substantial stuccoed mansions,embalmed during the Soviet years. Extravagant art nouveau houses, their febrile iron balconies clinging tenuously to crumbling façades, are a reminder that oil money once flooded in from Baku. Theso-called Lermontov House in Gudiashvili Square, with its fretwork balconies, has become the emblem of an increasingly desperate rearguard action to save the remnants of the town from the all-consuming alliance ofvoracious redevelopment and heavy-handed reconstruction.

This has been the best ever year for tourism in Georgia, as peace returns after the 2008 war with Russia.Saakashvili may not like old, but visitors, bringing in their much needed foreign currency, do. How to convince him and his compliant city officials that if the Old Town is razed to make way forglobal shopping outlets and brash reconstructed streets and squares that would disgrace a Hollywood film lot, they – we – may stop coming?

architecture georgia

Comments

  • 5 October 2011 at 3:20am
    outofdate says:
    You don't really get countries vying for the 20 dollars a day independent travellers with an interest in architecture and trekking (ugh) grudgingly spend. There are two kinds of tourist worth having, mass and high-end, and obviously there's not going to be any high-end tourism to Georgia for the next 97 years, so that leaves package tours. Europeans are now mostly allergic to them, but Asians aren't, and they really do love nothing better than to travel vast distances to identikit shopping malls. That that's insane is neither here nor there: it's how they 'realise' themselves, so who are we to quibble.

    Plus from the point of view of your high-ranking-Georgian-official-who-asked-to-remain-anonymous, you get twice the kickbacks for tearing something down and then building something else there.
    • 5 October 2011 at 9:08am
      Geoff Roberts says: @ outofdate
      I see what you mean. There must be some oil money floating about that could be invested in some careful renovation. Maybe they could revive the ancient craft of flower smuggling - I spent an alcoholic evening in Moscow once with some flower smugglers from Georgia, and they weren't short of money.
    • 5 October 2011 at 2:06pm
      outofdate says: @ Geoff Roberts
      I love stories like that. Time was the New Yorker would give someone $5,000 and tell them to go away for six months and investigate Georgian flower smugglers, but now it's all Obama-pop science-Obama-pop science...