Kutaisi is the great historic city of western Georgia: capital of the mythical Colchis of the Golden Fleece, seat of the Georgian kingdom in its medieval golden age, and today a calm, green city on the banks of the Rioni River, far less touristy than Tbilisi but incredibly rich in history. Its old town of low-rise houses, its bustling markets, its bridges over the river and its unhurried atmosphere make it a pleasant place to wander, while some of the country's greatest treasures are clustered in the surrounding area.
Just outside the city are two gems listed as UNESCO World Heritage: the 11th-century Bagrati Cathedral, perched on a hill above Kutaisi, and Gelati Monastery, founded by King David the Builder, with breathtaking medieval frescoes and mosaics and an academy that was a great centre of learning. And as if that weren't enough, the region offers spectacular nature: the Prometheus Caves with their illuminated stalactites and underground river, and the canyons of Okatse (with a walkway hanging over the void) and Martvili (with a boat ride between rock walls).
Add the thermal baths and abandoned sanatoriums of nearby Tskaltubo, and its role as a cheap gateway to the country thanks to the low-cost airport, and Kutaisi becomes an ideal base for discovering western Georgia. This guide helps you plan what to see in and around the city, how much admission costs, how to get between cathedrals, caves and canyons, and to understand why this ancient city, so many times a capital, is much more than a stopover between the airport and the mountains.
Kutaisi is one of the oldest cities in the world: it already existed more than 3,000 years ago as the capital of Colchis, the kingdom of the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts. It was an important centre in Antiquity and, in the Middle Ages, became the capital of the Kingdom of Georgia: this is where David the Builder reigned, founding the Gelati monastery and academy in the 12th century, and where the Georgian 'golden age' flourished, reaching its peak under Queen Tamar. Bagrati Cathedral, consecrated around the year 1003, crowned the city. After the kingdom fragmented, Kutaisi was the capital of the Kingdom of Imereti until Georgia came under Russian rule in the early 19th century. It then became a provincial city of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and today it is the country's second city and was, for a while, the seat of the Georgian Parliament. That whole long history, from Colchis to the medieval kings and from the Russians to the present day, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Georgia's west and deep south: Kutaisi, the old capital with Bagrati Cathedral and Gelati, the spa town of Borjomi and the cave city of Vardzia, carved out under Queen Tamar.
Read the history of Imereti and the south: caves and hot springs →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Kutaisi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world: archaeology shows settlements in the area going back more than three thousand years, and some count it among the oldest cities in Europe. As early as the second and first millennia BC it was the centre of Colchis, the kingdom the ancient Greeks wrapped in legend. To them, Colchis was a land fabulously rich in gold at the eastern edge of the known world, and they set one of their most famous myths there: the myth of the Golden Fleece.
According to the legend, Jason and the Argonauts sailed from Greece to Colchis aboard the Argo in search of the fleece, the skin of a golden ram. It was guarded by King Aeëtes, and they won it with the help of his daughter, the sorceress Medea, who fell in love with Jason. There is a real background to the myth: the peoples of Colchis were skilled goldsmiths, and a local technique of collecting gold from rivers with sheepskins may have inspired the story. The magnificent gold treasures of Colchis found by archaeologists now fill Georgian museums, and a fountain in central Kutaisi is topped with golden replicas of those pieces.
Colchis kept up contacts with the Greek, Persian and Roman worlds, and for centuries it was a crossroads of trade and cultures. Over time, the region became part of the political entities that would give rise to historical Georgia, first as the kingdom of Egrisi-Lazica and later, once Christianised, within the medieval Georgian kingdoms. By the time its great era began, Kutaisi already had millennia of history behind it.
Kutaisi reached its peak in the Middle Ages, when it became the capital of the Kingdom of Georgia. Around the year 1000, King Bagrat III united the various Georgian kingdoms and principalities under his crown, creating a unified Georgian state, and made Kutaisi one of its centres of power. As a symbol of this new era, he had the great Bagrati Cathedral built. It was consecrated around 1003, crowned the hill above the city and for centuries was one of the kingdom's main churches and coronation sites.
The city's splendour grew under David IV, known as 'the Builder' (Aghmashenebeli), who reigned from 1089 to 1125 and is considered the greatest of the Georgian kings. David reorganised the state and the army, drove out the Seljuk invaders (with the decisive victory at the Battle of Didgori in 1121) and led Georgia into an unprecedented period of expansion and flourishing. In 1106, very close to Kutaisi, he founded Gelati Monastery, which he saw not only as a place of worship but as a great centre of learning. The Gelati Academy, where philosophy, theology, sciences and the arts were taught, was one of the brightest cultural centres of the Eastern Christian world, sometimes compared to a 'new Athens' or a 'second Jerusalem'. David asked to be buried there, beneath the gateway, so that everyone entering would step on his grave.
That golden age reached its height under his great-granddaughter, Queen Tamar (1184-1213). During her reign Georgia reached its greatest extent, power and cultural splendour, and Shota Rustaveli's epic 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin' became its literary jewel. Kutaisi and its region were at the heart of that kingdom, which between the 11th and 13th centuries was one of the great powers of the Caucasus and the Orthodox world. The frescoes and mosaics of Gelati are a dazzling record of that golden era.
The splendour did not last forever. From the 13th century onwards, the Mongol invasions and later the devastating campaigns of Timur (Tamerlane) at the end of the 14th century hit Georgia hard and broke its unity. Over the following centuries the unified kingdom split into several rival kingdoms and principalities, and Kutaisi became the capital of the Kingdom of Imereti, which covered western Georgia. It was a time of political decline, internal wars and constant pressure from the great neighbouring powers.
During those centuries, western Georgia, Imereti included, came increasingly under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans controlled the nearby Black Sea coast and held power over the Georgian kingdoms, which often had to pay them tribute, sometimes even in slaves. In 1692, amid these conflicts, Ottoman troops badly damaged Bagrati Cathedral and blew up its dome. The great church stayed in ruins for more than three centuries, an imposing stone shell on the hill that became the very image of the divided and besieged Georgia of that time.
The kings of Imereti fought to keep their independence between the Ottomans and the Persians, and they increasingly sought protection from a rising Christian power: the Russian Empire. That search for an Orthodox ally against the Muslim empires would shape the next stage in the history of Kutaisi and of all Georgia: its entry into the Russian orbit.
In the early 19th century, the Russian Empire finished annexing the Georgian kingdoms. The Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti in the east was annexed in 1801, and the Kingdom of Imereti, with Kutaisi, was absorbed shortly afterwards, around 1810. Georgian self-rule came to an end. Kutaisi became a provincial city of the empire and the capital of the Kutaisi 'guberniya' (province), which covered much of western Georgia. During the 19th century the city modernised: the railway arrived along with new schools and buildings, and it grew as an administrative and commercial centre.
In this period Kutaisi was also a centre of Georgian cultural and intellectual life and of the nationalist and revolutionary ideas that were stirring the empire. After the fall of tsarism, Georgia had a brief period of independence (the Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921), until the Red Army occupied the country in 1921 and made it part of the Soviet Union. Kutaisi then became an important Soviet industrial city. Its factories (textiles, vehicles, engineering) made it grow and gave it its 20th-century look.
The Soviet era left a mixed legacy: industrialisation and growth, but also repression and the weight of the regime. Nearby, in Tskaltubo, a large thermal spa resort was developed for the whole USSR, and its grand sanatoriums, now abandoned, are a striking symbol of that vanished world. Georgian independence in 1991 brought, as it did across the country, a very severe economic crisis that hit Kutaisi's industry hard and shaped the difficult 1990s.
Today, Kutaisi is Georgia's second city and the undisputed capital of its western half. After the hard years that followed independence, the city slowly recovered. One unusual episode marked recent decades: from 2012 to 2019, in an attempt to decentralise power, the Parliament of Georgia was moved from Tbilisi to Kutaisi, and a futuristic glass building was put up on the outskirts to house it. The move was controversial, and in the end Parliament mostly returned to the capital, but it put Kutaisi back in the national spotlight.
The city is now going through a tourism revival. The opening of David the Builder International Airport, with low-cost flights from all over Europe, has made Kutaisi one of the main gateways to the country: many travellers land here and start their tour of Georgia from the city. Its location, at the heart of the west, also makes it an ideal base for visiting its two great World Heritage gems (Bagrati and Gelati) and the region's spectacular nature: the Prometheus Cave, the Okatse and Martvili canyons and the hot springs of Tskaltubo.
Quieter and more authentic than Tbilisi, with its old town of low houses, its colourful market and its unhurried pace, Kutaisi gives travellers a different experience. It is an ancient city that was the capital of legendary Colchis and of the great medieval Georgian kingdom, and today it quietly preserves and displays three thousand years of history on the banks of the Rioni River. Few cities of Kutaisi's size hold such a deep past.
