Tbilisi is one of those capitals that win you over effortlessly. Tucked into a valley on the banks of the Mtkvari, it mixes old and new like few others: medieval alleys with rickety wooden balconies, stone Orthodox churches, steaming sulphur baths under brick domes, and right next to them futuristic glass buildings, bars hidden in courtyards and a natural wine, food and electronic music scene that turned it into one of the trendiest cities in Eastern Europe. All at prices that are still surprisingly low.
According to legend, the city was born when King Vakhtang Gorgasali, out hunting, discovered some hot springs: that's why it's called Tbilisi, 'warm place'. Those thermal waters still bubble up in the Abanotubani district, where you can take a sulphur bath just as people did centuries ago. Above it rise Narikala fortress and the statue of Mother Georgia, with a cup of wine in one hand and a sword in the other, which sums up the country's character: welcome the friend with wine, the enemy with steel.
This guide helps you get around Tbilisi in a practical way: how much the baths cost, how the transport and the Metromoney card work, what to see in the old town, where to eat khinkali and khachapuri, how to use Bolt and which day trips are worth doing from here. It's a safe, cheap and warmly hospitable city, ideal for starting a trip through the Caucasus.
Tbilisi was founded in the 5th century by King Vakhtang Gorgasali next to some hot springs, and around the year 500 it became the capital of the kingdom of Kartli (Caucasian Iberia). Its location on the route between Europe and Asia, at the heart of the Silk Road, made it rich and coveted: over the centuries it was razed and burned dozens of times by Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and others, and it always rose again. It lived a golden age under Queen Tamar in the 12th-13th centuries, fell under the Persian and Ottoman spheres, and in 1801 was annexed by the Russian Empire, which transformed it with avenues and stately buildings. It was the capital of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921), then of Soviet Georgia, and since 1991 of independent Georgia, the stage for the 2003 Rose Revolution. That history of crossing empires, destruction and rebirth is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Georgia: the capital of sulphur baths and wooden balconies, alongside Mtskheta, the old spiritual capital, and the age-old sites of the Mtkvari valley.
Read the history of Tbilisi and the historic centre →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend has it that, in the mid-5th century, King Vakhtang I Gorgasali went hunting in the forests around his capital, Mtskheta. His falcon swooped on a pheasant and both birds tumbled into the undergrowth. When the servants found them, the two birds were dead, cooked in a spring of hot water bubbling up from the ground. Amazed by these thermal springs, the king ordered a city to be founded there and named it Tbilisi, from the Georgian 'tbili', meaning warm. Those same sulphurous waters still flow today in the Abanotubani district, and taking a bath in them is touching the very origin of the city.
Beyond the story, the choice of site was a strategic move. Tbilisi stands in a gorge where the Mtkvari River cuts its way between mountains, an unavoidable passage on the route linking Europe with Asia, the Black Sea with the Caspian, and the north with Persia. Vakhtang Gorgasali, one of the great kings of ancient Georgia, understood that whoever controlled this bottleneck would control the kingdom's trade and defence. His son Dachi moved the capital from Mtskheta to Tbilisi around the year 500, and from then on the city never stopped growing.
That privileged position was both its blessing and its curse. For fifteen hundred years, Tbilisi would be one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in the region, but also one of the most fought-over and battered: it is estimated that it was razed, sacked or burned almost forty times by the successive empires that contested it. And just as many times, it rose again from its ashes.
From its founding, Tbilisi was a prize coveted by every empire that passed through the Caucasus. In the 7th century the Arabs arrived and made the city the capital of a Muslim emirate for more than four centuries. Under their rule, Tbilisi became a thriving trading hub on the Silk Road, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side, and caravans loaded with silk, spices and slaves passed through its markets on their way between Persia, Byzantium and the northern steppes.
The big turning point came in 1122, when King David IV 'the Builder', one of Georgia's national heroes, took the city from the Muslims and made it the capital of a unified and powerful Georgian kingdom. This was the start of the Georgian golden age, which would reach its peak under his great-granddaughter, Queen Tamar (1184-1213), remembered as a wise and just ruler under whose reign the arts, architecture and literature flourished: Shota Rustaveli's 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin', the national poem, dates from this period. Tbilisi was then one of the most brilliant cities of the East.
That splendour collapsed in the 13th century with the arrival of the Mongols, and above all in 1386, when Tamerlane's hordes razed the city. From then on, Georgia was left fragmented and trapped between two Muslim giants: the Ottoman Empire to the west and Safavid Persia to the east, which fought over the Caucasus for centuries. The most tragic episode came in 1795, when the Persian shah Agha Mohammad Khan invaded Georgia and almost completely destroyed Tbilisi, massacring and enslaving much of its population. It was the blow that pushed the Georgian kings to seek the protection of a new power: the Russia of the tsars.
In 1801, just a few years after the Persian devastation, the Russian Empire annexed the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti and, with it, Tbilisi. The city became the administrative centre of the whole Russian Caucasus, seat of the tsar's viceroy, and went through a profound transformation. The Russians laid out wide, straight avenues —such as today's Rustaveli—, and built palaces, theatres, the opera house and European-style buildings that still define the 'new' centre, very different from the medieval maze of the old town.
Throughout the 19th century, Tbilisi became an astonishingly cosmopolitan city, a melting pot where Georgians, Armenians (who came to be the largest and most commercially powerful community), Russians, Persians, Azerbaijanis, Jews, Germans and a small European colony lived side by side. Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy passed through and were captivated; the Frenchman Alexandre Dumas described its sulphur baths with enthusiasm. The city had theatres, cafés, newspapers in several languages and an intense intellectual life.
It was also a political hotbed. At the start of the 20th century, Tbilisi became a centre of revolutionary agitation: this is where a young man named Ioseb Jughashvili, a Georgian from nearby Gori who would go down in history as Stalin, was active, and he took part in a notorious and bloody robbery of a bank carriage on the main square in 1907 to fund the Bolsheviks. When the Russian Empire collapsed, Georgia had its brief chance: between 1918 and 1921 it was an independent republic, the Democratic Republic of Georgia, with Tbilisi as its capital. It didn't last long.
In February 1921, the Red Army invaded the young republic and Georgia was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. For seventy years, Tbilisi —under its Russified name, 'Tiflis', until 1936— was the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. The era left deep scars: Stalin's repression in the 1930s fell especially hard on the Georgian intelligentsia, and by an irony of history the system's greatest executioner, Stalin, was himself Georgian, born just a few kilometres away, in Gori.
But Georgia never lost its strong national feeling. In 1956, when Moscow began 'de-Stalinisation', there were demonstrations in Tbilisi that ended with dozens dead. And in April 1989, at the height of perestroika, a peaceful pro-independence demonstration outside the government headquarters was brutally crushed by Soviet troops, who killed twenty-one protesters, most of them young women. That '9 April tragedy' sealed the break between Georgia and the USSR.
Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991. The first years were extremely hard: a civil war broke out on the very streets of Tbilisi in 1991-1992, with fighting that wrecked part of Rustaveli Avenue, followed by separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, economic collapse, power cuts and crime. The city hit rock bottom. Its rebirth would come with the new century.
The turning point came in November 2003. After rigged elections, hundreds of thousands of Georgians took to the streets of Tbilisi and occupied Parliament, on Rustaveli Avenue, holding roses instead of weapons. That peaceful Rose Revolution forced the resignation of President Eduard Shevardnadze (Gorbachev's former Soviet foreign minister) and brought to power a young, pro-Western generation led by Mikheil Saakashvili. Georgia turned decisively towards Europe and the United States, which put it at odds with Russia: in August 2008 a brief but traumatic war broke out, ending with Russian troops a few dozen kilometres from Tbilisi and with Abkhazia and South Ossetia under de facto Russian control.
Over the last two decades, Tbilisi has undergone a spectacular transformation. The old town was restored, and design hotels, natural wine bars, galleries and a vibrant food and electronic music scene sprang up —the club Bassiani became world-famous— turning it into one of the trendiest destinations in Eastern Europe. Futuristic buildings such as the Bridge of Peace symbolise this bet on modernity, not without controversy. The city filled up with tourists, digital nomads and émigrés, among them many Russians who fled after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Tbilisi nevertheless remains a city caught between two worlds. The European aspirations of most Georgians clash with the ever-present shadow of Russia, and in recent years Rustaveli Avenue has once again filled with protesters carrying Georgian and European flags, demonstrating against laws and governments seen as an authoritarian, pro-Russian turn. It is the same stage on which almost every political battle of the last century has been fought. For the traveller, that intensity is part of the charm: Tbilisi is a lively, hospitable city full of contrasts, where fifteen hundred years of history can be felt in every alley winding down to the river.
