Tbilisi

There is a smell to Tbilisi that announces itself before the architecture does. Sulphur, rising from the bathhouses cut into the cliff below the old town, where hot springs have served the same district for fifteen hundred years. The city sits in a fold of the Caucasus, between superpowers that have taken turns running it: Persian, Russian, Ottoman, Soviet, and the present awkward neighbour to the north. It has the air of having outlasted each of them, slightly stooped, slightly amused. The buildings hold this layering: wooden Persian balconies on Russian neoclassical façades on Soviet apartment blocks on churches built when local Christianity was already several hundred years old.

When to go

May and early June, then September into October, are the gentler months. Daytime climbs to comfortable warmth, high twenties or a degree over, with low humidity and a clear, quietly persistent light. July and August are punishing: routinely mid-thirties, occasionally pushing forty, and the old town's stone streets hold the heat past midnight. The compensation, if you come anyway, is that humidity stays low and the city empties of all but the determined. October pulls Tbilisoba into focus, the early-month city festival that turns Rustaveli Avenue into a long open-air supra of food and wine. Winters are mild, rainy, and longer than they should be.

What it's actually like

The old town is a Persian city remembered by a Russian one. Lanes bend as medieval lanes do, past courtyards strung with laundry between rust-orange wooden balconies, past basement cellars where qvevri pots, buried up to the rim, still ferment wine the way they have for eight thousand years. The sulphur baths sit at the foot of Narikala, the fortress Persians started building in the fourth century. Above, churches mostly older than the country that now takes them seriously: Sioni, Anchiskhati, Metekhi on its rock above the river. The newer Russian-built city across the water runs to wide boulevards, Art Nouveau facades, cafés where the coffee takes its time. It is not a city that explains itself, and after a few days you find you've stopped asking.

The neighbourhood you want

Stay in Sololaki. The neighbourhood sits on the slope of Mtatsminda behind Freedom Square, in a stretch of fading aristocratic houses, ornate wooden balconies, small wine bars, and corner bakeries, with all of the old town walkable downhill and the new city walkable along the river. Old Town (Kala) is the obvious alternative for first visits: more touristic, livelier, and slightly worn down by the crowds. Vera, ten minutes further out on the other side of Rustaveli, is the residential option: more cafés, fewer sights, where locals will tell you to stay.

Don't miss

Book a private room at the Abanotubani sulphur baths. Chreli Abano, the blue-and-yellow tiled 18th-century bath renovated in 2017, is the district's most recognisable, but any of the half-dozen named bathhouses around it works on the same principle. A private room runs ₾40–80 an hour for two to four people; Chreli Abano's nicer rooms run ₾130–200. The water arrives at 37–42°C, sulphur-warm and faintly mineral. Pay the extra ₾30 for the kisi, a scrubbing performed by a man who will, briefly, know you better than several people in your life. Go in the late afternoon, when the rooms quieten. Marco Polo wrote about these baths in the thirteenth century, and they were not new then.