Mariam + DetuMariam + Detu

Tbilisi Guide is an audio-walk app built around curated routes through Tbilisi. Users can follow a defined path on foot and experience location-based storytelling, or play the same route anywhere in the world as a remote listening experience.

This digital handbook is a guide to the city – one that tells the story of Georgia’s social transformation through the buildings, places, and spaces of Tbilisi. The guide does not include the main tourist zones. Its focus is on places essential to Tbilisi’s everyday life. By observing these places, we try to tell the story of how the city became what it is.

The focus is on the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. We must recount the past in order to understand the present – to unravel what has shaped, and what continues to shape, the city. The outlines of the new Tbilisi were drawn in Soviet times. Those outlines transformed and shifted in independent Georgia. We will try to observe who drew these contours.

The guide consists of the following parts:
Weather and Geography; The City’s Unconscious: Heroes and Wounds; Market and Economy: Second-Hand Goods, Dismantling Yards; Science and Unregulated Construction; Soviet and Post-Soviet Privileges; Wars, the Collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crises of the 1990s, the Post-Soviet City; Public Space, Rituals, and Spectacle; The New Old Tbilisi. 

The texts are a kind of montage: a collage of old newspaper articles, historical events, memory, and subjective reflections. By weaving old articles into the narrative, we invite you to travel through time.

And in closing, as they used to say: Welcome to Tbilisi, once the city of sun and roses.
What it is today – that is for you to decide.