Tbilisi walking tour part 1

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THE LEANING TOWER OF TBILISI is one of the city’s most unusual buildings. Tucked into a side street of old town, it truly is a bizarre structure, with a tower on the perpetual brink of falling down, and only a steel beam holding the tower in place. A huge clock sits in the middle of the disheveled tower, with a leaning column on its side.
While an incredibly odd sight, it’s not an old structure. It is a modern tower, attached to the puppet theatre of renowned puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze. He himself is the brainchild behind the structure, as well as the building to its side, which houses the actual theatre. Gabriadze built the theatre himself over a timespan of thirty years, reusing old pieces from abandoned structures of the old town, and from buildings destroyed following a major earthquake. The weird clock tower was added in 2011, after a four-year construction phase.
The historical part of Old Tbilisi has significantly been changed over the decades. Historical and public buildings built in the XIX century have been substituted for completely new buildings. Fortunately, there still are the streets, street-stairs, alleys, and buildings in Tbilisi with their details, which keep the history of the city and gives you the opportunity to be a tourist in your own city and discover your share of Tbilisi.
In Old Tbilisi, the trade was active, the people were occupied with different fields of handicraft, which is reflected in the names of these streets. Therefore, there are streets named- Bambis Rigi (Cotton Row), Rkinis Rigi ( Iron Row), Mekvab Row, Topkhana, Kharazkhana, Sirajkhana. Besides, there are streets marking the handicraftsmen activities- Okromchedeli Street, Samghebro Street, Dabakhana and etc.
In the Middle Ages, Tbilisi was basically comprised of three parts, from which Kala was distinguished by size. Two containing parts of Kala- Upper and Lower Kala are made in the style of the medieval street network, which has survived to the present day. This time we will get acquainted with the highly artistic courtyard-balcony houses, concentrated in the streets of Kala, mainly dating back to the second half of the XIX century.
Balconies, the face of which finally settled in the 1940s, occupied the main place in Tbilisi residential houses. From the courtyard, the houses are decorated with plain wooden balconies, and on its facade, there are more pompous balconies. If we draw a parallel and recall the balconies of the houses kept in western Georgia, in particular in Samegrelo, Imereti and Racha, we will find that the linkage between them is obvious. The tradition of lathed balconies comes from the Oda houses typical for western Georgia. It is known, that openwork balcony was spread in eastern Georgia by masters traveling in western Georgia. Besides, the esthetic value of the balconies, the ornaments represented here, also have their symbolic meaning.