Route #1
In late summer 1817, hundreds of Swabian families followed the call and set out on their long march to the Caucasus. The first colonists reached the promised land on September 21 and settled in Georgia. In the capital Tbilisi the German emigrants were assigned an area on the north-western bank of the river Mtkwari (Kura). They divided this area according to a clear geometrical pattern. First a spacious main road was laid out, followed by longitudinal and transverse roads, which still determine the Tbilisi street grid today. In 1824, the German colony "Neu-Tiflis" with its characteristic order, life culture and energy was officially incorporated into the capital. With the political upheaval and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) a new chapter began for the community, as well as for this district.
The Soviet Symbolism
Route #2
Not without reason was Tbilisi of enormous importance to the Soviets: Stalin was a Georgian. Learn more about the Soviet history of the Caucasian metropolis and official treatment of the Soviet heritage during the tour. Compared to other post-Soviet cities, many socialist symbols and monumental sculptures in independent Georgia have been renamed, dismantled, radically reinterpreted or even disappeared. Already after the collapse of the Soviet Union, streets and places were renamed, monuments and reliefs removed. After the Rose Revolution (2003), the new government decided to break free from Moscow's orbit and take its historiography into its own hands. In 2011, the document was signed that prohibited the use of Soviet symbolism, especially the symbol of the hammer and sickle:
the most iconic symbol of the 20th century.
Guided Tours
Route #3
In Soviet times, Georgian poets and writers were assigned to a "national culture" and heroised according to the motto "national in form, socialist in content". They were interpreted and instrumentalised as supranational forerunners of socialist thought. Shota Rustaveli and his epic poem "The Knight in Tiger Skin", for example, became part of the Soviet cultural heritage. Post-Soviet cultural policy followed the same path. The monuments of Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin were removed, some Georgian communists were reburied from the Mtazminda Pantheon and vice versa, victims of Stalinism, writers such as Mikheil Jawakhishvili and Titzian Tabidze, were symbolically reburied by erecting a monument of honour.