Holiday in Caucasus (8): Tbilisi, Georgia
The capital of Georgia is Tblisi – the name means ‘the place of warm springs’ – which has a population of about 1.5 million that is 40% of the country’s entire population. The city lines the banks of the Mtkvari River. Since the main VJV group was recovering from an overnight flight, I spent two and a half hours on a sunny morning wandering round the south side of the river, exploring mainly the Old City. It is utterly unlike the clean and modern Baku: the Old City is a rambling mixture of charm and mess with lots of graffiti and a great deal of renovation still to be done.
At 2 pm, all the group members – now 14 – convened in the hotel lobby for a quick briefing by our guide Nick before we drove in a coach to the National History Museum. I was here in 2017 and now, as then, I concentrated on the section covering the Soviet occupation of 1920-1991. The total number of victims is claimed to be approximately 400,000 killed in the Second World War, 400,000 deported (most of whom were eventually shot), and around 80,000 who were summarily shot.
After almost an hour and a half at the museum, we spent another near two and a half hours walking around looking at sights and stopping for refreshments which was the first chance for all of us to talk to one another.