Warm springs named a Silk Road capital on the Kura
Tbilisi, Georgia's capital on the Kura, holds more than 1.3 million people—nearly a third of the nation. Old Georgian roots in tpili, warm, nod to sulfur springs; until 1936 most foreign languages preferred Persianate Tiflis, and a royal hunting legend explains its founding.
Digs at Dighomi, now a suburb, show unbroken occupation from the early Bronze Age onward, plus Palaeolithic stone tools; by the late Bronze and early Iron Age the area held the Caucasus's largest settlement. The favourite founding story has King Vakhtang I of Iberia, in the fifth century, hunting with a falcon that brought down a pheasant; both birds tumbled into a hot spring and died, and the king ordered a city built on the spot. His successor Dachi, who reigned from 522 to 534, moved the capital here from Mtskheta and began its walls.
Sitting between Europe and Asia near the Silk Road was lucrative but dangerous. Rome, Parthia, Sassanid Persia, Arabs, Byzantium and the Seljuks all fought over it. Persians held it from the 570s until Byzantine and Khazar forces sacked it in 627; Arab armies under Marwan II arrived in 736–738 and set up an emirate with a mint striking coins in Arabic and Georgian, and the Khazars sacked the city again in 764. After beating the Seljuks at Didgori in 1121, King David IV took Tbilisi in 1122 and made it the capital of a united Georgia, opening a golden age in which the population reached about 100,000 by the end of the 12th century.
Under the Russian Empire, from 1801 to 1917, it was seat of the Caucasus Viceroyalty. The switch from Tiflis came on 17 August 1936, when Soviet authorities aligned city names with local languages and Georgian linguists replaced the archaic ṭpili with the modern tbili; Turkish, Persian, Greek, Spanish and German still use variants of the older form. Ossetians simply call it Kalak, from the Georgian for city.
The population remains overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, and the streetscape layers medieval, neoclassical, Art Nouveau, Stalinist and modern buildings. Visitors head for the Sameba and Sioni cathedrals, Narikala Fortress, Rustaveli Avenue and the pseudo-Moorish opera house, and the city still serves as a transit route for energy and trade.
Source: Tbilisi
