Tbilisi, Georgia, and the Political Act of Illegibility

Between East and West, past and platform, Georgia resists the soft violence of being understood too easily.

This is the next stop in Dispatches from Places Not Yet Absorbed by the Algorithm — a series about destinations that resist being rendered, looped, or simplified. You can start with the first entry, on Folegandros, Greece, and if this resonates, subscribe to follow the rest of the series as it unfolds.

Tbilisi is one of the last major capitals in Europe where you arrive without a mental slideshow already playing.

You’re not even sure if it’s a European capital¹ and neither are many of the people who live here. There’s no Venice filter, no rooftop checklist from The Guardian, no “Old Town” preset queued up on Reels. It occupies a continent — technically Europe — but refuses its alignment. Ask ten people what continent Georgia belongs to and you’ll get twelve answers².

This is a city that resists legibility — not just visually, but ideologically. It cannot be easily scanned, sorted, filtered, or filed. European but not quite European. Orthodox but not Slavic. Post-Soviet but anti-imperial. Queer in its margins, patriarchal in its laws. Aspiring toward EU democracy, yet drifting, fracturing, and flirting with Russia. These contradictions aren’t a glitch. With a little time here, you realise they’re part of the operating system. You don’t reconcile Georgia’s inconsistencies. You learn to sit inside them.

Stamba Hotel, formerly a Soviet-era publishing house, now plays host to a cosmopolitan fever dream: terrazzo floors, velvet booths, cold brew on tap — all framed by the brutalist carcass of the old press. Ivy hangs where conveyor belts once ran. A pink café blooms beneath exposed concrete. This isn’t just preservation., t’s performance. Brutalism rebranded as softness. Dissonance turned into hospitality. A structure once meant to circulate ideology now circulates aesthetics. And it loops beautifully.

You say you’re going to Georgia and people assume Atlanta. You clarify — not for peaches, for khachapuri — and watch recognition slide sideways. They’ve maybe heard of the country, but couldn’t point to it. Georgia is always somewhere, but rarely located. It sits at the edge of half a dozen cultural spheres — not quite Asian, not quite European, not quite Middle Eastern — and yet it’s older than all those modern definitions. It has been absorbed and expelled by the Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Mongols, Russians, Soviets, and now, maybe soon, by the platforms.

This is a country that invented its own alphabet — one of only fourteen original scripts in human history³. It began fermenting wine over 8,000 years ago⁴, while grapes in France were still growing wild and Italy hadn’t yet been imagined — a 5,000-year head start on Bordeaux and 6,000 years before Barolo. It produced queens who ruled like war poets and revolutionaries who wrote in verse. It wasn’t colonised by Britain or France. It was a kingdom before England was a word. A Christian state before Rome converted. A polyphonic culture when Europe still chanted in unison. It was part of the Soviet Union, but never fully assimilated. Under the USSR, its food was too fragrant, its cinema too elliptical, its thinkers too disobedient.

Georgia has a very contemporary problem: a failure of legibility — not just on maps, but in the frameworks the West uses to process the world. The Anglo gaze (now extended via algorithm) tends to organise foreign cultures through three familiar lenses:

• Colonial (what we claimed)

• Cold War (what we opposed)

• Tourist (what we consume)

Georgia fits none of them.

The Nutsubidze Skybridge buildings — three Soviet-era towers in Saburtalo, connected by metal walkways on the 10th, 12th, and 14th floors. Designed in the late 1970s by architect Otar Kalandarishvili as an experiment in vertical collectivism, they were meant to blend housing with transport, form with ideology.

A wooden balcony hangs above a hidden entrance, trees and wires block terraces, and grand staircases fall just beyond doorframes.

Tbilisi doesn’t offer a visual shorthand. It offers contradiction. Here, a vine-wrapped 19th-century wooden balcony curves over Persian stonework. There, a half-crumbling apartment advertises perfumes behind Soviet baroque ornament, red ribbons marking political grief. A grand staircase reveals itself behind rusted iron doors and a scratched star — communist, decorative, neither. This is not a city that aligns. It stacks. It splinters. It doesn’t perform coherence — it performs memory, badly archived and still breathing.

A Stalinist block gives way to an Art Nouveau mansion gives way to one of the city’s best restaurants.

Entrance to Café Littera, hidden deep within the Georgian Writers’ House — once a centre of avant-garde literary life, later a site of surveillance and state control. Today it’s a garden restaurant, glowing behind an unmarked corridor. This is Tbilisi’s architectural sleight of hand: no sign, no signal, no promise of aesthetic reward. Just a hallway that misleads — and then opens. Illegibility as design. Incoherence as seduction.

A mosque is just down from the synagogue which is just down from the Zoroastrian temple, downhill from a crumbling concert hall and a glass bridge shaped like a sperm. Former Soviet monuments now house capitalist participation. Light falls where it shouldn’t.

The former Ministry of Highway Construction (1975), now the Bank of Georgia HQ, is one of the most surreal structures in the post-Soviet world. Designed by architect George Chakhava, it stacks five concrete blocks in defiance of gravity, modernism, and typology. Part megastructure, part Monument to Transport, it was meant to embody infrastructure and ideological flow. Now it houses capital in partnership with the UK.

Even Google Maps gets vertigo, spinning through alleyways in a script neither Cyrillic nor Latin, but something older, sinuous, and proud. Even H&M uses it. Coca-Cola too. Georgia makes global brands switch alphabets — not the other way around.

Even H&M and Coca-Cola had to switch alphabets in Georgia. The Georgian script — Mkhedruli — is sinuous, uncategorizable, and algorithmically stubborn. It doesn’t loop well. Georgia refuses Latin default. So even global brands, when entering Tbilisi, have to re-render themselves into something local, curved, and complex. Here, legibility flows in reverse: the interface learns the culture — not the other way around.

Tbilisi is not easily read — not by a tourist, not by the world, and thus not by interface or feed.

The platform economy runs on legibility: tag it, map it, loop it. But here, nothing formats. No “It shot,” no visual shorthand. Georgia’s refusal to collapse into any one category also fragments the algorithm — and with it, its export value. The architecture misbehaves. The signage confounds. Even the content won’t consolidate.

The Central Library of Tbilisi State University: a brutalist monolith softened by intricacy. Vertical bands of concrete fold into brutal ribs, while traditional Georgian motifs — stylised as gridded ornament — run like code through its seams. Built during the late Soviet period, it’s not quite modernist, not quite nationalist, not quite imperial. It’s something else: a refusal rendered in pattern. Even this building misbehaves. It holds form, but never simplifies.

The Cookbook Was a Warning

I first discovered Georgia via a 2019 New Yorker piece that told a story I couldn’t shake: A family in Tbilisi, running a tired, underwhelming restaurant — thirty-five dishes, dark wood interiors, indistinguishable from every other “traditional” spot in the city — had stumbled across something at the Dry Bridge flea market: an old cookbook. The binding was falling apart. The illustrations looked more like folklore than food. But something in it caught their attention.

It was the 1914 edition of Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes, written by Barbare Jorjadze — a 19th-century poet, playwright, intellectual, proto-feminist, and the first woman in Georgia to publicly challenge the men reformatting the national language. She was known in her time for her verses and in ours for her recipes. During the Soviet era, she had been almost entirely erased along with the wines, cheeses, ingredients, and methods she preserved. Of her 800+ recorded recipes, only a handful survived the standardisation of Soviet food policy, which allowed just four grape varietals and four cheeses to be cultivated nationwide. Because in the Soviet project, food wasn’t just sustenance, it was structure. To control taste was to control memory. Recipes became subversive when they preserved regional identity, improvisation, or inherited knowledge. And so cuisine, like language or religion, was flattened into uniformity: not just to feed the population, but to erase the differences that made it plural in the first place.

Soviet food policy wasn’t just about scarcity; it was, again, about this concept of legibility. Only what could be catalogued, counted, and reproduced at scale was permitted to exist. The rest — the wild herbs, the oral variations, the regional improvisations — was erased. What couldn’t be standardised couldn’t be seen, and what couldn’t be seen couldn’t be allowed.

But now, Barbare is back.

The restaurant rebranded itself Barbarestan (meaning guest of Barbare), and the family began cooking through her book. A cuisine long buried by empire was suddenly back in circulation — not as nostalgia, but as a counter-history. And it worked. Within a few years, Barbarestan had become a pilgrimage site for culinary tourists, a feature in The New Yorker, and a case study in the recovery of cultural code.

And maybe that would be enough — a forgotten cookbook, a family restaurant, a story of recovery. But what stayed with me wasn’t just the food. It was what the food revealed: that the very act of resurfacing Georgia’s culinary memory also made it vulnerable to being flattened again. That once something becomes legible — readable, taggable, exportable — it also becomes easy to circulate, to aestheticise, to lose.

In this way, for Georgia to be either European or Soviet is also, paradoxically, to become un-Georgian. It can participate — but only by performing a version of itself that’s been preformatted for external recognition. It can be seen, but not on its own terms.

Khinkali and Adjarian khachapuri — two of Georgia’s most recognisable dishes. One, a highland dumpling said to descend from 13th-century recipes. The other, a cheese-and-egg bread from the Black Sea coast, popularised in the 1970s and declared “Dish of the Year” in global food trend reports by 2018. Both are now exported — but not equally. Khachapuri loops better: it photographs well, translates easily, behaves. Khinkali requires context. In a platform economy, not all food survives. Only what formats gets circulated.

Legibility Is Not Neutral

Legibility is never neutral. It’s always a demand — a formatting pressure. A soft violence that says: explain yourself, reduce yourself, resolve. To be legible is to be ready for circulation, whether as content, policy, or brand. And the closer something gets to being understood, the greater the risk it will be exploited. This applies to countries and it applies to people.

Barbarestan made Georgian culinary memory legible again. But Tbilisi is now facing that same threshold across every register — cultural, political, aesthetic, even existential. It’s not just the soup that’s being translated. It’s the city.

And the pressure is everywhere.

Student murals under a Soviet-era coffered ceiling. Tarot hands, flying cherries, snakes, planets, stray cars. There’s no official narrative here — just a collective subconscious leaking out in aerosol and acrylic. These aren’t platform-ready or nation-branding.

The EU wants Georgia to stabilise — to render as European. Russia wants it to drift — to render as post-Soviet. Tourists want it to simplify — to render as charming, the new Berlin, and vaguely, inoffensively Orthodox. The algorithm wants it to look good from above⁵.

Tbilisi today: EU and Georgian flags hang side by side in a wine bar, framed by tropical plants and concrete. Outside, a green city bus announces its route in the Georgian alphabet — one of only 14 original scripts in the world. Above it, blue signage directs traffic both left and right. This is the aesthetic of a country mid-pivot: westward-facing, script-bound, historically entangled, and unresolvable. It wants to move forward — but hasn’t yet chosen which forward.

And increasingly, Georgia is trying to oblige. There are EU flags in shop windows and Pride posters in wine bars, but also Orthodox icons behind cash registers and nationalist slogans on construction sites. On every corner, graffiti tells Russians to go home, and nearby, someone has scrawled the opposite. The government courts foreign capital while criminalising foreign-funded civil society⁶. The state tries to look democratic, but behaves like a placeholder. The message is messy.

The mosaic on the former Trade Union Palace of Culture (1970), designed by Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, depicts two pregnant rabbits gazing up at a radiant sun — a surreal, cosmic scene officially titled “The Human Being, The Work: Purpose and Beauty of Existence.” Unlike typical Soviet mosaics, which glorified the worker-state through muscular labourers and industrial triumph, this one bends the genre into something stranger and more local: folkloric, symbolic, defiantly unresolvable. It’s not socialist utopia — it’s myth, fertility, and dream logic rendered in tile. Like so much of Tbilisi, it doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to.

Georgia may be ancient, but Georgia is not finished, and it is definitely not resolved. It is still figuring out how to hold everything — the unfinished revolution, the ancient script, the 800 recipes they just now found — without giving in to the demand to perform as one thing.

But platforms don’t tolerate ambiguity. And increasingly, neither do people.

Yes, Tbilisi is an incoherent city full of contradictions. But that doesn’t mean we should ask it to make sense — to narrativise itself, brand itself, dress itself for export. That demand goes beyond gentrification to narrative compression. Economic formatting. Cultural hygiene. A country told — again — to pick a side. To resolve its contradictions. To perform coherence for an outside gaze.

And that’s where this goes even deeper: the very qualities that once made Georgia too complicated to control — its multiplicity, its excess, its refusal to resolve — are now the things we ask it to soften in order to be legible. To become more European, but not too Orthodox. More progressive, but not too queer. Palatable, but still “authentic.” The Soviets tried to flatten it through quotas and doctrine. We risk flattening it through tourism and trade.

To resist legibility, then, is not just cultural, it’s political.

The Chronicles of Georgia — a half-finished, 30-metre-high megastructure of basalt columns built by Zurab Tsereteli in the late Soviet period. It depicts the history of Georgia in vast, vertical panels: saints, monarchs, martyrs, and wine. It is both grandiose and forgotten, mythic and mislocated — towering above Tbilisi but rarely visited, rarely tagged.

To remain illegible — as a state, a city, or a self — is to refuse participation in systems that require performance, predictability, and exportability. It is to remain untagged, unranked, unlooped. But that refusal comes at a cost: of visibility, of funding, of safety, of scale.

So Tbilisi stands at the threshold — not between East and West, but between being and being read.

And maybe that’s the question we all face now. Not just as travellers or observers, but as selves inside a system that keeps asking us to make sense. Where contradiction becomes a liability. Where coherence is the price of visibility. Where being seen often means being softened. What does it mean to remain illegible — on purpose — in a world that rewards only what mimics?

Tbilisi by the Numbers

Social Media & Algorithmic Visibility

• Instagram hashtag count (#tbilisi): ~2.7 million posts

• Related tags: #oldtbilisi (~205K), #tbilisiphoto (~161K), #tbilisilovesyou (~141K)

• Hashtags per week: ~7,800 uses of #tbilisi

• Content typology: Mixed—landscape photography, café culture, historic tours, digital nomad vlogs

• Algorithmic resistance factors: Minimal—platform-ready aesthetics, dense tour infrastructure, booming ecommerce

• Seasonality: High: peaks in May–September, sustained year-round tourism according to GNTA

Geography

• Urban area: ~720 km²; population density ~1,500 people/km²

• Elevation: 380 m average; ranges from river valleys (~380 m) to Mtatsminda (~770 m)

• Geology: Sedimentary limestone, interspersed with metamorphic schists

Population & Demographics

• Population (2025 estimate): ~1,087,000

• Urban agglomeration: ~1.1 million (2024)

• National share: ~30% of Georgia’s 3.7 million

• Median age: ~38 years

• Growth rate: +0.24% annual in last year

Infrastructure & Access

• Fixed broadband: ~42 Mbps average, below international norms

• Mobile internet: ~41.6 Mbps download, 17.5 Mbps upload (ranked 96th globally)

• ISPs: Silknet & Magti typical packages range 20–100 Mbps at 50–100 GEL/month

• Transport: Extensive bus network, metro with 2 lines, modernised – rapid transit ongoing

• Wi‑Fi coverage: Cafés & coworking spaces offer reliable 15–50 Mbps

Hospitality & Accommodation

• Registered beds in Tbilisi (2017): ~17,800

• National pipeline (2020–23): +7,835 rooms / +16,133 beds (12% national growth)

• International chains: Present (e.g., Marriott, Crowne Plaza, Hyatt)

• Hotel growth trend: Sustained—over 238 new hotels between 2020–23

Governance, Culture & Daily Life

• Protests: ~50,000 marched in 2024 against “foreign agents” law

• Civil tension: Ongoing clashes around democratic direction

• Cultural infrastructure: Music festivals, galleries, and heritage conservation in the city-centre

• Public sentiment: Strong pro-European identity (80% support)

If You Go

• TO STAY: Stamba

• TO EAT: Café Littera, Kitch, Barbarestan

• TO DRINK: Bassiani, Pink Bar,

• TO LISTEN: Mutant Radio

1. Georgia is technically in Europe by several political definitions (Council of Europe, EU aspirations), though not geographically by all models — hence the ambiguity.

2. Even official EU documents alternate between describing Georgia as “in the Eastern Partnership” (Europe-adjacent) and “in the South Caucasus.”

3. Georgian Mkhedruli is one of 14 writing systems that are not descended from another. Cited by linguistic sources including Unicode and SIL International.

4. Archaeological digs at Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveri (south of Tbilisi) date winemaking to ~6,000 BCE — 8,000 years ago. France’s earliest traces: ~1600 BCE; Italy ~1200 BCE.

5. As of 2024, #Tbilisi has over 2.9 billion views on TikTok — still far behind #Lisbon (~8B), but climbing. There’s no dominant “Tbilisi shot.” The visual grammar hasn’t settled yet.

6. The controversial “foreign influence” law passed in 2024 echoes Russia’s 2012 “foreign agent” law, and has been widely condemned by EU/US bodies.