The backstreets and local markets of Tbilisi

Tbilisi's beauty is not curated — it peels, leans and hangs laundry over the street. The city rewards travellers who leave the renovated lanes around the fortress and walk ten minutes in any direction, into neighbourhoods where the courtyards are the architecture and the markets are the museum. Almost nothing described below is ticketed, and most of it is free. What it asks for instead is a willingness to climb stairs, to hold a door open for someone carrying shopping, and to be somewhere at the hour it is actually alive.

Two things govern the order of a day here. The markets belong to the morning and are largely finished by mid-afternoon; the balconies belong to the last ninety minutes of daylight, when low sun turns the carved wood the colour of weak tea. Plan around that and you see everything. Plan badly and you arrive at Dezerter Bazaar to find the cheese women packing up.

Key facts

• Best explored on foot; mornings for markets, late afternoon for balconies and courtyards
• Two unhurried days covers all five areas below; one long day covers three of them
• Etiquette: courtyards are semi-private — admire from the threshold, ask before photographing people
• Cash matters. Small lari notes are essential at both markets and at the cheaper bathhouses
• The months that work best are roughly April to early June, and September to October
• A day of this — transport, market food, a bath, a glass of wine — comes to something in the region of GEL 80 to 150 per person

How to plan it: two mornings and two evenings

Central Tbilisi is small. The whole right-bank circuit — Dezerter Bazaar to the north, the Dry Bridge on the river, Sololaki on the slope, Abanotubani at the southern end — fits inside about forty minutes of continuous walking, although the gradients mean you will not walk it continuously.

Day one: be at Dezerter Bazaar not long after it opens, around seven or eight in the morning, while the trucks are still unloading. Move south to the Dry Bridge for late morning, once the stallholders have their tables out. Eat near the bridge, rest through the hot middle of the day, then climb into Sololaki at about four o'clock and stay until dark.

Day two: start at the bottom of Abano Street in Abanotubani, follow the gorge up, take the Betlemi stairs, and reward the climb with the botanical garden. Come back down for a bath in the early afternoon, which is when the bathhouses are quietest. Cross the river in the late afternoon for Chugureti, which only begins to make sense after about six.

If you have one day rather than two, drop the botanical garden and the left bank, and keep the two markets and Sololaki.

Sololaki: the city of staircases

Uphill from Freedom Square, Sololaki was the first planned residential district built outside the old city walls, and it filled in the belle époque with money that had come from elsewhere — Baku oil, Kakhetian brandy, Armenian and Georgian trading fortunes. What those owners spent it on is the reason to walk here. The street facades are handsome but restrained; the extravagance is inside the entrance halls, which the bourgeoisie of the day treated as a calling card. Push gently on an open door and you may find a painted ceiling, a tiled floor laid in patterns, a spiral iron staircase turning up through four storeys of peeling plaster.

Two houses are worth seeking out by name. The Kalantarov House, built around 1910 for the Baku oil magnate Mkrtich Kalantarov by the engineer Ghazar Sarkisian, has a stairwell that photographers and guidebooks return to again and again, and it is usually accessible because people still live there — which is exactly the reason to be quiet in it. The Writers' House of Georgia, raised between roughly 1903 and 1905 for the brandy maker David Sarajishvili to a design by the architect Karl Zaar, mixes art nouveau with neo-baroque, and is genuinely open to the public, with a literary programme and a walled garden.

The wooden balconies — lace-carved, improbably cantilevered, sagging in ways that would close a building anywhere else — are what Tbilisi is recognised by, and they read best in the last hour of light. Allow around two hours for the district, more if you are slow about doors.

Two stops will carry an afternoon. Littera sits in the Writers' House garden, and its kitchen has long been associated with the chef Tekuna Gachechiladze's reworking of Georgian cooking. Vino Underground, a brick cellar a few minutes away, opened in 2012 as Georgia's first bar dedicated to natural wine and is still run by a collective of artisan winemakers, with tastings of several qvevri wines and a plate of cheese. Both take bookings and both are worth making one for.

The Dry Bridge: history by the kilo

Every day, weather permitting, the riverside around the Dry Bridge becomes an open-air attic. It is not one market but four, and knowing which is which saves an hour.

The flea market proper runs along both sides of the bridge and west beside 9 March Park: Soviet medals and samovars, film cameras, hand-painted china, daggers, vinyl, cutlery, the contents of apartments. The art and craft stalls occupy the park itself and the embankment above it, where painters lean unframed canvases against the railings alongside felted shawls, wool socks and drinking horns. The antiques section sits downstairs from the embankment opposite the park and is easy to miss entirely — porcelain, chandeliers, whole dinner services. A book and postcard market has traditionally set up in Dedaena Park by the water, though it has not always been running in recent seasons.

Hours are typically around ten in the morning until about five in the afternoon, but the market only fills out properly from about eleven. Weekends, particularly Saturday and Sunday, bring the most sellers; Mondays are noticeably thin, and heavy rain or snow empties the whole thing. Bring cash, because almost nobody takes cards.

Haggle, but kindly. Many sellers are pensioners clearing family cupboards, and the difference of a few lari means more to them than to you. Be clear-eyed about what you are buying, too: this is now largely a visitors' market, the prices are not local prices, and a proportion of the "Soviet" medals and enamel badges are reproductions. What tends to be genuine: old film cameras, salvaged brass door furniture, kilims, and the paintings, most of which are the artist's own work sold by the artist standing beside them.

For lunch afterwards, Zakhar Zakharich sits immediately beside the market and is the kind of large, plain Georgian restaurant where the khinkali are the entire point; it generally opens around midday and runs late into the evening. Cafe Daphna, a short walk into the old town, does a prettier and more modern version of the same dumpling.

Dezerter Bazaar: where Tbilisi actually shops

North of the old town, a few minutes on foot from Station Square metro, sprawls the city's main food market — named, the story goes, for army deserters who sold their kit here in the 1920s. This is not a market that performs for visitors. Thousands of households still buy their week's food in it, often from the same cheese woman their mothers used.

It typically opens around seven in the morning and winds down by about five, and it is at its best well before noon. The main hall, rebuilt in 2012, has wholesalers on the upper floor supplying restaurants and shops, with outdoor stalls spilling across the carpark in front. That is only the beginning. Across the block, the Dinamo market holds the honey sellers, the cheese counters and the spice merchants, with a small makeshift altar of Orthodox icons standing among the butchers. Opposite it, Sakolmeurneo Bazari is a warren of tin sheds under bare bulbs where a few bar-restaurants pour wine and put out snacks. There are also underground tunnels of second-hand clothing and a scruffy mall, the Passaji, for anyone minded to go further in.

What to buy: churchkhela, the walnut-and-grape-juice "candles", running at something like GEL 2 to 8 a strand depending on length and nut. Sulguni, and the sharper mountain guda, commonly somewhere around GEL 6 to 18 a kilo. Spice blends of khmeli suneli, dried marigold and blue fenugreek. Tkemali plum sauce and walnut-heavy adjika. Pickled jonjoli and green tomatoes from the grandmothers who preside over pickle empires. Draught wine, ladled out of plastic barrels into whatever you bring, for a few lari a litre.

Vendors will usually cut you a taste of cheese or honey unprompted; take it, then buy something. Cameras are welcome and frequently invited — people here are more likely to ask you to photograph them than to object. Bring a bag, bring small notes, and come hungry.

Above Abanotubani: the Betlemi ascent

Everyone visits the domed sulfur baths. Almost nobody climbs past them, which is the whole opportunity. From the end of Abano Street the Leghvtakhevi gorge cuts back into the hillside, carrying a small river down to a waterfall of around twenty-two metres — a drop recorded in Georgian sources as far back as 1429, now roughly ten minutes from the busiest square in the old town and almost always quiet.

From there the Betlemi ascent climbs in flights of restored stone steps through the Betlemi quarter, rehabilitated by international conservators in the late 2000s. Somewhere in it, and easy to walk straight past, stands the Ateshgah: the brick remains of a Zoroastrian fire temple, generally dated to the Sasanian period, later a mosque, later a storehouse, later somebody's home. The door is often shut and you may have to knock. Keep climbing and you emerge near the Mother Georgia statue and the ridge path to the fortress.

The gorge is the lower end of the same valley that the National Botanical Garden occupies, and the garden is a large, quiet and consistently overlooked piece of the city centre. Entry is a token amount, in the region of GEL 4 for an adult, and it tends to open around nine in the morning and close in the early evening. It will absorb a whole afternoon if you let it.

As for the baths themselves, rooms are rented privately by the hour, and the price is for the room rather than per person, so a group of four splits it. The plainer bathhouses on the lanes off Abano Street typically start somewhere around GEL 15 to 40 an hour. The grand tiled ones, Chreli Abano among them, begin considerably higher and can run into the hundreds for the larger suites. The water is the same water. A kisi scrub from an attendant is usually another GEL 10 to 20, in cash, and worth it.

Chugureti and the left bank

Across the river, the left bank is where the unvarnished city is being rewritten rather than restored. Chugureti was founded around 1818 as Neu-Tiflis, a settlement of German craftsmen, and the bones of that grid survive along Agmashenebeli Avenue, whose central stretch was pedestrianised under the New Tiflis programme from 2016 — a couple of kilometres of art nouveau facades, carved doors and reopened cafes running down to Marjanishvili Square.

The anchor is Fabrika: a Soviet sewing factory turned into a hostel, coworking floors, studios and a courtyard of container bars, murals climbing every wall. On a warm evening the courtyard fills with students, designers and everyone's second cousin, and nobody checks what you are drinking. Nearby, Stamba occupies a former printing house and has kept its brutalist concrete intact around a planted atrium; you do not have to stay there to sit in it over a coffee. Marjanishvili is the metro stop for all of this.

What it costs, and how to move between things

The metro runs a flat fare of around GEL 1 a journey with a Metromoney card, which itself costs something like GEL 2 and can be shared between travellers; one tap usually buys about ninety minutes of transfers onto city buses as well. Short app-booked taxi rides through the centre come to roughly GEL 4 to 7, and crossing the city to about GEL 8 to 15, with a surge multiplier in rain and at rush hour. Never take an unmetered street taxi without agreeing the fare first.

Almost everything here is walkable, but two legs are worth motorising: Dezerter Bazaar down to the Dry Bridge, and the old town over to Chugureti once your feet have gone. Cards are accepted in restaurants and hotels and essentially nowhere in either market.

When to come, and what to skip

April to early June and September to October are the months this walk works best, with daytime temperatures broadly in the high teens to high twenties. September is the pick if you can only choose one: the heat breaks, and the Kakhetian grape harvest, rtveli, begins, which shows up immediately in what is piled on the market stalls. Late spring is beautiful and also the wettest stretch of the year, with afternoon thunderstorms close to daily.

July and August are the mistake most people make. Tbilisi regularly sits in the low to mid thirties and occasionally pushes higher, and the stairs of Sololaki and Betlemi are punishing in that. If you must come then, do the markets at dawn and treat the middle of the day as indoor time. Winter is cold but entirely workable — the food market never stops, though the Dry Bridge thins out in snow — and February, March and November are generally among the cheapest weeks to fly and sleep.

What to skip: the bar-and-souvenir strip around Shardeni and Bambis Rigi, the one part of the old town fully converted to visitors, where you will pay old-town prices for a weaker version of everything above. Skip buying gifts in old-town shops while the Dry Bridge exists. Skip Dezerter after about two in the afternoon, when what you will see is a carpark. And skip the most expensive bathhouse unless the interior is the point, because the sulfur is identical three doors down.

Tip: Buy your souvenirs at the Dry Bridge and your picnic at Dezerter — bread, sulguni, tomatoes, a strand of churchkhela — then carry both up to the fortress walls at sunset. The combination costs a fraction of the old town's tourist restaurants and tastes considerably better.

Tbilisi's polish is coming, street by street, and some of it is good: the restored Betlemi stairs are proof that careful work beats no work at all. But the unvarnished version is still here, in the courtyards and the cheese counters and the stairwells nobody has got round to. Walk it while it lasts.