Marneuli

Marneuli is the largest town on the Kvemo Kartli plain, about 40 km south of Tbilisi on the road to Armenia, and the main centre of Georgia's Azerbaijani community. It is not a sightseeing town in the usual sense, but it gives a vivid picture of everyday life in the region: busy markets heaped with vegetables from the surrounding farms, teahouses, mosques as well as churches, and cafes serving plov, kebabs and tandir bread. Azerbaijani and Russian are heard more than Georgian, and foreign visitors are rare enough to be met with friendly curiosity.

The farmland around Marneuli has a very deep past. At Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, two Neolithic village mounds in the municipality, archaeologists found pottery holding chemical traces of grape wine from about 6000 BC, published in 2017 as the earliest known evidence of winemaking. There is little to see at the mounds themselves, but the finds explain Georgia's claim to be the cradle of wine. Marneuli is also on the way to the Sadakhlo crossing into Armenia.

The Shulaveri-Shomu culture, named after sites on this plain, was one of the earliest farming cultures of the Caucasus, flourishing around 6000 BC. Its villages of round mud-brick houses have been excavated at Shulaveris Gora, Gadachrili Gora and other mounds near Marneuli, and their pottery yielded the oldest known residues of grape wine. The modern town grew in the 20th century as the market and administrative centre of an irrigated farming district.