Sololaki

Sololaki is the grid of steep, tree-lined streets that climbs from Freedom Square and Kote Afkhazi Street towards the foot of Mtatsminda and the Narikala ridge. It grew in the 19th century as the district of Tbilisi's wealthy merchants, many of them Armenian and Georgian, who built tall townhouses with carved doors, cast-iron balconies and grand shared entrance halls. Behind the street doors, many of these halls still keep painted ceilings, tiled floors, stained glass and sweeping wooden staircases. The area feels residential and a little faded, and that is much of its charm.

Walk without a plan along Machabeli, Asatiani and Lermontov streets, and look into entrance halls where a door stands open, remembering that people live upstairs. The Art Nouveau mansion at 13 Machabeli Street, built for the cognac maker David Sarajishvili, now houses the Writers' House of Georgia, with a restaurant in its garden. Sololaki also has some of the city's best small wine bars and bakeries, and its upper streets lead to the lower funicular station on Chonkadze Street.

Sololaki began as an area of gardens watered by a channel, and the name is usually traced to an Arabic or Persian word for that channel. In the 19th century, under Russian rule, the gardens gave way to regular streets, and by the end of the century this was the most fashionable residential quarter of Tiflis. Merchant families competed with ever richer facades and halls. The Sarajishvili mansion on Machabeli Street went up in the first years of the 20th century. Some halls have been restored in recent years, while others are crumbling.