Marjanishvili Square

Marjanishvili Square lies on the left bank of the Kura, in a district that people in Tbilisi still call the German colony out of old habit: at the beginning of the nineteenth century settlers from Swabia made their homes here, and until the 1940s the Lutheran church of Peter and Paul stood in the middle of the square. It gave the street its former name, Kirochnaya. The present ensemble took shape in the late 1940s and in the 1950s to designs by the architect Mikhail Melia: two residential blocks and the building of a design institute formed an enclosed space with a broad cobbled roadway and a green island in the middle. The buildings are handled in the spirit of Stalinist Empire style, but with a local accent: the top of each block is finished by a row of closely spaced stone posts, which makes the heavy facades look unexpectedly light, while the ground floors are set back under deep arcades. The square is named after the theatre director Kote Marjanishvili, whose theatre stands nearby on the street of the same name. It is not far from here to Davit Aghmashenebeli Avenue with its restored tenement houses. The square is a convenient starting point for a walk along the left bank: the pedestrian Aghmashenebeli Avenue with its restored tenement houses is a stone's throw away, and the metro station of the same name works right under the square itself. In the evening the arcades of the ground floors are taken up by cafes.

On the map