David Aghmashenebeli Avenue

The main street of the left bank of the Kura, built up in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the district was called Alexandrovsky and was settled by German colonists and Armenian and Russian merchants. Hence its look: an unbroken line of two- and three-storey tenement houses with stucco work, bay windows, caryatids and wrought-iron balconies — urban eclecticism of the same generation as in Odesa or Baku. The avenue is named after King David the Builder. The stretch of about a kilometre between Marjanishvili Square and Marijvari was reconstructed in the 2010s and made pedestrian: stone paving was laid, plaster and moulded details were returned to the facades, and the overhead wires were removed. A subject in its own right here are the front doors: carved oak leaves with stained-glass inserts, lion masks in the keystones and traces of old gilding, each house with its own. Many have survived since the buildings went up and carry the mark of the workshop that made them. In the evening the street is lit and almost empty; by day the coffee houses and wine bars on the ground floors are open.

On the map