Tbilisi

According to the legend, Tbilisi was founded - on the present-day territory of Georgia - by King Vakhtang I Gorgasali, who reigned in the 5th century. One day the King went hunting with a falcon. During the hunt, the King's falcon is said to have caught a pheasant and disappeared from the hunters' sight. Both birds were found dead in a spring, which turned out - to the King's and his retinue's amazement - to be a hot spring. King Gorgasali was so impressed with the natural phenomenon and the beauty of the surroundings that he decided to set up a city and call it Tbilisi, derived from the Georgian word "tbili" meaning "warm". Scientists have revealed that Tbilisi in fact developed one hundred years before the reign of Gorgasali, and the first accounts of settlement on the city's territory date back to the 4th century BC. During its turbulent history, Tbilisi has been invaded several times by different peoples, devastated and rebuilt. In the years 1845-1936, renamed as Tiflis, it constituted a part of the Russian Empire, and then of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, Tbilisi has been the capital of independent Georgia and Georgia's largest city, home to a quarter of the country's population. The multicultural city, extending along the banks of the Kura River for a distance of almost 30 km, in the picturesque and rocky Tbilisi Valley, is the main economic, industrial, transport, religious and cultural centre of Georgia. Today, as Tbilisi experiences rapid development connected with modernization, the words of a 19th-century traveler are still valid: "Tiflis ... is a kind of Janus, one face looking towards Asia and the other towards Europe".

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