Betlemi Quarter and the Stairs

Betlemi is the part of old Tbilisi that cars cannot reach. The quarter — also called Kldisubani, the cliff district — is built on the steep slope below Narikala, and its main thoroughfare is in fact a long flight of stone steps climbing from Asatiani Street.

As you climb, the sound of the city changes in stages: first the traffic disappears, then the tourist cafes, and what is left is balconies, washing lines and cats. Some houses have been restored; others are still held up by timber props. This is a lived-in neighbourhood, not an open-air museum, and it has the untidiness that goes with that.

At the top of the steps stand two churches, Upper and Lower Betlemi. Both were originally Armenian churches and both were transferred to the Georgian Orthodox Church in the 1990s. In front of Upper Betlemi is a small terrace — probably the best free view in the city over the roofs of the old town towards Metekhi and Sameba.

Nearby, on Gomi Street, stands the Ateshgah, a brick structure understood to be a Zoroastrian fire temple. Its date is disputed: the core may go back to late antiquity, while what you see is considerably later rebuilding. It is one of very few such buildings left anywhere in the region. It is normally locked, and visitors look at it from the yard outside.

From Betlemi a path continues straight up to the walls of Narikala and to the upper gate of the Botanical Garden.

Above Betlemi, on the crest of the Sololaki ridge, stands Kartlis Deda, the Mother of Georgia: a twenty-metre aluminium figure put up in 1958 for the city's fifteen-hundredth anniversary, by the sculptor Elguja Amashukeli. She holds a bowl of wine in one hand and a sword in the other — wine for a guest, steel for an enemy. From Betlemi the path to her takes about twenty minutes and runs along the walls of Narikala, which makes the obvious way to finish the climb.