Dry Bridge Market

The Dry Bridge is a bridge with no water under it. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century over a side channel of the Mtkvari that separated Madatov Island; the channel was filled in during the 1930s, leaving the bridge high and dry.

The market appeared in the early 1990s, and its origin is not a cheerful one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, with wages and pensions simply gone, people came here to sell the contents of their flats. What is now a tourist attraction began as a market of last resort, and a certain amount of what is on the tables still comes from someone's family cupboard.

On offer today:

• Soviet medals, badges, watches and cameras

• porcelain, silverware, samovars, old banknotes and coins

• Georgian cloisonné enamel jewellery, daggers, carpets

• vinyl records, old books, and family photographs sold by strangers

Beyond the bridge, in Dedaena Park, painters sell canvases, and below there is a row of furniture and woodwork.

Two practical truths. First, a large share of the "antiques" are reproductions, particularly the daggers, the orders and the icons; buy because you like the object, not because you believe the story. Second, taking a genuinely old item out of Georgia requires a permit from the Ministry of Culture for anything over fifty years, and the seller will not sort that out for you. Bargaining is expected, and the first price is almost always reduced.

If anything here is worth buying, it is usually something small and specific: a real pair of Georgian cloisonné earrings, a Soviet camera that still takes pictures, a poster from a Georgian film of the 1970s, a hand-painted porcelain cup. Large furniture and carpets are harder both to carry home and to export. The market works simultaneously as three things: a place to shop, an open-air museum of Soviet material culture, and a fairly blunt exhibit about what happened to household wealth in the 1990s.