Freedom Square and the Old Parliament

If Tbilisi has a middle, this is it. The square appeared in the early nineteenth century outside the old city walls, and it has been renamed five times since: Yerevan Square, then Paliashvili, then Beria, then Lenin, and finally Freedom.

At the centre, since 2006, stands a gilded St George spearing the dragon by Zurab Tsereteli, on a column some thirty-five metres high. Before it there was a statue of Lenin, taken down overnight in August 1990. On the south side is City Hall, an 1870s Moorish-style building with a clock tower — one of the most recognisable facades in the city, and still the mayor's office.

The square also carries one very specific piece of history. On 26 June 1907 Bolsheviks led by Kamo, with Stalin somewhere in the planning, ambushed a bank convoy here with bombs and gunfire; dozens of people were killed and the money went to fund the party. The mass protests of 1989, of 2003, and of most years since have crossed the same paving.

Walking up towards Rustaveli, the Old Parliament appears on the right: a long colonnade above a wide flight of steps. This was the Supreme Soviet, then the chamber where independence was declared in 1991, and the building the Rose Revolution walked into in November 2003. Parliament was moved to Kutaisi in 2012 and later partly moved back, so the building is in use and not open to visitors — you look at it from the pavement.

The square itself is a place you pass through rather than linger in: a traffic knot where the old town, the avenue and the metro all meet.

One more recent episode belongs here: in May 2005, during a speech by the American president George W. Bush, a live grenade was thrown from the crowd towards the platform and failed to detonate. On an ordinary day the square's one real quality is its openness: after the narrow lanes of the old town, this is the only place in the centre where you see a wide piece of sky.