Georgian National Museum

One building that holds the whole of Georgian history. The Simon Janashia Museum on Rustaveli Avenue is the main branch of the National Museum network, and if you only have time for one museum in the country, this is the one to choose.

Two collections here are genuinely world class. The first is the Treasury in the basement: gold jewellery from the third millennium BC onwards, Colchian and Iberian work in sheet gold and granulation so fine that modern goldsmiths struggle to reproduce it. These are the objects that sit behind the myth of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, and seeing them makes the legend feel a good deal less like fiction.

The second is the Dmanisi collection: hominid skulls roughly 1.8 million years old, the earliest human remains found outside Africa. This is a discovery of global significance, and the museum presents it properly rather than as a footnote.

The rest of the permanent display covers:

• The Museum of Soviet Occupation, documenting repression between 1921 and 1991
• An archaeology floor running from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages
• Ethnographic and numismatic collections
• Temporary exhibitions, often contemporary art

Labels are in Georgian and English. Russian captions are patchy, so an audio guide or a live guide is worth the extra cost if you want more than the objects themselves.