Metekhi Church

Metekhi stands where Tbilisi began. The rock above the left bank of the Mtkvari held a royal residence as early as the fifth century, in the time of Vakhtang Gorgasali, and tradition credits him with building the first church on the spot.

What stands now is much later: it was built between 1278 and 1289 under King Demetre II, on a cross-in-square plan with three projecting apses. Its later history says a good deal about how successive rulers treated the city. In 1819 the Russian administration turned the church into a barracks and then a prison; Maxim Gorky was among those held here. Under Soviet rule it stayed a prison and was converted into a theatre in the 1930s. Services only returned at the end of the 1980s.

By tradition, St Shushanik is buried in the church — the fifth-century martyr who is the subject of the oldest surviving work of Georgian literature.

On the terrace beside it stands the equestrian statue of Vakhtang Gorgasali, put up in 1967 by the sculptor Elguja Amashukeli; it is one of the most photographed silhouettes in the country.

The honest assessment is that the interior is plain — almost no old wall painting survives, and there is not much to detain you. People come for what is outside: the view from the cliff edge over the brick domes of the sulphur baths, Narikala on the opposite ridge, the Bridge of Peace and the bend of the river. In the evening, when the floodlights come on, this is the postcard of Tbilisi.

From the terrace you look straight down at the place the city is named after. By tradition Vakhtang Gorgasali was hunting here when a wounded pheasant fell into a hot spring, and the king ordered a town to be built on the spot — tbili means warm, and the sulphur water still surfaces in the same place below. The story is a legend, but archaeology confirms that people were settled on this bend of the river long before it.