Sololaki and its Art Nouveau Entrances

In Sololaki the facades are not the point; what matters is behind the doors. The district lies south of Freedom Square at the foot of the Sololaki ridge, on ground that was once the khan's gardens — the name itself comes from the water channels that irrigated them.

In the late nineteenth century, when Baku oil and Caucasian trade brought money into Tbilisi, the city's wealthy families built their houses here: Mantashev, Aramiants, Sarajishvili, Melik-Azarian. They followed European fashion, first eclectic historicism and then Art Nouveau, and they spent most of the budget where guests would see it — on the entrance hall and the stairs.

The usual walking route covers Lado Asatiani, Amaghleba, Machabeli and Geronti Kikodze streets. Inside the stairwells you will find:

• painted walls and ceilings, usually faded and partly fallen away

• coloured glass in the roof lantern above the stairwell, throwing patterns down the steps

• cast-iron balustrades and tiled floors that still carry the maker's stamp

On Machabeli Street stands David Sarajishvili's mansion, built in the early 1900s and now the Writers' House, with the best-preserved interior in the district.

One warning. These are private homes, not museums. Over the last decade many entrances have had keypad locks fitted, precisely because of the flow of visitors. If a door is open, go in quietly, do not ring apartment bells, and do not film in the corridors. Some residents are welcoming, some are tired of it, and both reactions are fair.

The reason these stairwells are in the state they are in is straightforward. In the 1920s the Soviet authorities nationalised the large apartments and divided them: several families to a flat, one room each. The shared space — which is exactly the staircase, the entrance hall and the glass above it — belonged to nobody, and so nobody maintained it. That went on for eighty years. Some entrances have been restored recently through private effort and small city grants, but most are still waiting, and a few have simply lost their glass.