State Silk Museum

This is less a museum about silk than a surviving specimen of a nineteenth-century museum. It was founded in 1887 alongside the Caucasian Sericulture Station on the initiative of Nikolai Shavrov, and the building was completed in 1892 to a design by Alexander Szymkiewicz, the architect who also gave Tbilisi the Rustaveli Theatre.

The purpose was practical. Peasants across the southern provinces of the empire had to be taught how to raise silkworms, recognise their diseases and handle cocoons properly. So this is a teaching collection, not a display of finished luxury.

What makes it remarkable is that almost nothing has been modernised. The halls still hold their original oak-and-glass cases, and inside them:

• cocoons gathered from silk-producing countries around the world, sorted into hundreds of varieties

• dried moths and every stage of the worm's life cycle

• dyed silk samples, pigments and woven fabrics

• handwritten labels in faded ink, in Russian and French

• the station's own library and photographic archive

Much of the collection was prepared for the international exhibitions of the period and won medals at them. Today the rooms are often empty and the staff will usually walk you round themselves and explain what you are looking at. For anyone interested in old display cases, copperplate handwriting or the history of science, this is one of the more unusual hours available in Tbilisi.

Silk in Georgia is far older than the museum. Silkworms were raised for centuries in both the east and the west of the country, and under Soviet rule the trade was scaled up into an industry with its own factories and research institutes. In the 1990s it collapsed almost entirely. The museum is therefore not only a collection but the last coherent trace of an economy that fed parts of the country for well over a century, and the staff are quite clear-eyed about that.