Tskaltubo

Tskaltubo was designed as a showpiece of Soviet balneology, and it is now one of the strangest towns in Georgia. Radon-carbonate water rises here at 33–35 °C, warm enough to use without heating, and by the 1950s the whole settlement had been laid out around it: a circular central park holding the bathhouses, and a ring of sanatoriums spreading outwards along wide avenues.

At its peak the resort handled around 125,000 patients a year, many arriving on direct trains from Moscow. Some twenty sanatoriums went up between the 1930s and the 1980s, each belonging to a different ministry or trade union — Metallurgist, Miner, Geologist, Railwayman, Iveria, Sakartvelo. Several were built by German prisoners of war after 1945. Bathhouse No. 9 still has a frieze of Stalin and the private pool he used.

The Soviet collapse ended all of it. From 1993 the empty sanatoriums were filled with families displaced from Abkhazia, and for thirty years people lived inside the colonnaded halls, hanging washing between marble columns. Most have now been rehoused and the buildings are being sold to investors: a few are under renovation, one or two work again as hotels, and the rest stand open, roofless and slowly filling with trees.

What you do here is walk. The central park is well kept and free, with springs, cafes and the working bathhouses. Beyond it the ruins are unguarded and photogenic — Medea's rotunda, the grand staircase of Iveria, the peeling ballroom of Shakhtiori.

Two warnings. This is not a museum: floors are missing, there is no lighting, and a handful of blocks are still lived in, so ask before walking in. And the town changes quickly — a sanatorium open one season can be behind a construction fence the next.