Tbilisi has always had a complicated relationship with its own buildings. Here, architecture rarely settles into a single meaning. Houses change functions the way people change political languages. Palaces become classrooms. Private yards turn into underground parliaments. Walls learn to listen.
In 2025, the city reopened two spaces that had never truly been closed — only muted, partially forgotten, administratively paused. The National Palace and the Merab Kostava Memorial House-Museum returned to public life almost simultaneously, creating a rare moment of architectural dialogue. One speaks in the syntax of empire and institutions; the other whispers in the grammar of dissent, intimacy, and moral risk.
Together, they form a map of Georgian modernity — fractured, layered, unresolved, alive.
The National Palace: How Power Learns to Educate
The National Palace does not just stand on Rustaveli Avenue; it presides over it. Elevated on a stone plinth, adapting its façade to the slope of the city, the building performs a familiar nineteenth-century gesture: authority translated into geometry.
Its origins are unapologetically imperial. Built and rebuilt across the early decades of Russian rule, reshaped by architects imported from the metropole, the palace was conceived as a visible lesson in governance. Classicism arrived in Tbilisi carrying a promise of order, hierarchy, clarity — a visual technology of control. Symmetry reassured. Corinthian pilasters disciplined the gaze. Arched galleries established rhythm where political certainty was still fragile. Yet history refused to behave politely.
The same halls that once hosted governors and viceroys became the stage for one of Georgia’s most fragile triumphs: the declaration of independence in 1918. The flag raised above the palace did not erase its past; it complicated it. A few years later, the Red Army entered Tbilisi, and power changed hands again — quickly, brutally, efficiently. The building absorbed everything.
Its most radical transformation arrived quietly in 1937, when the palace was converted into an educational center. The symbolism was almost perverse in its elegance: a former seat of authority repurposed as a factory of curiosity. Ballrooms turned into theaters. Salons became classrooms. Ideology learned to disguise itself as pedagogy. Today’s restoration understands this paradox and chooses not to simplify it.
The renewed National Palace does not sanitize its biography. It preserves the Renaissance gravitas of its interiors, the ornamental plasterwork, the imitation marble, the grand foyer that still remembers boots, speeches, silences. At the same time, it opens itself fully to children, teenagers, adults — thousands of bodies learning art, science, movement, performance.
The building’s true achievement lies in its refusal to collapse into a museum of itself. It remains operational, inhabited, noisy. The past here does not dominate; it frames. The palace trains young citizens inside a structure that once trained subjects, and the difference between the two becomes palpable in every rehearsal room, every laboratory, every informal gathering on the stairs. Power did not disappear. It learned to circulate.
Merab Kostava’s House: Where History Refuses Monumentality
If the National Palace represents history written in stone, the Merab Kostava Memorial House writes history in pencil — intensely, nervously, personally. Located on Zandukeli Street, the house resists architectural spectacle. Its importance lies in accumulation rather than scale. It matters because life happened here with unusual density.
Merab Kostava’s biography is inseparable from the late Soviet Georgian experience of moral resistance. Musicologist, poet, dissident, public intellectual — he belonged to a generation for whom culture functioned as an ethical weapon. His house became a node in a clandestine network of thought, publication, discussion, danger.
The yard surrounding the house achieved almost mythical status long before the museum existed. Known simply as “Merab’s yard,” it operated as an informal university, a meeting place, a zone of intellectual fermentation. Long before independence became a political fact, it existed here as a shared intuition.
The museum, founded in 1991, consciously rejected triumphalism. It never aimed to freeze Kostava into a heroic icon. Under the careful guardianship of his mother, Olgha Demuria-Kostava, it preserved texture: handwritten notes, personal letters, music records, underground magazines, photographs scarred by use. The recent rehabilitation enhances this ethos rather than diluting it.
Expanded exhibition spaces, contemporary technology, proper storage for tens of thousands of artifacts, and a renewed public yard allow the museum to function as a living archive. The space invites study, hesitation, return. It frames the national liberation movement as a process rather than a completed narrative. Here, independence appears as labor.
Unlike monumental memorials that instruct visitors what to feel, Kostava’s house asks them to read, listen, connect fragments. The revolution remains unfinished — and that is precisely the point.
Two Architectures, One City Thinking Aloud
The simultaneous return of these two spaces signals a shift in Tbilisi’s cultural self-perception. The city appears increasingly willing to treat architecture as an intellectual medium rather than a decorative asset. These buildings do not offer comfort. They offer density. They demand time.
The National Palace stages the long negotiation between authority and education, discipline and imagination. Kostava’s house preserves the fragile ecology of dissent, where private life and public responsibility intertwine. One teaches scale. The other teaches courage.
Together, they outline a model of cultural development rooted in complexity rather than consensus. They acknowledge that Georgian history remains unresolved, emotionally charged, politically sensitive. Instead of smoothing contradictions, these spaces keep them visible.
In a region where memory often becomes a battlefield, Tbilisi has chosen — at least in these two cases — to cultivate memory as practice. The doors are open. The buildings are speaking. The city is listening — perhaps more attentively than before. And that, in 2025, Tbilisi has reopened two buildings that remember too much to remain quiet.
By Ivan Nechaev
