This prestigious Hotel was clearly not accessible to everyone. In 1967, the construction of the tallest building in Tbilisi was finished: Hotel Iveria, a 22 storey high structure designed by the Georgian architect Otar Kalandarishvili in the very geographical centre of Tbilisi and well visible from every point of the city.
The story goes back to 1960´s, when Soviet Georgia was one of the top tourist destinations of the USSR. Here, the country’s and the city’s recent past and present are visibly mixing, creating an absurd, mostly unused transitory space in the heart of town. The place is not only one of Tbilisi’s few public squares, it is also arguably the place where the political and social transformation are most deeply reflected in urban space and architecture. While the square is geographically exactly the same, a lot has changed. The hotel has been emptied of the refugee squat, had a modern renovation and now belongs to the Radisson group. In fact, that very place had been a battlefield only a few years earlier.Īlmost two decades later, the square is mostly home to noisy traffic and vast empty spaces. Yet, right in front of the audience stood the run-down Hotel Iveria, which was now home to over 800 Abkhazian refugees as a silent reminder of the recent conflicts. Although the air still contained the strange scent of war on that day in 1995 after a severe civil war, the young independent country was rejoicing. Still called Republic Square back then, the square itself was also the setting for a military parade in celebration of the Georgia’s independence, which it gained shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. On the sunny 26 th of May in 1995, the Georgian air force planes created a spectacle for the crowd that had gathered for Independence Day. The place has changed a lot during the past decades, but still retained its character as an important part of the city. In the centre of Tbilisi lies the Rose Revolution Square, named after Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003. A closer look at its history and current condition may reveal what Tbilisi’s downtown will actually become: an open, public space for citizens or yet another space of transition for cars and tourists. Despite being one of the few squares in the city, it keeps transforming, heavily influenced by different powers ruling the country. Rose Revolution Square in Tbilisi was once called Republic Square and has been showcase of different regimes, conflicts and aspirations.
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