Georgian National Museum

The country's main museum on Rustaveli

The main building on Rustaveli Avenue is the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia. It traces itself to 1852, when a collection of antiquities was started at the Caucasian branch of the Russian Geographical Society; in 1865 the German naturalist Gustav Radde turned it into the Caucasian Museum, and in 1919, under the first republic, it became the Museum of Georgia.

In 1921, when the Red Army entered the country, part of the collection left for Europe with the departing government. Its return was the work of the émigré historian Ekvtime Takaishvili, who guarded the crates in Paris, refused to let them be sold and came back with them to Tbilisi under Soviet rule.

Today the museum holds the archaeological gold of Colchis and the Trialeti barrows, the finds from Dmanisi, where the earliest humans outside Africa were unearthed, and the Museum of Soviet Occupation. The treasury is the country's strongbox: wreaths, cups and figurines from burials two and a half thousand years old and more.