The skyline everyone shoots from Old Town — the cliff-top church, the bronze king on his horse, the gold dome further up the hill — is Avlabari. It is the district on the far bank of the Mtkvari, the historic Armenian quarter of Tbilisi, and the great majority of visitors take the photograph from the safe side and then turn around.
Crossing is not a project. Metekhi Bridge puts you under the cliff in two minutes, and Avlabari Square is another ten minutes up. What you find there is plainer than the postcard: a working residential hill with two of the city’s most photographed monuments perched on its edges and almost no tourist theatre in the middle.
What is actually there once you cross
Not much that announces itself. That is the point, and it is also the reason people bounce off it.
The centre of gravity is Avlabari Square, the district’s old civic heart, where the metro exit, the marshrutka stops and the everyday shops all collide. Next to it stands Ejmiatsin Church, an 18th-century Armenian Apostolic church, restored and still in use — one of the few Armenian buildings in the quarter that survived the twentieth century in one piece. Behind the square the streets narrow fast: two-storey houses with wooden balconies, iron staircases bolted to the outside, and courtyards you can see straight into because the gates were removed decades ago and nobody replaced them.
The bakeries are the thing to look for. Tone bread is sold at street level through a hatch cut into the wall, hot, for a couple of lari, and the queue at eight in the morning is entirely local. That is a more honest picture of Avlabari than either of its famous churches.
Two other stops earn a detour:
- Queen Darejan’s Palace (Sachino) — built in 1776 for the wife of King Erekle II, on the ruins of the old Avlabari city wall. You will recognise it from the round pale-blue carved balcony hanging off the cliff face. It is now a working convent of the Transfiguration, and the visitable section reopened in August 2024 after restoration.
- The underground printing house where the young Stalin ran an illegal press from 1903 to 1906, roughly fifteen metres below a suburban yard. Entry is 10 GEL, cash only, weekdays 10am to 6pm, tours in Georgian or Russian with an English sheet at the door (checked September 2026 against Wander-Lush’s visitor guide). It sits closer to 300 Aragveli metro than to Avlabari station, so treat it as a separate trip.
Why there is an Armenian quarter here at all
The name is the history. Avlabari comes from the Armenian for outer district: outer because it sat across the water from the walled medieval city, beyond the gates, which is exactly where a growing non-Georgian merchant population was permitted to settle and build.
The hill above became the community’s burial ground. The Khojivank cemetery was founded around 1655, when Aslan Melik-Bebutov built the St Astvatsatsin church on family land, and by the early twentieth century it held more than 90,000 graves — the largest Armenian burial ground in the city, and its religious centre.
Then it was dismantled. Between 1934 and 1938 the Soviet authorities demolished the church and cleared the cemetery, and the headstones were broken up and reused as building material, including in the structure that is now the Georgian Parliament on Rustaveli. A small memorial section, the Armenian Pantheon, opened in 1962 with about thirty relocated gravestones, most of them standing over no remains at all. The details are set out in the record of the Khojivank Pantheon, checked September 2026.
Very few Armenians live in Avlabari now. The quarter kept the name and lost most of the people, which is why walking it feels less like visiting a living ethnic district and more like reading a place that has been overwritten twice.
Sameba, and the ground underneath it
Sameba, the Holy Trinity Cathedral, is the gold dome you have been photographing. It stands 101 metres tall including a 7.5-metre gilded cross, the largest cathedral in Georgia and the third tallest Eastern Orthodox cathedral anywhere, finished in 2004 after nine years of building. Entry is free. Published grounds hours vary between sources, from 8am–8pm to 8am–10pm, so aim for the middle of the day.
The thing worth knowing before you go up: it stands on part of the Khojivank site. Foundation work in the 1990s cut through burials, and remains were removed by truck. That history is not on the signage, and it is the reason Sameba means something quite different to Armenian Tbilisi than it does to the coach parties. We cover the building itself in more detail in our guide to Sameba Cathedral, and its place in the wider religious landscape in our overview of Georgian Orthodox churches.
Our advice: give Sameba twenty minutes, not an afternoon. It is enormous and it is new, and the reward per minute drops off fast once you have stood inside the dome. The older, smaller things down the hill repay time better.
Metekhi, the king, and the drop into Rike
Metekhi Church sits on the rock directly above the river at the Avlabari end of the bridge. The present building went up between 1278 and 1289 under King Demetre II, replacing a twelfth-century church the Mongols destroyed in 1235; the site itself goes back to the fifth century, when Vakhtang Gorgasali is said to have put a church and fortress on this plateau as part of the new capital.
The equestrian statue of Gorgasali beside it, by the sculptor Elguja Amashukeli, dates from the 1960s. It is not medieval, and knowing that improves the view rather than spoiling it: you are looking at a Soviet-era monument to a fifth-century king, placed to be seen from the other bank.
Below the cliff is Rike Park, flat, modern and busy in the evening, and from there the cable car crosses the river to Narikala Fortress for 2.5 GEL paid with a Metromoney card. It runs from 10am to midnight in summer and to 10pm in winter, and the ride takes under two minutes — fares and hours checked August 2026 against this Tbilisi transport guide.
The metro station is the real argument for staying here
Avlabari station opened in 1967 and sits on Line 1, the red line, one stop from Liberty Square and a straight run out to Didube for the intercity marshrutkas. A ride is a flat 1 GEL however far you go, the Metromoney card costs 2 GEL and is refundable, and one tap buys you 90 minutes of free transfers onto buses.
Compare that with Sololaki or the lanes of Old Town, where the walk to a metro entrance can be fifteen minutes of cobbles with a suitcase. If you are leaving Tbilisi for Kazbegi or Kutaisi on a morning marshrutka, this one detail is worth more than a nicer courtyard. Our Tbilisi neighbourhoods guide sets the trade-off out district by district.
Cheaper rooms, and the two honest catches
Rooms in Avlabari run noticeably below the equivalent on the Old Town side, for the plain reason that the address is residential rather than scenic. Budget hotels here advertise upper-floor rooms with a cathedral view at prices Sololaki charges for a windowless box. If you are weighing districts against each other, our guide to where to stay in Tbilisi has the comparison in full.
Two catches, and neither is small.
The first is the evenings. Avlabari empties after dark. There are neighbourhood places to eat and a handful of bars, but the density of wine bars, live music and late kitchens that makes Old Town and Vera pleasant at eleven at night simply is not here, and you will end up crossing the bridge for dinner more often than you planned.
The second is the hill. Everything in Avlabari is above the river, so every return trip is a climb — from Rike Park up to Avlabari Square is a steady haul with steps in places, and it is unpleasant in July heat with shopping. Check where your accommodation sits relative to the metro before booking, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Is Avlabari safe to walk around at night?
Yes. It is a residential area with families, dog walkers and lit main streets, and Tbilisi as a whole has very low levels of street crime. The genuine hazards are physical rather than criminal: unlit side lanes, broken pavement, missing manhole covers and stray dogs that bark more than they bite. Bring a phone torch and stick to the wider streets after midnight.
How long do you need in Avlabari?
Half a day covers it comfortably as a visitor: the cathedral, the palace, the square, the back lanes, then down to the church on the cliff. Stretch it to a full day only if you are pairing it with the printing house museum or eating a long lunch.
Are there still Armenian churches you can visit in Avlabari?
Ejmiatsin Church by the square is the one to head for — 18th century, Armenian Apostolic, restored and open. The Church of the Red Gospel, from the same period, survives only as ruins. The memorial pantheon on the hill is small and easy to walk past without noticing it.
Can you walk from Old Town to Sameba Cathedral?
You can, and it takes about 25 minutes from Liberty Square: over Metekhi Bridge, up past the church on the rock, then a sustained climb through residential streets to the cathedral gates. The alternative is one metro stop to Avlabari and a shorter uphill from there, which is the better call in summer.
One last piece of routing, and it is the one that changes the day: do this district downhill. Take the metro to Avlabari, start at the cathedral on the top of the hill, work down through the square and the back streets to Metekhi, and finish in Rike Park at the bottom with the cable car in front of you. Every other order turns a pleasant afternoon into a climb.
Featured image: Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.
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