If you only carry one thing home from a market here, make it Georgian spices you genuinely can’t buy where you live: blue fenugreek, a real khmeli suneli blend, and a bag of Svaneti salt. Everything else on the spice table, coriander and dried barberry included, sits on shelves in most of Europe and North America already.
So the question isn’t what to buy. It’s what survives the trip and clears customs, and where to buy it without paying triple at the stall by the gate. Here’s the short version, then the detail.
The four that earn their suitcase space
Blue fenugreek is the one to prioritise. Georgians call it utskho suneli, and it’s the seed that makes food taste Georgian rather than merely spiced, milder and sweeter than the fenugreek Indian cooking uses, faintly floral. It’s the backbone of khmeli suneli and the thing that separates real adjika from a generic chilli paste, as Wikipedia’s entry on utskho suneli notes. Good luck finding it in a supermarket at home. Buy it whole or ground and you can build half the cuisine off it.
Khmeli suneli is the ready-made blend, and the name just means dried spices. A proper one leans on blue fenugreek, coriander, marigold, summer savoury, marjoram, dill and bay, and comes out somewhere between pale green and umber. It goes into kharcho, lobio, the meat inside khinkali, most stews. The colour tells you a lot: the greener and more fragrant, the more fenugreek and marigold in it. The best blends come out of Svaneti.
Svaneti salt, or svanuri marili, is the sleeper hit. It’s not seasoned salt in the boring sense, it’s coarse salt pounded with garlic, blue fenugreek, coriander, dried marigold, caraway and hot pepper until it’s a damp, savoury, faintly funky rub. Put it on roast potatoes, grilled meat, eggs, tomatoes. Once you’ve cooked with it you’ll ration the bag. The Kitchn and Wikipedia’s Svan salt page both describe the same core recipe, though every family in Svaneti tweaks it.
Then dried marigold, sold as Imeretian saffron after the western province where it’s prized. It isn’t saffron at all, it’s ground tagetes petals, and it gives dishes an earthy warmth and a pale yellow colour rather than heat. Georgians reach for it in walnut sauces like bazhe and, again, in khmeli suneli. The name matters when you shop: ask for saffron and you’ll get marigold, and that’s correct. This Georgian saffron guide walks through why the two names point at the same jar.
The ones you can probably skip
Coriander is everywhere in Georgian cooking, both the fresh leaf (kindzi) and the dried seed, and it flavours adjika, tkemali, marinades and half the salads on a table. But you already have coriander seed at home, and it’s the same plant. Buying a bag here is fine as a top-up. It isn’t a reason to leave clothes behind.
Dried barberry is the same story. Those tart little red berries brighten rice and stews and turn up in kharcho spice mixes, and they’re lovely, but Iranian and Central Asian groceries stock them in most cities. If you’ve never seen them where you live, grab a bag. If you have, spend the money on fenugreek instead.
Our advice: treat the market as a chance to buy what’s hard to source, not to stock a whole pantry. Two bags of blue fenugreek and one of Svaneti salt will change more dinners than a carrier bag of things you can already order online.
Adjika: the paste and the powder are two different souvenirs
This trips people up, so it’s worth being clear. Adjika comes two ways, and only one of them belongs in your suitcase.
The paste is the original: hot peppers, garlic, herbs and blue fenugreek pounded into a thick, salty, crimson (or green, from unripe peppers) mass that Georgians spread on almost anything. It’s fantastic. It’s also wet, which makes it a customs and cabin-baggage problem the moment you fly, and the good stuff at the market is often loose in a tub rather than sealed.
The dry adjika is the same flavour rebuilt as a powder: dried red peppers, blue fenugreek, coriander, marigold, garlic and salt. It weighs nothing, it doesn’t leak, and it clears customs the way any dried spice does. If you want to take the taste of adjika home, take the powder and make the paste in your own kitchen. Buy one small tub of the wet stuff to eat during the trip.
Where to buy in Tbilisi, and for how much
Go to the spice rows at Deserters’ Bazaar, the sprawling market at Station Square (Vagzlis Moedani in Georgian), which sits right on top of a metro stop served by both lines. It’s open daily from about 07:00 to 18:00, and the produce is freshest in the morning, checked September 2026 against this Dezerter Bazaar market guide. Walk past the vendors crowding the entrance and buy from the indoor stalls, where the blends are better and the prices aren’t set for tourists.
On price, spices are cheap enough that haggling feels petty. A bag of khmeli suneli runs about 3 to 5 GEL, and a good-sized bag of Svaneti salt about 5 to 8 GEL, per that same guide, so roughly a euro or two each at the August 2026 rate of about 2.6 GEL to the dollar. Blue fenugreek and marigold sit in the same range. You’re not going to argue a vendor down from three lari, and you shouldn’t try. Buy a few extra bags instead, they make good gifts and they weigh nothing.
One thing not to do: don’t go looking for spices at the Dry Bridge flea market. That’s Soviet cameras, medals and antiques, a different kind of souvenir run entirely. And if you want the wider picture of what these spices actually go into, the Georgian food guide covers the dishes they season.
The airport and customs reality
Dried spices are the easy case. Flying into the EU, small quantities carried for personal use are exempt from certificates and inspection, with a limit of 2 kg per person on dried herbs and spices from a non-EU country like Georgia, per German customs guidance. You’d have to buy an absurd amount of fenugreek to hit that. Into the US, commercially processed, shelf-stable dried spices are broadly fine, though anything with fresh plant matter or seeds meant for planting gets more scrutiny, so keep everything dried and labelled.
The paste is where people get caught out, and it’s a cabin problem before it’s a customs one. Adjika counts as a liquid or gel at security, so a tub bigger than 100 ml can’t go in your hand luggage, full stop. Pack it in checked baggage, double-bagged, and keep it in sealed original packaging so it reads as a commercial food product rather than a mystery tub. Anything containing meat or dairy is a separate matter, most travellers can’t bring those into the EU at all, but plain vegetable adjika isn’t that.
The single rule that covers most of it: keep spices dry, keep everything in its shop packaging, and declare food when the customs form asks. Nobody minds a labelled bag of khmeli suneli. They mind an unlabelled jar of wet red paste.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most authentic Georgian spice to bring home?
Blue fenugreek, hands down. It’s the seed almost no supermarket outside the Caucasus carries, and it’s the flavour that defines the cuisine. A single bag lets you approximate khmeli suneli, adjika and Svaneti salt yourself if you ever run out of the ready-made versions.
Can I bring Georgian spice paste on a plane?
Only in checked luggage if the container is over 100 ml, because airport security treats adjika and tkemali as gels. Seal them well, pack them in your hold bag, and leave the powdered blends for your carry-on where they cause no trouble at all.
Is khmeli suneli the same as curry powder?
No. They share the idea of a house blend, but khmeli suneli has no turmeric-cumin-chilli base and isn’t hot. It’s herbal and nutty, built on blue fenugreek and marigold, and it’s closer in role to an Italian dried-herb mix than to anything from an Indian kitchen.
How much should a bag of Georgian spices cost at the market?
Single-digit lari for most bags, so a couple of euros. If someone at the entrance quotes you far above that, walk ten metres to an indoor stall. The real prices are fixed and low enough that the whole spice haul for a family costs less than one restaurant meal.
Last practical note, and it’s the one people wish they’d known: buy double the blue fenugreek you think you need. It’s the thing you’ll miss first, it keeps for a year in a sealed jar, and it’s the one item on this list you can’t simply reorder when the bag runs out. For the rest of your Tbilisi shopping, the best souvenirs guide covers what else is worth the luggage weight.
Featured image: Ekkatterrinna (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.
Leave a Reply