If Tbilisi has a stage, this is it. Rustaveli Avenue runs a little over a kilometre through the heart of the city, and almost everything that matters in the public life of Georgia has happened somewhere along it — premieres and protests, parades and revolutions.
Laid out in the nineteenth century and once called Golovin Street, it takes its present name from Shota Rustaveli, the twelfth-century poet whose epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin Georgians still quote by heart. The avenue is lined with plane trees and grand façades: the Moorish opera house, the colonnaded Rustaveli Theatre, the parliament building, the National Museum, the Academy of Sciences, and the small Kashveti church facing it all.
It is best walked slowly. Stop for coffee under the trees, browse the booksellers, look up at the carved balconies above the shopfronts. In the evening the theatres and the opera fill, and the cafés spill onto the pavement.
For a guest of the Telegraph there is nothing to plan here — the hotel stands on the avenue itself. Step out of the door and you are already on the most storied street in the country, the one you will come to know simply by living on it for a few days.
