Tbilisi – Sulphur and Searching for Peace and a Bed

The day began with a bath – not just any bath, but the kind of sulphur bath that reminds you how ancient cities like Tbilisi never forgot the art of ritual cleansing. We rented a room at the Roman Baths, a vaulted chamber tiled like a forgotten hammam, smelling faintly of sulphur and centuries. Lorena had a woman assigned to her, I had a man: scrubbers, cleaners, exfoliators with the kind of no-nonsense attitude that suggests you are merely another body in need of vigorous redemption. They alternated between massage and abrasion, erasing skin as if polishing wood. It was oddly humbling, being scoured by a stranger in a city that has spent millennia scrubbing itself free of conquerors.

The Old Town is where this sense of layered endurance reveals itself most vividly. Wooden balconies, imported generations ago by a mountain community, cling to the facades like forgotten lacework. Many of the grand mansions have been broken up into flats during Soviet times—partition walls where once there were ballrooms, stairwells leading to three kitchens, four families, and a chaos of laundry. Tbilisi is a palimpsest: architecture written, rewritten, overwritten, each era stubbornly refusing to vanish.

We crossed the Bridge of Peace—glass, steel, a futurist gesture that some dismiss as kitsch but which Georgians themselves see as symbolic, a literal and metaphorical connection between the two banks of the river, between east and west, between a troubled past and a European dream. The irony is that two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—remain under Russian control, and the current government seems bent on a populist, Moscow-friendly course. Politics here feels like a tug-of-war over identity: Europe on one side, empire on the other.

In daylight, the city bakes at forty degrees. The heat is an assault, softened only by the big plastic beakers of fresh fruit—€10 for a liquid reprieve. At night, the punishment turns into exuberance. Tbilisi is alive after dark: wine bars packed, music spilling from courtyards, an energy that feels almost defiant. The nightlife is not just pleasure but protest, a refusal to be subdued.

At the old caravanserai, once a stop on the Silk Road, now a museum, I stood in the shaded courtyard imagining the camel caravans unloading silk, spices, rumours, and fatigue. Tbilisi’s geography made it inevitable: a place to pause, to trade, to sweat.

What wasn’t inevitable was the Aqua Hotel. We had booked it for two nights—central, convenient, on Alexandre Pushkin Street. When we arrived, sweating and hopeful, the doors were locked. A security guard at the reception desk waved us away brusquely. No English, no explanation, just an unmistakable gesture: leave. Booking.com offered no help, just the cold indifference of an algorithm. At 11 p.m., in a foreign capital vibrating with music and heat, we found ourselves without a bed. There is a peculiar vulnerability in that moment: luggage dragging on cobblestones, couples arguing in low tones, the search for shelter. Eventually, we did find another hotel in the Old Town, though the memory of being turned away lingers longer than the relief of having found a room.

Tbilisi is a contradiction embodied: sulphur and scrub, Soviet ghosts and glass bridges, forty-degree heat and cool fruit drinks, locked doors and open nights. It is, in every sense, a city that demands you be wide awake.