Galaktion Tabidze Street

    Galaktion Tabidze Street Before and now

Our last stop is in 20 G.Tabidze street (behind 5 Chonkadze street we turn to the left to 5 Lermontov street and then turn to the right and go up the street) - "Caucasian House" or as people call it "Pushkin Memorial of the Smirnovs' House". When entering the house one unwillingly forgets that in mi-nutes' walk distance there is the center of the city because all of a sudden one becomes a witness and a participant of a wonderful serenity, the calmness of the 19th century. It was built in 1860 by order of the head of the Tamamshev family (a rich Armenian merchant) and according to the design of a Swedish architect Otto Simenson in a traditional European style with colored wooden balconies. Elizaveta, Tamamshev's daughter, married Michael Smirnov and got this house as her dowry. Alexandra Osipovna SmirnovRosset was Michael's mother. She was a friend of Pushkin and Krilov, Mitskevich, Leist and Zhukovski, a maid of honor of the two empresses, a hostess of the literary saloon, one of the most beautiful women of that time. At the end of the 70s of the 19th century Michael brought the furniture from his mother's Petersburg saloon into this house and soon it became one of the centers of cultural communication where remarkable people of Georgia and Russia, writers, scientists, actors, musicians, met and conversed. In this way many unique exhibits appeared in Tbilisi: decorative tables, made by Peter the Great himself, Pushkin's gentleman of the monarch' hat, tobaccocase of Katherine II and many other things. Ilia Chavchavadze, Niko Nikoladze, P. Melikishvili, A.Rubinstein (who often came to play on tour in Tiflis and spent a lot of evenings with pleasure in this house), P. Tchaikovsky visited this house in order to touch the family relics. It is in this house where the first academic edition of Nikoloz Baratashvili (1817-1845) works was prepared and published (Elisabeth's sister married the nephew of the great poet). Three generations of Smirnov's family managed to carefully keep and bring through the 20th century cataclysms this unique collection to us. The family collection of the Smirnovs was gifted to Georgia in 1985.

The former home of Sergo Orjonikidze, 17 Galaktion Tabidze Street

The house was built at the turn of the 20th century, and housed the first ambassador of the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic to Georgia, Sergei Kirov.

Its most famous resident, however, was Sergo Orjonikidze. A close friend of Joseph Stalin, Orjonikidze lived in the house from 1921 to 1926. Orjonikidze led the Bolshevik invasion of Georgia in 1921 and is credited with crafting policy that seriously reduced Georgian autonomy within the USSR, including the decision to combine Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan as Transcaucasian SFSR, instead of allowing Georgia to have full member status in the USSR.

Nastas Mikoyan, Joseph Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze in Tiflis, 1925