13/08/2026
🏛️ There is more beneath this familiar Tbilisi façade than most of us ever see.
The Melik-Azaryants House has stood on Rustaveli Avenue since 1915. But part of its story lies several floors below the street.
When Tbilisi-born Armenian merchant, philanthropist and geologist commissioned the building, the site presented a challenge. Part of the plot was occupied by a ravine and rubbish dump and groundwater complicated construction. The solution included three to four underground levels of basements and tunnels. The cellars were enclosed in a lead frame and specially fired bricks were used in their construction.
Above ground, this was much more than an apartment building. The complex had six entrances and included a cinema, art gallery, photography studio, kindergarten, its own telephone exchange and a garden with a fountain. All of this was part of life within the building in early 20th-century Tbilisi.
Today, some of what lay below is visible again.
As part of the ongoing rehabilitation, 1,200 cubic metres of accumulated waste have been cleared from the basement floors. Later additions, primarily dating from the Soviet period, are also being removed in parts of the building. The work continues under the supervision of architects, structural engineers, archaeologists and art historians.
These aren’t newly discovered secret tunnels. They were part of the original building.
In Tbilisi, a façade is often only the beginning. Behind it and sometimes beneath it are traces of different periods, communities and ways of living that shaped the city we see today.
At Living Roots, our tailor-made architecture and cultural journeys explore these layers of Tbilisi and Georgia with specialists who know the buildings, their history and the details that are easy to walk past.
If architecture is your way into a city, we’d love to show you more.
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Visual material: Living Roots / / National Archives of Georgia / / scantbilisi / Wikimedia Commons
