All activities / Museums & Galleries / Tbilisi
Museums & Galleries in TbilisiGE
Georgia's capital, a layered city of Orthodox churches, wine bars, and Soviet modernist blocks on the Mtkvari River. The base for Caucasus motorcycle and overland circuits running north to Kazbegi and west to the Black Sea.
Why here
The Simon Janashia Museum on Rustaveli Avenue, founded 1852 and flagship of the Georgian National Museum's network of some twenty institutions, holds the country's showstopper: the Archaeological Treasury of more than six hundred pieces of Georgian goldsmithing from the third millennium BC to the fourth century AD, including the Colchian gold of Vani that gives the Golden Fleece myth its receipts. Down the same avenue, the privately founded Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, opened 2018, hangs over three and a half thousand works from the last seventy years of Georgian art, Pirosmani's heirs through the Soviet underground. One boulevard, five millennia, ten lari at the door.
Best months
Year-round; both close Mondays and run roughly ten to six. The gold treasury sometimes requires a separate ticket, take it. English labeling is solid at both anchors.
Getting there & around
Both museums sit on Rustaveli Avenue within a ten-minute walk. Metro Rustaveli or Liberty Square serves both ends.
Skill levels: beginner
Schools & guides (2)
Georgian Museum of Fine Arts
OrganizerPrivately founded Rustaveli Avenue museum opened 2018 with over 3,500 works of the last seventy years of Georgian art; site is script-heavy, verified by search.
Georgian National Museum
OrganizerThe national umbrella of some twenty museums, anchored by the 1852 Janashia Museum and its gold treasury of Colchian metalwork.