EVERYTHING HERE USED TO BE SOMETHING ELSE
Part II of the GEORGIA EDITION
This is the second installment of our GEORGIA EDITION, a multi-part exploration of the culture, hospitality, and architecture shaping modern Georgia. Today, we head to the roof of The Telegraph Hotel.
For your listening pleasure
EVERYTHING HERE USED TO BE SOMETHING ELSE
Tbilisi’s buildings are reconstructing themselves out of their own wreckage. So are the people. So where is everybody?
Words by Jackson Greathouse Fall
I sneak onto roofs. I’m a habitual roof sneaker — I have been since high school. This is my one real vice as a traveler, and after two years of living out of a bag I’ve gotten good enough at it that I no longer think of it as sneaking so much as checking. Service stairwell, propped door, a confident walk past a housekeeping cart. Nobody stops a man who looks like he left something up there, or like he has somewhere to be. Yellow reflective vests work a charm for this stuff.
The roof of The Telegraph in Tbilisi is worth the trespass for one reason besides the views: from up there, you smell all four restaurants at once. Grilled meat from one vent, khachapuri baking from another, coffee and pastries from the café, and... Pad Thai? from another? I lingered up there for a look around on my first weekend in Georgia, peering down at a city that I did not yet understand at all.
Let’s explore the buildings that make the city what it is, and the people behind them.
EXISTING CONDITIONS
Georgia sits in the middle of the world’s most complicated neighborhood. Russia sprawls over the north, Turkey in the southwest, and Armenia and Azerbaijan below. Roughly a fifth of Georgia’s territory is currently occupied by Russian forces. You can drive from downtown Tbilisi to an occupation line about the same time as it takes to get from lower Manhattan to JFK.
Now come up on the roof with me, because the view does the explaining.
Look down: we’re standing on the 1964 Post and Telegraph building designed by Lado Alexi-Meskhishvili and Teimuraz Mikashavidze, faced in all its original Bolnisi tuff — that’s the pale volcanic stone this entire city is quarried out of. For thirty-odd years, before the wall came down, this was where you came to talk to anyone outside Georgia — the physical building you walked into in order to reach the rest of the world. Symbolic and a little bit auspicious for what would become a five star boutique hotel half a century later. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it sat empty for decades. Its now 239 rooms, a (crappy, if not weirdly high production value) jazz club in the basement, the four restaurants I can smell from here, all redone by Shanghai based Neri&Hu.
Towering over to our left: the Radisson Blu. Built in 1967, twenty-two floors, designed to be the finest hotel — the pinnacle of Soviet Georgian hospitality. Then war broke out in Abkhazia in the early nineties and roughly a thousand refugees moved into the hotel and lived there for a decade. Laundry strung across the balconies of a modernist tower — the tallest building in the city at the time. It became the most photographed building in the city for the worst reason a building can be photographed. In 2004 the families were paid to leave — somewhere around seven thousand dollars a room — and it reopened as a Radisson of all things in 2009.
I only know this because The Telegraph doesn’t have a pool, and guests are afforded use of the Radisson’s for that reason. We’re all refugees here in one way or another.
Straight ahead, a few hundred meters down Rustaveli Avenue: the literal Parliament, where Georgians have protested more or less continuously since November 2024, when the government suspended the country’s EU accession talks after a disputed election.
Soviet luxury. Refugee camp. Five-star. Riot line. Sound novel? Let’s keep walking down Rustaveli. This story plays out in Tbilisi over and over again, pretty much everywhere that is new and trendy and cool you can look.
CHANGE OF USE
I learned how to look at buildings like this in Istanbul, standing inside the Hagia Sophia and feeling like something was subtly wrong with the room.
