Towering over the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is Mtatsminda Park, a Soviet-era fairground and gardens set atop a craggy hill. Accessed by a funicular railway, you will find a host of terrifying, creaky old amusement rides, including the 65-metre-high Giant Wheel, which seems to bow outwards over the edge of a sheer cliff. Dotted around the park are the remnants of Soviet comms equipment; rusting satellite dishes, a vast radio tower.
The amusements are what you might charitably call ‘low-fi’ – I would not recommend forking out the 20 Georgian lari (£5.60) for the House of Mirrors, for instance, a sad, reflective tunnel within which you bumble around for approximately three minutes like a daddy long legs trapped behind a window. But Mtatsminda is an excellent spot to pick up a few bottles of the local Natakhtari beer and gaze wistfully over one of the most geopolitically fascinating cities in Europe.
Bordering Russia to the North, Georgia’s position is at once prosperous and precarious. Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, more than 100,000 Russians moved here – most to Tbilisi – a massive influx for a nation of just 3.7 million.
This helped send the economy into overdrive, with the price of housing inevitably following. There had been an uneasy detente between the two countries following the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, in which Putin redrew parts of the border in his favour, but the fire is once again being stoked. Graffiti sprayed liberally across the capital.
