location: 41.69475750707263, 44.80514963074604

date: late 19th century

illustration focus: courtyard; balconies

4/9 Ietim-Gurji is a textbook Tbilisi duet: a Europeanised street front and an inward, wood-made life. From the lane of Aleksandre Chekvaidze Street (Google Maps still shows the pre-2017 name, Sultanishani Turn), the façade keeps to restrained brick-and-plaster planes, a simple cornice, and a long timber balcony. The moment you step inside – either through the main entrance or from the parallel street named after Ietim-Gurji – the composition flips to its true stage: a compact courtyard strung with two-level open gallery-balconies, or ayvani, painted turquoise-blue. Here the galleries stitch rooms into an enfilade around the yard, turning circulation into a social act: shade in summer, a bench by the rail, a place to talk and to watch.

This type of residential house defines mid-19th-century Tbilisi: a street-aligned wall kept relatively plain, while domestic life turns inward to an oblong yard bound by a continuous ayvani. Planning is enfilade-based – rooms open directly to the gallery; in variants the enfilade runs on one or two sides of the court, sometimes encircling a double inner yard; the common Г-shaped plan places the main ayvani to the yard and, not rarely, a lighter balcony to the street. Balconies are broad – often rivaling the rooms in width – and serve at once as corridor, sitting room, and route to exterior stairs. Timber carries the articulation (posts for columns), with carved rails and shallow arches. Where the street requires more decorum, stained-glass vitraj and tighter mouldings domesticate the façade, leaving the fuller carpentry to the yard.

These communal inner yards – often nicknamed “Italian courtyards” – condense a shared way of life: neighbours meeting along laundry lines, stairways in the open air, doors opening directly to the gallery. The term is local shorthand rather than a claim of origin; what it captures is the social permeability of the domestic threshold. In houses like this, the gallery is simultaneously corridor, balcony, and sitting room, so the yard becomes a semi-public room where everyday domestic life and conversation overlap.

The ayvani – open gallery-balconies – are the hinge that makes this hybrid work. Structurally they are a light post-and-beam porch; spatially, an anteroom between flat and yard; culturally, a device that kept everyday life visible even as street fronts adopted classicising rules. In Tbilisi practice, the classical order is recast in carpentry – posts in lieu of columns, pierced balustrades in lieu of masonry articulation, shallow carved arches from post to post – so that the galleries are not appendages but the primary interface of domestic life.

Local lore folds the address 4/9 Ietim-Gurji into the city’s oral toponymy as “Eva’s pavaroti” (“Eva’s turn/bend”): retellings speak of a Jewish merchant named Eva whose shop and evening meeting-point lent the corner its nickname. The story has traction in guidebooks and rental names, but no documentary tie to this specific plot has been established, and the official record is silent; it is best treated as neighbourhood legend rather than attested toponym.

Reading the house within Tbilisi’s longer debate on identity clarifies why these galleries matter. In the later Soviet decades the architect-preservationist Shota Kavlashvili (1926–1995) – also one of the authors of the modernist Archaeology Museum – turned balcony culture into a policy emblem; admirers dubbed him the “prince of balconies.” His office prioritised the repair and the reconstruction of balconies as heritage signifiers. The open balcony galleries on the 4/9 Ietim-Gurji St courtyard also appear to be part of this Kavlashvili’s balcony reconstruction programme. Nevertheless, the house remains in poor condition nowadays. According to the official heritage passport (Reg. No. 3745), the building requires structural strengthening and rehabilitation – with documented defects – through-cracks, the loss of one risalit pediment, sloping floors, damp walls, a waterlogged cellar – and ad-hoc yard-side additions that compromise its integrity.

Sources and Further Reading

Ministry of Culture and Sports of Georgia. Heritage Passport for 4 Ietim Gurji Street / 9 Sultanishani Lane (Register No. 3745). Available at: memkvidreoba.gov.ge

Beridze, Vakhtang. Architecture of Tbilisi, 1801–1917, 2 vols. [tbilisis khurotmodzghvreba, 1801–1917]. Tbilisi, 1960–1963. [in Georgian]

Chanishvili, Nino. Nineteenth-Century Architecture of Tbilisi as a Reflection of Cultural and Social History of the City. FaRiG Rothschild Research Grant Report, 2007.

Kvirkvelia, Tengiz. Old Tbilisi [dzveli tbilisi]. Tbilisi, 1984. [in Georgian]

Kutateladze, Tea. Interiors of Residential and Public Buildings in Tbilisi, 19th–20th Centuries [satskhovrebeli da sazogadoebrivi shenobebis int’erierebis monument’ur-dek’orat’iuli perts’era k. tbilisshi XIX–XX sauk’uneebis mijnaze]. Tbilisi, 2015. [in Georgian]

Meskhi, Maia. Architectural-feature Analysis, Problems and Paradigms of Sololaki Area’s Spatial-Volumetric Structure [sololak’is sivrtsit – motsulobiti st’rukt’uris arkit’ekt’urul – mkhat’vruli analizi, problemebi da paradigmebi. Tbilisi, 2019. [in Georgian].

Tsintsadze, Vakhtang. Tbilisi: Architecture of the Old City and Residential Houses of the First Half of the 19th Century [Tbilisi. Arkhitektura starogo goroda i zhilye doma pervoi poloviny XIX stoletiia]. Tbilisi, 1958. [in Russian]

Wheeler, Angela. Architectural Guide: Tbilisi. 2023.

text and photos by Elena Lisitsyna