Kutaisi State Historical Museum
Imereti's main museum, in a former bank building, with a gold treasury from Bagrati Cathedral.
Founded in 1921-22 and named after the historian Niko Berdzenishvili, the museum occupies a three-storey building on Pushkin Street put up in the 1890s for the state bank. It is the principal historical collection of western Georgia, holding more than two hundred thousand items that run from the ninth century BC to the late medieval period: archaeology from Colchis, coins, manuscripts, textiles, woodwork and ethnographic material gathered across Imereti, Racha and Lechkhumi. Its numismatic holdings are among the richest in the Caucasus.
The best known display is the treasury, a strong room of gold and silver church plate, processional crosses, repoussé icons and illuminated gospels. Much of it was taken from Bagrati Cathedral and the monasteries of Gelati and Motsameta during the Soviet period, when the churches were closed, and it is shown in a separate guarded hall. The museum also keeps a research library of some forty thousand volumes and publishes an annual journal on its collections.
Highlights
- Treasury of gold and silver church plate from Bagrati and Gelati
- Repoussé icons, processional crosses and illuminated gospel books
- Colchian archaeology and one of the richest coin cabinets in the Caucasus
- Housed in a 1890s state bank building on Pushkin Street
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