Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia
Georgia's principal history museum, holding Colchian goldwork, Dmanisi hominin fossils and ethnography.
The Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia is the flagship branch of the Georgian National Museum and stands on Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi. Its collections descend from the museum of the Caucasian Department of the Russian Imperial Geographic Society, founded in 1852. Renamed the Museum of Georgia in 1919, it took the name of the historian Simon Janashia in 1947. Since 2004 it has been part of the unified Georgian National Museum, which also administers sites in Mtskheta, Gori, Sighnaghi and Kutaisi.
The permanent displays run from archaeology to the twentieth century. The Archaeological Treasury shows pre-Christian goldwork and jewellery from Colchis and Iberia, including finds from Vani and Akhalgori. A palaeontology and anthropology hall presents the Dmanisi hominin skulls, among the earliest human remains found outside Africa. Upper floors cover Georgian ethnography, numismatics and a display on the Soviet period. The red-brick building, begun before the First World War and completed by Nikoloz Severov in 1929, blends neo-classical form with Georgian ornament.
Highlights
- Archaeological Treasury of Colchian and Iberian gold and jewellery
- Dmanisi hominin skulls from the 1.8-million-year-old Dmanisi site
- Museum of the Soviet Occupation display on the upper floor
- Severov's 1929 red-brick facade on Rustaveli Avenue
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