Georgians - Settlements

Georgia's central valleys and coastal regions are thickly settled with towns and villages of from 50 to 50,000 inhabitants. Town suburbs often sprawl out and divide into clusters of houses, like villages themselves. In the mountains and hills, villages rarely exceed 1,000 people and are often at a considerable distance from one another. Even the smallest villages typically consist of several named areas, each originally settled by a different family. In eastern Georgia, houses cluster compactly, with both private plots and collective-farm fields surrounding them; in the west, each sits in its own large garden. A small village usually includes a stone water fountain, a shop, a kindergarten, and a threshing ground, also used for summer meetings and dances. Larger villages may have a recreation hall, a bathhouse or café, clinics, grammar schools, and one or two factories or workshops.

A standard house in eastern Georgia is square, two stories high, and built of cement or brick with a tile roof. In the west the older style, still preserved, favors wide, one-story, all-wood houses with elaborate carvings. Houses often have eight or ten rooms; the kitchen is on the ground floor with its own entrance, the best room is on the second floor. All houses have verandas, outside staircases, and balconies, where people work and eat in the summer months. Each house, or sometimes several dwellings belonging to a father and his sons, stands in a courtyard with a fence and a gate. The gates are now usually metal, painted blue or green (once regarded as protection against the evil eye); a visitor pauses at the gates and calls to the people inside. The garden invariably includes a grape arbor and rose bushes as well as fruit trees and vegetables. Men build their houses carefully over a period of years, as they have the time and can buy the materials.

In Tbilisi most people live in apartments, either five-story prewar buildings or modern high-rises. The center of the city is Rustaveli Prospect, a wide avenue of public buildings, theaters, and stores, where crowds stroll in summer. Nearby is the old town with its jumbled balconies and courtyards, the old sulfur baths, and the most important churches. A traditionally Armenian quarter lies across the river, along with the central market and most of the city's industry. Abandoned cliff and cave dwellings, refuges during the wars of earlier centuries, remain across southern Georgia. In mountain villages many houses still have old stone defense towers, some dating from the twelfth century or perhaps earlier. Into the twentieth century, poorer western Georgians lived in ancient-style round houses with central hearths.