Monuments in Georgia dismantled and “modernized”

Like people, monuments are born, live and die. During his four-year assignment in Georgia, RIA Novosti correspondent Besik Pipiya has seen several monuments disappear. Some sculptures were dismantled on ideological grounds. In other cases, monuments “traveled” from one place to another for technical reasons.
Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin were immortalized in stone in a park on Sovetskaya Street in Tbilisi. In the late 1980s, “the leader of the workers” and “the father of all peoples” were relegated to oblivion.
Photo from the National Archive of Georgia.

A monument symbolizing the friendship between Georgia and Russia was put up at the entrance to Tbilisi in 1981. It was designed by Zurab Tsereteli. After certain events in April 1989, the monument was removed.
Photo from the National Archive of Georgia.

The Memorial of Military Glory in Kutaisi dedicated to the victory in the Great Patriotic War was blown up on December 19, 2009. The explosion killed a woman and her eight-year-old daughter.

This statue of Josef Stalin in his small motherland, in the town of Gori, was miraculously saved at a time when sculptures of the leader were being destroyed everywhere else in the late 1950s and when the monuments to the organizers of the October Revolution and their followers were demolished in 1989-1991. In June 2010, under the cover of night, Georgian officials dismantled a six-meter high statue of Josef Stalin in just three hours. The great dictator was accused of creating an empire that “forced Georgian authorities to peace” in August 2008.

The statue of a jolly man, a frequent customer of Georgian taverns, used to stand above a Khinkali Cafe in old Tbilisi. In 2011, he “retired,” the Khinkali Cafe was replaced by a Japanese restaurant.

A statue of King David IV the Builder used to sit on Republic Square. The king happened to be in the way of a hotel construction site and the statue was moved to the city outskirts. Tbilisi residents were outraged when they realized they were facing… “David the Builder’s rear end.”

There used to be a statue of Prometheus on the right bank of the Kura River in Tbilisi. Later the titan, who stole fire from the Olympic gods, disappeared from its pedestal. Our correspondent later discovered the statue of Prometheus in a resort park at Borzhomi, 150 km from Tbilisi. Georgians believe this was the actual place where Zeus bound Prometheus to a rock.

A statue of a naked Olympic athlete in front of the Sports Palace in Tbilisi. This statue has survived.

But once it was dressed up for the Tbilisoba festival… in a white t-shirt, a sports jacket and trousers, with large headphones around his neck.