04 — The Founder of Tbilisi
The achievement for which Vakhtang is most remembered by his nation: the founding of Tbilisi and the shift of the royal seat from ancient Mtskheta to the new capital on the Kura. These two files treat the famous hunting-and-hot-springs foundation legend as tradition weighed against history, and set out what can and cannot be said about Vakhtang’s part in the birth of the city that has been Georgia’s capital ever since.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
Of all the deeds ascribed to Vakhtang, the founding of Tbilisi is the one that most shapes his place in Georgian memory — he is, above all, the founder of the capital. Yet even here the record is a tangle of tradition and history: a celebrated foundation legend of a hunt and a hot spring; a shift of capital that the sources associate with Vakhtang but complete under his son; and the hard external fact that Tbilisi is a real, datable city that became the seat of a Persian viceroy within a generation of Vakhtang’s death. This section keeps the legend and the history distinct, honoring the tradition while pinning what is documentable (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Founding of the Capital | The founding/expansion of Tbilisi and the shift of the capital from Mtskheta; the famous hunting-and-hot-springs foundation tradition (the falcon, the pheasant, and the warm springs that give the city its name) — tradition weighed against history under §3.5. |
| The City and the Kingdom | Tbilisi as the new center of the kingdom and its building works; why the site mattered, the completion of the transfer under his son Dachi, and the city’s swift emergence as the seat of Kartlian — and then Persian — power. |
See Also
- The Reorganization of the Georgian Church — the Mtskheta the capital moved away from, and its cathedral
- Vakhtang in Georgian Memory — the founder-of-the-capital as national hero
- St. Abo of Tbilisi — the martyr and patron of the city Vakhtang founded
References
- Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012.
- Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963.
- Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.