Georgian National Museum

The Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, the flagship of the Georgian National Museum, occupies a large building on Rustaveli Avenue a few steps from Freedom Square. It is the best single place to understand the country's long history. The archaeological treasury displays gold and silver jewellery from ancient Colchis and Iberia, including the 5th-century BC Akhalgori hoard, and the prehistory galleries show fossils of early humans from Dmanisi, about 1.8 million years old. Other halls cover medieval icons and goldsmiths' work, around 80,000 coins and a remarkable collection of Urartian inscriptions.

Allow at least two hours, and start with the treasury and the prehistory halls, which hold the most striking pieces. Upstairs, the Museum of Soviet Occupation exhibition documents the 1921 Red Army invasion, the repressions and the decades that followed through photographs, documents and personal objects. Temporary exhibitions change often, and most labels are in Georgian and English. The museum is a good choice for a hot afternoon or a rainy day.

The museum grew out of the collection of the Caucasian department of the Russian Imperial Geographic Society, founded on 10 May 1852. The building on Rustaveli Avenue was built in 1913–1917 for the Caucasian Museum, and its facade was reworked in 1929. It is named after the historian Simon Janashia. Since 2004 it has been part of the Georgian National Museum, which also runs the Dmanisi museum-reserve, the Open Air Museum of Ethnography and other museums across the country.