History

Tbilisi in the early 19th century was the administrative capital of Russian Transcaucasia and a meeting point of European, Persian, and Ottoman cultural traditions. A civic theatre opened on the current site in 1851, designed to serve the growing Russian officer and merchant class as well as the Georgian and Armenian bourgeoisie of the city. The repertoire was mixed: Italian opera, Russian drama, and occasional works in Georgian. The building was destroyed by fire in 1874, a common fate for 19th-century theatres lit by oil lamps and heated by open stoves.

Victor Schröter, a St. Petersburg architect who had already built theatres in Riga and Kiev, received the commission to design the replacement. He chose a Moorish Revival programme — unusual for a Russian imperial commission, but appropriate for a city that stood at the interface of Christian and Islamic architectural traditions. The new building, inaugurated in 1880 with a performance of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, used horseshoe arches, interlaced geometric tilework, and muqarnas-derived corbels throughout the facade and interior public spaces.

The theatre became closely associated with Zakaria Paliashvili after the premiere of Abesalom da Eteri in 1919 — the first Georgian opera to achieve lasting repertoire status. The building survived the Soviet period with its fabric largely intact, undergoing renovations in the 1970s and again in the 2000s that preserved Schröter’s Moorish exterior while upgrading the stage machinery. Georgia formally renamed the theatre for Paliashvili in 1933, the year of his death.