Photo by Wowan1978, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
🇬🇪 Georgia · Old Town, Tbilisi
Photo by Wowan1978, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
🇬🇪 Georgia · Old Town, Tbilisi
♨ Temperature
39°C
⛰ Altitude
445 m
⚗ pH
7
💧 TDS
1100 mg/L
🌊 Flow rate
80 L/s
📅 Established
5th century (legend); bath houses rebuilt 17th–19th c.
✓ Verified on 2026-07-22
The word 'Tbilisi' derives from the Georgian for 'warm place' — a name given to the city because of the sulfur springs that rise along the banks of the Mtkvari River. The Abanotubani district (meaning 'bath district') clusters a series of domed brick bath houses, each fed by the same subterranean sulfurous aquifer that reportedly drew King Vakhtang Gorgasali to found a city here in the 5th century. According to legend, the king was hunting when a pheasant fell into one of the natural springs and emerged cooked — prompting him to build his capital on the site. The bath houses, rebuilt in their current form during the Persian and Russian periods, operate in the tradition of the regional hammam: a sequence of steam rooms, soaping chambers, and cool-down pools. The sulfur-rich water — milky, warm, faintly eggy — has been used continuously for over a millennium as a place of bathing, socialising, and recovery from illness.
| Hydrogen Sulphide | 8.5 mg/L |
| Sodium | 180 mg/L |
| Bicarbonate | 420 mg/L |
| Calcium | 72 mg/L |
| Sulphate | 95 mg/L |
Tbilisi's sulfur baths are among the oldest continuously operating bathing facilities in the Caucasus. The city itself was founded around these springs in the 5th century AD. Over the following fifteen centuries, the bath houses passed through Persian, Ottoman, and Russian administrative periods, each of which added architectural layers to the domed structures visible today. The historic district of Abanotubani is protected under Georgian heritage legislation and forms the cultural core of the UNESCO-proposed Old Town of Tbilisi.
Georgian bath culture is deeply social: the sulfur baths of Abanotubani have historically been places of business negotiation, political conversation, and communal ritual as much as cleansing. Writers including Alexandre Dumas and Alexander Pushkin bathed here and wrote about the experience. Pushkin called the Tbilisi baths the finest he had ever visited. The tradition of hiring a 'keisari' — a professional scrubber and masseur — for a full bath ceremony continues today in several of the historic houses.
The sulfur springs of Tbilisi flow from a natural aquifer without mechanical pumping, at a consistent 37–42°C. The water is not recirculated — it flows through the bath chambers and drains naturally, continuously renewed from the geothermal source. Several bath houses have undergone renovation using traditional brick and tile materials consistent with the historic architectural character of Abanotubani.
Websitewww.tbilisi.gov.ge
AddressAbanotubani, Old Town, Tbilisi, Georgia