The story
Tbilisi City Festival in Tbilisi
Better known locally as Tbilisoba, Tbilisi's city festival was first staged in 1979 at Communist Party initiative, went dormant in the early 1990s, and was revived in 1995 as an annual October celebration of the capital's roughly fifteen-hundred-year history. Centered on Old Tbilisi, it combines open-air folk concerts with regional harvest stalls and honorary-citizenship ceremonies.
Tbilisi's citywide festival is far better known locally by its Georgian name, Tbilisoba, first staged on October 28, 1979 at the initiative of Eduard Shevardnadze, then First Secretary of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic's Communist Party, who created the celebration partly to redirect public enthusiasm away from religious observance and toward a new, ostensibly secular civic tradition.