Rustaveli Avenue goes quiet at midnight on July 23. No cars, no buses, no taxis, for four months, while crews tear into Tbilisi’s grandest boulevard. Tbilisi City Hall confirmed the closure will run from Tamar Chovelidze Street to Freedom Square, with Vaso Abashidze Street shut entirely and Aleksandre Griboedov Street flipped temporarily to two way traffic, Georgia Today reported.
The timing lands the closure on the exact stretch of pavement where Georgians have gathered every single day for nearly 600 days to protest their own government. City Hall’s traffic bulletin does not mention that. Almost nothing about the rehabilitation ever has.
Private Cars Get Rerouted Through Old Tbilisi’s Back Streets
Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze laid out the closure himself at a city government meeting. “The work will begin on July 23, at 12:00 a.m., from which time all types of vehicle traffic will be completely restricted on Rustaveli Avenue and part of Merab Kostava Street,” he said.
City Hall says alternative routes exist for private vehicles, and they run through some of the oldest streets in the capital. Three main diversions will carry the load:
- Drivers heading from Petre Melikishvili Avenue toward Freedom Square will loop through Ivane Tarkhnishvili, Vasil Barnovi, Kote Makashvili, Polikarpe Kakabadze, Daniel Chonkadze, Amagleba, Lado Asatiani and Shalva Dadiani streets.
- Traffic from Nikoloz Baratashvili Street toward Merab Kostava Street shifts onto Revaz Tabukashvili and Sandro Inashvili streets, through First Republic Square, then Giorgi Akhvlediani and Niko Nikoladze streets.
- Cars moving from Mikheil Javakhishvili Street toward Rustaveli Avenue divert via Revaz Tabukashvili, Revaz Lagidze and Marie Brosse streets, finishing along the Zviad Gamsakhurdia Embankment.
None of these streets were built for the volume Rustaveli normally carries. Tbilisi drivers are about to find that out for four months straight.
Sixteen Bus Lines Learn a New Route Home
Public transport gets rerouted too, and the changes touch far more riders than the private car diversions. City Hall listed exactly which lines move and where.
| Routes Affected | New Path During Closure |
|---|---|
| Buses 301, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310, 314, 326, 331, 337, 342, 344, 345, 352, 358, 397; minibuses 472, 532, 540, 541 | Through Heroes’ Square and the right bank of the Mtkvari River to connect with Baratashvili Street |
| Buses 359 and 391 | Via Heroes’ Square and Galaktion Tabidze Bridge |
| Bus 378 | No longer stops at Rustaveli Metro Station; redirected toward Heroes’ Square |
| Minibuses 408, 420 and 457 | Modified routing for the closure period |
Heroes’ Square and Baratashvili Street effectively become the makeshift interchange for the whole northern half of the network for the next four months.
Five Failed Tenders Later, the Diggers Finally Show Up
The date on the calendar makes this look sudden. It is not. Kaladze first floated the idea at the end of 2023, promising work would start within a year and run more than two years total.
What followed was one of the slower rehabilitation sagas in Tbilisi’s recent building record.
- End of 2023: Kaladze announces the rehabilitation plan for the first time, pitching a two phase project covering facades and then roadway.
- February 2025: City Hall opens four tenders worth a combined GEL 28.4 million. Two, worth GEL 8.7 million, draw zero bidders. Two others attract only a single company, DIN Group. The project is postponed weeks later.
- November 2025: City Hall folds GEL 40 million (roughly $14.8 million at current exchange rates) into the 2026 to 2027 municipal budget, split GEL 10 million for 2026 and GEL 30 million for 2027, covering road surface, drainage, a new bike lane and underground utility work across a 1,442 meter stretch of the avenue.
- February 20, 2026: Five retendered contracts worth a combined GEL 12.3 million ($4.5 million) go out. All five draw zero bids.
- March 2026: Tbilisi Deputy Mayor Giorgi Tkemaladze tells BM.ge that failure is “a natural process” and new tenders would follow within days, aiming to “begin the works by mid-May in order to make the most of the summer period,” with a finish targeted before the new school year.
- April 28, 2026: A third round of tenders, worth nearly GEL 17 million across three contracts, goes out.
- Mid-June 2026: Tenders are reissued a fourth time, at a higher cost, according to BM.ge.
- July 23, 2026: Construction finally begins, with the full vehicle ban starting at midnight.
Kaladze himself has called the rehabilitation one of City Hall’s key pre-election promises, one that kept slipping because contractors kept refusing to bid on it.
The Avenue Where Georgia Has Protested for Nearly 600 Days
Rustaveli Avenue is not an ordinary road. It runs past Georgia’s parliament, its opera house, its national museums and the Tbilisi Concert Hall. Since November 28, 2024, the day the ruling Georgian Dream party announced it would suspend Georgia’s EU accession talks, it has also been the country’s protest stage.
Independent outlet Civil Georgia has described the resistance as nearing 600 consecutive days as of early this month, and Caucasian Knot recorded activists marking their 585th day at the parliament roughly two weeks ago. A core group has held the pavement every single evening since; weekend marches still pull thousands.
That history has not been peaceful. Riverdale Standard has previously reported on a clash on the avenue that left six people detained and several injured, on riot police firing water cannon at demonstrators, and on protesters burning a coffin marked with the ruling party founder’s name on the same stretch of road now fenced for construction.
Amnesty International published a report last month documenting what it called a coordinated campaign against the movement. Denis Krivosheev, the organization’s deputy director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, put it bluntly.
Georgia’s experience over the last three years is a cautionary tale of how governments can rapidly turn state institutions into potent tools of repression for the sake of entrenching their own power.
Krivosheev made the remark alongside the release of a report documenting a coordinated system built to crush dissent. A companion document, filed separately, traced how parliament rushed through waves of legislation criminalizing routine protest activity starting in December 2024, just weeks after the demonstrations began.
Where Does the Protest Move Now?
OC Media, an independent regional outlet that has covered the rehabilitation saga since its first announcement, has flagged the obvious question City Hall never answers in its own materials: where do the demonstrators go once the fencing goes up.
The movement has already been squeezed once this year. In January 2026, a protester named Zakareishvili was convicted under a newly introduced offense of obstructing pedestrian pathways, after simply standing on a sidewalk, and served a five day sentence. “When you’re in jail, endurance is not really the issue,” he said. “What consumes you is a feeling of injustice.”
The daily gathering has always been small and quiet compared with the Saturday marches, which start from the Tbilisi Concert Hall a few streets away and route toward parliament. That march route does not depend on the closed section of Rustaveli itself, but the daily vigil in front of the building does, and nothing in City Hall’s plan says where several hundred people meet each evening for the next four months.
Beka Shalamberidze, a 33-year-old logistics manager from Kutaisi, Georgia’s third-largest city, traveled to Tbilisi for the country’s Independence Day march in May. He has kept coming back.
We hoped that the government would be gone in two months or something.
Shalamberidze said that, describing how far the movement’s own early expectations have drifted from where it stands now, closing in on two years on the same pavement.
Kaladze’s Fourth Deadline
Kaladze says the Infrastructure Development Service will run the works, starting with water supply, sewage, drainage and gas lines underground before the road surface itself. He has set an end of November completion target.
That target arrives after a mid-May start and a September finish were promised in March, after an end of summer finish was promised in February 2025, and after a two year plus timeline was promised at the very start, in 2023. Each of those deadlines came from a City Hall official speaking on the record. None of them held.
Rustaveli Avenue will reopen sometime this winter, repaved and rewired. What returns to stand on it after four months of fencing is still an open question nobody at City Hall has been asked to answer.
