Tbilisi celebrates St. Patrick's Day

For the first time in Georgia’s history, the country has officially celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, where Tbilisi City Hall in the centre of the Georgian capital went green for the holiday.

A special celebration, where lots of beer was consumed last night, was attended by Tbilisi Mayor, Georgia’s Foreign Minister, other officials, foreign diplomats, Irish tourists and Tbilisi locals.

Mayor Davit Narmania said the event symbolised the "growing friendship” between Georgia and Ireland.

Tbilisi was among a handful of world famous locations that went green for St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. 

Irish tourism agency Tourism Ireland announced that along with Tbilisi City Hall, the Colosseum in Rome, the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in the fabled district of Montmartre overlooking Paris and the Grand Ole Opry (the show that made country music famous) in Nashville 'went green' for the first time ever this year in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day as part of the organisation’s sixth annual Global Greening initiative.

Tbilisi was selected to join Tourism Ireland’s annual Global Greening, which sees a host of major landmarks and iconic sites around the world illuminated in green for St. Patrick’s Day while Tbilisi Mayor Narmania visited Dublin earlier this year.

Tbilisi government believed this decision would increase the number of Irish tourists in Georgia.

Meanwhile the other sites that went green included the Niagara Falls, the London Eye, Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro and Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland Paris.

St. Patrick's Day is a cultural and religious celebration occurring annually on March 17, the date of the death of the most commonly-recognised patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick.

Photo: This old manuscript kept in Tbilisi features St. Patrick. Photo credit: Giorgi Kalandia.