Tbilisi State Silk Museum

Founded in 1887, the museum displays silkworm cultivation exhibits, historic looms, and textile samples documenting Georgia’s once-thriving silk industry, making it one of the oldest museums of its kind still operating.

Planning your visit

The Tbilisi Silk Museum opened in 1887, built by the Caucasian Sericulture Station to promote and improve silk production across the Russian Empire's southern territories — and it survives almost unchanged, which is what makes it remarkable. The building, the display cases, the labels and the arrangement are largely original, so visiting is as much an encounter with nineteenth-century museum practice as with silk.

The collections cover the silkworm's life cycle, mulberry cultivation, disease control, cocoon and thread samples from across Europe and Asia, historic looms, dyed and woven textile samples, and the scientific apparatus of a research institution.

Georgia's silk industry, once significant on the Silk Road routes, largely collapsed in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, which gives the museum an elegiac quality.

It is small and eccentric, and it is one of the more distinctive small museums anywhere in the Caucasus.

Bookable options include guided museum tours and Silk Road history tours of Tbilisi incorporating the museum. Current availability is shown below.