He joined us after he had finished the construction of a village church in western Georgia. Phrases of more than five words depressed him. Reticent and eluding, he would return your glance with a quiet subtle smile of his elusive eyes, without focusing on you for long, and then would shift his gaze to a rain-pipe. Judging by his character, his age could have been between 1,300 and 1,500. The name of the other man was Avtandil (Avtandil Lezhava). What a beautiful career! We made friends with him, and still are, and will be forever! He had spent 50 years on different construction sites in Georgia, and had been a builder all those years. The first was called Otar (Otar Magrakvelidze), a man of my age over 70, one of those people whose face in a group photograph is often half cropped because they stand at the side. And even if that period was dark, who are we to pass the judgment? We’d better be mute on the subject.īut who would do the building? Where are good builders to be found? In the end, one came out of a wall. I made a trip to the Dark Ages and I must say that they were not nearly as ‘dark’ as we often think of them.
My table was piled with books on the architecture of Georgia, Byzantium, Italy and Russia…Books on the decorative ornaments, generously left by Byzantium for the world to use. The tower was to naturally blend with the surrounding space and time. When the construction began, I found myself, as if by a miracle of the time machine, in the faraway and beautiful Byzantine Empire of the 10th – 13th centuries. Rezo Gabriadze speaking about the Tower and its construction: People often call it the Tower with clock or The Tower with angel. Rezo decorated the tower with hundreds of tiles which he designed himself and the it instantly became a major architectural attraction of Tbilisi.
There is a small puppet theatre inside the tower and twice a day at noon and at 7pm you can see a show – “The Circle of Life”. Every hour an angel comes out with a small hammer to ring the bell. In 2010 Rezo Gabriadze built a unique clock tower next to marionette theatre in Tbilisi old town.
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