Old funicular station off Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi

I have twice visited the wonderful Fotografia gallery in Tbilisi, both during the autumn of 2018 and during the spring of 2019  (well worth a visit, also online). While there, I saw some shots (like this one) taken in a really interesting location, in what looked like an oval building with stairs on all sides snaking themselves up to something above. The structure looked quite large, but when I found the building (by chance actually) I was surprised to see that it is actually quite small. There was no entrance so I had to squeeze in through broken windows near the ground and crawl on the floor among dust and debris.

This an old funicular station built in 1905 in the yard of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences just off one of the main avenues in Tbilisi, Rustaveli Avenue. 

The station was built to connect the centre of Tbilisi with the "upper" Tbilisi which is on the mountain side surrounding the city. The station isn't operational and hasn't been for quite some time, but apparently there is a plan to restore the building and the funicular too. Reading this I was happy that I got to go there before it becomes all nice and shiny again. There is graffiti everywhere and some of it is quite good, I think. Very colourful and a bit bizarre, which adds to the atmosphere a lot. It would have been very different had the structure only looked old and dilapidated.

The photos above were shot with my Hasselblad 203FE using the Carl Zeiss Distagon 40 CFE and the PC Mutar 1.4x shift converter. The film is the always excellent Kodak Ektar 100.