Tbilisoba 2026: 3-4 October, Five Venues and What's On

Tbilisoba 2026 is on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October, and entry is free. City hall announced five locations on 22 September: the usual anchors, Rike Park and Orbeliani Square, plus Gudiashvili Square, Leghvtakhevi, Europe Square and Metekhi Bridge (checked 24 September 2026).

By day there’ll be children’s concerts, entertainment and sport at every location, and both evenings end with music and theatre. The ceremony for Tbilisi’s honorary citizens at 20:00 on 4 October goes out live. The timetable with artists and stage times isn’t out yet; in 2023-2025 it came out just three days before the start.

What happens at Tbilisoba 2026

The announcement reads more like a list of zones than a line-up. The festival grounds get festive decorations and installations, photo spots and places to sit, and there’s an open-air cinema again. Food comes as “entrepreneurial and gastronomic zones”: Georgian and international cooking, masterclasses, fast food, tastings and sales of traditional sweets, honey and wine, and modern confectionery. The one item with a fixed time, the honorary-citizens ceremony, comes without a venue. In 2023, 2024 and 2025 city hall held it at the Palace of State Ceremonies, in 2024 before what the public broadcaster 1TV called an invited audience. Unless the 2026 programme moves it to an open stage, the broadcast is how you’ll see it.

The announcement doesn’t split anything by venue and doesn’t mention the satsnakheli grape press. The mayor said the full programme with descriptions is already on the city hall website, but on 24 September tbilisi.gov.ge had nothing beyond the meeting report, in Georgian or in English. Past years show when to look: in 2023 city hall posted it on 27 September for a festival starting on 30 September, in 2024 the mayor presented it on 2 October for a festival on 5-6 October, and in 2025 on 17 September for 20-21 September. Don’t hold off booking a room for it - the dates have been public since 27 August; check tbilisi.gov.ge again from the last days of September.

Venues: the constant core and what shifts

Rike Park and Orbeliani Square were in the programme in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and they’re back. What shifts is everything around them. Abanotubani, a venue all three of those years, isn’t on the 2026 list by name. Europe Square already hosted the closing gala in 2025. From the river up into the old town, the six names sit like this:

• Rike Park - the riverside park on the left bank of the Mtkvari (Kura), linked to the old town by the Bridge of Peace. Everything else about the park, from the cable car to the fountains, is in our Rike Park guide.
• Europe Square and Metekhi Bridge - step off the bridge onto the left bank and you’re already on the square, which is itself the southern tip of Rike Park. If five locations with six names looks like a miscount, this pair is the likely overlap.
• Leghvtakhevi - the gorge below Narikala; according to the Georgian National Tourism Administration, the path starts at the end of Abano Street in the bathhouse quarter and leads to a waterfall.
• Gudiashvili Square - an old-town square where Kala meets Sololaki.
• Orbeliani Square - a few minutes’ walk from Liberty Square, with Giorgi Leonidze Park beside it; in 2023-2025 its stages spilled into nearby Atoneli and Purtseladze streets.

In 2023-2025 the food and wine festivals ran in Rike, and the producers’ market turned up both there and on Orbeliani. Dedaena Park by the Dry Bridge isn’t a Tbilisoba location, even though at least one events listing puts it on the festival map. From 25 September to 5 October it hosts a separate event, a city fan zone for Georgia’s national football team and the Tbilisuri Bazaar fair with dozens of Georgian producers.

In 2024, Orbeliani also hosted themed add-ons beyond the usual rows - a cheese fair called “Kvelieri” and a spinach fair called “Ispanakhoba,” which was there in 2023 too. The 2026 announcement names neither.

Why the guidebooks get the date wrong

The capital has marked its birthday since 28 October 1979. The festival was created on the initiative of Eduard Shevardnadze, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Georgia, for an ideological purpose: to honour the capital and pull people away from attending religious events with a new secular tradition. It also played on the city’s 1,500-year history as a theme, though Tbilisi’s actual 1,500th anniversary had already been marked in 1958, when the Kartlis Deda (Mother of Georgia) statue went up on Sololaki hill. The festival lapsed for a few years in the early 1990s amid political instability and was resumed in 1995.

Since 2018, there’s been a clear rule: Tbilisoba lands on the first weekend of October rather than late in the month, as it used to. It has broken three times since: 2020 shrank to an online concert over COVID, 2021 was first pushed back and cut to a TV-only concert with no audience, then cancelled outright after a building collapse in Batumi, and 2025 moved to 20-21 September because of municipal elections. The last four editions:

• 2023 - 30 September and 1 October
• 2024 - 5-6 October
• 2025 - 20-21 September (moved for municipal elections on 4 October)
• 2026 - 3-4 October

If you’ve come across “the last weekend of October” - the Georgian National Tourism Administration’s own page was still saying that on 24 September - or “the latter half of October” from English Wikipedia, both descriptions are at least eight years out of date. The newer slip is a single day: an events listing published in July 2026 was still giving Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October on 24 September, while city hall’s 3 and 4 October fall on a Saturday and a Sunday.

The grape press, crafts, and the money on the stalls

Tbilisoba is officially a harvest festival, and the Georgian National Tourism Administration describes a satsnakheli, a wine press carved from a single piece of wood, set up in Rike Park for people to climb into and crush grapes underfoot while singing. A more detailed but dated account on the Georgian Travel Guide site (a 2018 article) says any guest who wants to can join whoever is already treading. City hall’s programmes for 2023-2025 never named it and the 2026 announcement doesn’t either, so you’ll only find out on the day whether the press is there. A full day working an actual vineyard is a different trip entirely: that’s rtveli in Kakheti, not a few minutes in one tub at this city festival.

Beyond the wine press, the same core programme repeats year after year: craft stalls selling woodwork, ceramics and metalwork, regional products like cheese, honey, wine and churchkhela, and autumn-themed decor at every venue. Getting into the venues is free, but the food, wine and souvenirs on the stalls themselves aren’t - budget for them the way you would at any market; our Georgia prices guide has the wider price picture. For stalls without the staging, the Dry Bridge flea market and Deserter’s Bazaar run all year, with food and second-hand goods and none of the festival decor. The Dry Bridge won’t be quiet on 3-4 October, though - Dedaena Park next to it has the fan zone and the Tbilisuri Bazaar fair until 5 October.

Free to attend, not free for the city

None of the official announcements from 2023 through 2026 mention a ticket for any city venue - no price, no box office, no QR code at the gate. That makes it a different animal from a paid festival like Art-Gene, where an evening of folk music cost 60-90 GEL in 2026 per a Georgia Today announcement from 2 July (the organiser itself doesn’t publish prices). At Tbilisoba’s street venues you just walk in.

Free for visitors doesn’t mean free for the city, though. The 2026 dates first surfaced on 27 August, not in a press release but in city hall’s filing with the State Procurement Agency for a simplified procedure, with a budget of 3,114,727 GEL. The justification is the usual one: “a significant part of the planned activities consists of original and individual creative works” that can’t be tendered out in advance. Per the news reports on the filing, the money covers street installations and decor, exhibition pavilions, concerts, theatrical performances, fairs and the honorary-citizens ceremony. In 2023 the city budgeted almost the same amount (3,140,175 GEL), the 2024 filing was for 3.5 million, and the 2025 plan was 3,439,500 GEL - roughly 325,000 more than the 2026 filing. So the edition city hall describes as “unprecedented” in scale comes with a smaller filing than both the 2025 plan and the 2024 filing, though the final account can still differ.

Getting there, and getting out afterwards

All six places sit in the most walkable part of the old centre, and the metro gets you close. Tavisuplebis Moedani (Liberty Square) station is about 560 m, a 7-8 minute walk, from Orbeliani Square and about 590 m from Gudiashvili Square. For the river side, Avlabari station is roughly 620-640 m from Metekhi Bridge and the middle of Rike Park, 8-9 minutes downhill. Leghvtakhevi works best as a detour from the baths: the waterfall is about 300 m, four minutes, from Abanotubani. The two anchors, Orbeliani and Rike, are about 1.1 km apart, a 15-minute walk. Tickets and the Metromoney card are covered in Tbilisi’s public transport guide.

Metekhi Bridge and Europe Square, two of the 2026 locations, normally carry traffic. In 2025 city hall announced on 10 September that the bridge and the square would shut from 17 to 23 September, and the streets around Orbeliani Square and the Dry Bridge from 15 to 23 September, all for a festival on 20-21 September. There wasn’t a 2026 notice as of 24 September, but if it goes like 2025, driving through the centre will be awkward for the whole week, not just the festival weekend.

Getting out is harder than getting in. Both evenings end with music and theatre, and that’s when most of the crowd heads for the metro at once; the 2025 closing gala on Europe Square started at 20:00. If you don’t want to queue at the station entrance, allow extra time for the walk back to your hotel and go around the busiest stretches instead of through them.

What to pair Tbilisoba with

Two festival days won’t show you much of Tbilisi. If you’ve only glimpsed Narikala fortress and the sulphur baths on the way to Leghvtakhevi, give them a day of their own; our Tbilisi city guide rounds up what else to see. Once the food stalls have made you hungry, it’s easy to mix up dish names; Georgian food, dish by dish sorts out the difference between Adjaran and Imeretian khachapuri and what to order if you’re at the table for the first time.

If you’ve got a few more days in Georgia after Tbilisoba and want to build a longer trip around whatever else is on, the year-round events calendar covers it in one place.