I arrived in Tbilisi in the last week of October with no plan beyond a hotel booking and an intention to walk. The driver from the airport had his window down. October averages a high of around twenty degreesCelsius here, which after a wet European autumn felt like an administrative error in my favor. By mid-November the temperature had slid to thirteen and I had bought a jumper from a man who assured me it was Italian. It was not Italian.

What I remember first is the woodwork. The old town under the fortress ridge is a collection of houses that seem to be holding one another up out of politeness, nearly all of them with wooden balconies bolted to the front — carved, fretworked, painted in colours softening since the nineteenth century, sagging at angles no surveyor would sign. Laundry hangs off them. Cats sleep on them. I photographed balconies for an afternoon and kept none of it. The appeal is not visual. It is that people still live behind them.

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