Shida Kartli

Gori, the main town of Shida Kartli, is the birthplace of Georgia’s most (in)famous son. Josef Vissarionivich Djugashvili, later to become Stalin, was born there to a humble cobbler in 1878. As a teenager he studied at a Georgian Orthodox seminary, but quickly rebelled against the establishment order and went underground as a political outlaw, stirring up workers in factories throughout the Caucasus, getting arrested several times by the Tzrist police and most notoriously robbing a bank on the main square in Tbilisi under his early nom de guerre ‘Koba’. Today there is a museum in Gori dedicated to his life and a statue of Stalin presides over the town’s main square. Recently there has been a great debate about whether to finally take the statue down.