Radisson Blu Iveria A Luxury Hotel That Became a Refugee Camp

The Radisson Blu Iveria Hotel is located at the center of Georgia’s capital city Tbilisi. Built in 1967, it was Georgia’s finest hotel and a popular place to stay for its excellent location and sweeping views of the city. Then in the early 1990s, soon after the collapse and subsequent breakup of the USSR, civil war broke out in Georgia. Tbilisi was flooded with refugee ethnic Georgians coming in from the disputed territory of Abkhazia on the west of Georgia. More than 200,000 refugees poured into the city and the government was faced to deal with their reallocation. Many buildings in Tbilisi, including Hotel Iveria, were reallocated for housing the displaced. A thousand of them wound up in the hotel’s 22 floors where they would remain for the next ten years.