The 'River of Paradaise' and the Legend about the City of Tbilisi: A Literary Source of the Legend
Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: The city of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, was founded by the king Vakhtang Gorgasal in the 5th c. AD on a site that had been inhab-ited al least since Neolithic times. The site is still famous for the hot springs which to all appearances gave the city its name: in Geor-gian tbil-i means ‘warm’. According to the Georgian legend: King Vakhtang Gorgasal was hunting in the forest. Suddenly his falcon caugth a pheasant. The bird fell into a hot spring and made sound and became well again and flew away. The king gave orders to build a city on this site. The origin of the folk legend remains entirely enigmatic, yet the parallelism observable in Jewish folklore seems to be indicative. Indeed, the main element of this plot – the unusual spring – appar-ently resembles the legendary motif of the “river of paradise ” which in ancient Jewish folkloristic tradition was associated with Alexan-der the Great.
Author: Constantine B. Lerner
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2320049004