Tskaltubo — Echoes of a Forgotten Utopia

Hidden in western Georgia, Tskaltubo was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious spa cities — a monumental landscape built around healing waters and political power. Its grand bathhouses and sanatoriums welcomed thousands, including Joseph Stalin himself, who regularly sought treatment in these naturally warm mineral springs.

Designed as a utopia of health and rest, Tskaltubo embodied the Soviet ideal of collective well-being, expressed through imposing architecture, symmetry, and scale. From above, the remnants of this vision unfold as a silent dialogue between ambition and decay — palaces of healing slowly reclaimed by time, vegetation, and memory.

This aerial film captures Tskaltubo not only as an abandoned place, but as a monument to a vanished ideology — where water, power, and history once converged, and where echoes of another era still linger in stone and shadow.