Dadiani Palaces Museum

The Dadiani holdings are strongest exactly where a princely family's own archive tends to be strongest: personal correspondence and portrait photography tying a minor Caucasian court to the court of Second Empire France, alongside a genuinely old ecclesiastical treasury (Tagiloni gold, Khobi silver-gilt work, saints' relics) that predates the Dadianis' own tenure by centuries. The archaeological and numismatic material from the Colchian cemeteries and the Nokalakevi excavations gives the collection a second, older backbone independent of the family's own history. What the sources gathered here do not show is depth outside these areas - the eight foundations read as the 19th-century family collection plus what earlier princes had already excavated or been given, rather than an actively growing acquisitions programme.

The palace complex that today houses the Dadiani Palaces Museum stands in Zugdidi, the historic seat of Mingrelia (Samegrelo) in western Georgia. The site's earliest structure was a stone-and-brick house built over stone arches that, in the time of Prince David Dadiani, covered a wine cellar; the house above it was known as Pupi's House, after the prince's sister who lived there, and later served as a workshop producing parquet floors for a new palace. After David Dadiani's death the house stood empty for years until Queen Ekaterine Chavchavadze-Dadiani, his widow and regent of Samegrelo, rebuilt it into the palace that gives the museum its main facade today. Documentary material held in the museum's own manuscript collection records that construction of 'the newly constructed house of Princess Ekaterine, daughter of Alexander' began on 29 October 1873 and continued into the 1880s.

A second palace was added in the 1890s for Ekaterine's son, Prince Niko Dadiani-Mingrelski, the last reigning prince of Samegrelo before the principality was absorbed into the Russian Empire. Built to a design attributed to the architect Salzmann, it was a two-storey, hotel-type building whose ballroom was, by the museum's own account, unmatched in size anywhere else in Transcaucasia at the time.

The museum dates its own public life to 1 May 1921, when the Georgian ethnographer and geologist Akaki Chanturia converted the palace into a formal museum. Exhibition already had a history here before that: in 1840 the palace hosted a display of archaeological material that Prince David Dadiani had excavated at Nokalakevi, the site of ancient Archaeopolis, and in early 1848 David Dadiani was showing guests his own archaeological and numismatic collection from the same excavations.

Both palaces read as a single architectural statement even though they were built roughly twenty years apart. The Queen's Palace has a two-storey main front with a rear section showing several later additions - one three storeys, one a long two-storey wing with rooms cut into its sloping rear ground and cellars dug into the hillside. The main facade is faced in finely carved limestone over a brick shell; the entrance is a covered veranda on arched buttresses, pierced by wide pointed windows that mix Islamic and Gothic vocabulary in the same run of masonry, while the rear elevation carries carved wooden balconies, Laz-style ceilings and ornamented doors. A limestone staircase rises to the second floor at the centre of the building, with a service staircase in stone and wood behind it; the ground-floor arcade still holds damaged clay wine jars left from the original Dadiani cellar. The walled inner courtyard has its own small limestone pool, carved and probably built to carry a fountain, behind wrought-iron gates.

The Prince's Palace is plainer in massing - a brick, hotel-type block with a central corridor on each floor and rooms opening off it on both sides - but its ballroom was the showpiece. Semi-timbered balconies wrap the front, rear and sides at second-floor level; the front balconies and veranda look out over open ground, and the rear balconies face directly onto the botanical garden that Ekaterine Chavchavadze planted around both buildings. Both palaces were built with their own piped water and drainage, unusual for a provincial residence of the period. The complex as a whole is usually described as neo-Gothic with Georgian, Russian, Islamic and Tudor detailing folded into the same elevations, which is what gives its silhouette of crenellated parapets, pointed windows and onion-shaped finials a slightly hybrid, collected-abroad character.

The Dadianis' most publicised holding owes itself to a marriage rather than a campaign. Salome Dadiani, daughter of David Dadiani, married Prince Achille Murat (1847-1895), a descendant of Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat, and the alliance brought a stream of Bonapartist material into the family's private rooms. Correspondence now catalogued in the Manuscript Foundation includes letters from the Murats, from Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie, alongside the correspondence of Ekaterine Chavchavadze herself; the family's photograph albums hold portraits of the French imperial family and the Murats, taken in some cases by leading 19th-century photographers including Felix Nadar, Dagron and Disderi.

The single object most visitors travel for is a bronze death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte, cast in 1833 by Kannel and Richard, which the museum's own page states is one of only three such masks in existence worldwide. Visitor accounts describe further Napoleonic material displayed alongside it, including trinkets, paintings, and books reflecting Napoleon's own interest in chess.

The museum's collection, put at approximately 41,000 objects by a tertiary account, sits well beyond its French sideline. The Christian Arts Foundation holds the Tagiloni Treasure, a hoard of gold and silver material - a golden stag's head, gold jewellery components, silver cups and phialai - discovered in 1930 on the right bank of the Enguri and dated to the 1st-2nd centuries AD; the Robe of the Virgin, kept with a set of relics that includes the arm of Saint Marina, the hand of Saint Kvirike and bone fragments attributed to Saint George and Saint John the Baptist; a 10th-century silver thurible from Obuji church, decorated with foliate and floral ornament on four silver chains and dated to the Kingdom of Egrisi-Abkhazia; and a 12th-century multi-panel icon from Khobi Monastery combining painting with repousse silver gilt across fifty-two compartments built to hold relics. A separate, later object from the same monastery, a 17th-century silver-gilt triptych of Saint Demetrios and Saint George, is displayed in the same collection.

The Archaeology Foundation carries up to 10,000 items spanning archaeology, numismatics, sphragistics and paper money, much of it Colchian Bronze and Iron Age material of the 15th-7th centuries BC recovered from the Tsaishi and Ergeta cemeteries and hoards found at Tagiloni, together with a collection of Colchian tetri, the ancient Georgian coinage struck in the 6th-3rd centuries BC.

The Manuscript Foundation holds about 23,000 items: a 16th-century Tetraevangelion paired with a translation of John Chrysostom's Gospel commentary, an 18th-century Tetraevangelion and Psalter, a 17th-century Synaxarion, the second part of the 17th-century Jami-Gulani, the Tsaishi Gulani - an 18th-century compilation running to nearly 2,000 pages - manuscript verse and the epic 'Battle of Rukhi' by Grigol Dadiani, caricatures by Mihaly Zichy for 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin', and the chancery archive of the Zugdidi district in Georgian, Russian and French. A separate, tertiary account of the palace's history additionally records 13th- and 14th-century manuscripts and miniatures among the wider holdings.

The museum's own tariff page groups the visit as a single ticket covering the Queen's Palace, the Prince's Palace and the adjoining Zviad Gamsakhurdia Presidential Center exhibition space, with tickets sold at the Presidential Center itself; adult admission is 17 GEL and pupils and students pay 2 GEL, in groups of up to fifteen, with a Georgian-language guide at 35 GEL and an English- or Russian-language guide at 45 GEL. A published list of visitors admitted free of charge covers museum staff of Georgian and foreign state museums, personnel under the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, people with disabilities, socially vulnerable and internally displaced people, members of the Museum Alliance and of ICOM, members of the museum's own Friends Club, and pre-school children. Amateur photography is allowed inside; professional equipment needs prior clearance from the museum administration by email or phone. The museum is open every day except Monday, 10:00 to 17:30.

Visitor accounts describe a second, separately ticketed treasury section holding the icons and relics, which at least one visitor found was not volunteered at the ticket window and had to be asked about directly; guides are frequently praised precisely because on-site labelling is minimal. The grounds include the Zugdidi Botanical Garden that Ekaterine Chavchavadze laid out around both palaces, and a restaurant on site is noted by visitors, though it is not listed on the museum's own pages.

Visitors consistently rate the palace and its grounds highly for their architecture and setting, and name the Napoleon material as the reason to come. The same visitors are just as consistent in describing the museum experience itself - staffing, labelling and how tickets are sold - as underdeveloped for a collection of this importance.