Tbilisi keeps losing pieces of itself. The Bridge of Peace, the glass-and-steel span across the Mtkvari that Bidzina Ivanishvili called “nothing but ignorance” a month after he entered politics in 2011, still stands — but only because demolishing a tourist postcard is harder than starving a highway.

Kutaisi’s parliament building, relocated out of the capital, sat empty for years after Parliament returned to Tbilisi in 2018; the government now plans a technology hub instead. And the twin steel-and-glass tubes on the Rike riverbank — a $46 million concert hall designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas, largely finished in 2012 and never opened since the government that commissioned it lost power — now have a demolition permit and a December deadline. The state set the terms of its own loss.