Alphabetic Tower

Look up. A hundred and thirty metres of steel helixes spiraling into the Black Sea sky, each curve carrying a letter of the Georgian alphabet — this is the Alphabetic Tower, and it is unlike anything you have seen before.

The structure opened in two thousand and eleven, commissioned to mark a very specific anniversary: twenty-five hundred years since the Georgian alphabet was first shaped into script. The designer, the Spanish-Basque architect Alberto Domingo Cabo, chose a double-helix form — two intertwined strands rising like DNA, a deliberate echo of how language carries culture across generations. The tower does not hide its engineering. Steel ribs, glass panels, and thirty-three Georgian letters in aluminum, each two and a half metres tall, climbing the outer skin.

Georgian script is one of only fourteen writing systems still in use today that evolved independently, without borrowing from another alphabet. It belongs to the Kartvelian language family, and the letters you see spiraling upward are from the modern Mkhedruli script — the everyday alphabet Georgians write with now. The older scripts, Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri, are reserved for liturgical texts and monumental inscriptions. Each letter here catches the light differently depending on the hour. Early morning, they glow pale gold. At dusk, they darken to silhouettes against the tangerine sky.

Inside, a lift rises through the core of the helix to an observation deck near the top. The deck offers a three-hundred-sixty-degree view: the oil terminal and cargo port to the north, the Adjara mountains folding inland to the east, the old town and its low Soviet blocks to the south, and due west, the Black Sea stretching flat to the horizon. On clear days, you can see the Turkish coast. The deck also houses a small café and a rotating sphere — a steel globe that turns slowly, though its symbolic purpose remains more decorative than functional.

The tower sits at the northern edge of Batumi Boulevard, the long seaside promenade that runs for seven kilometres along the waterfront. This part of the boulevard was reclaimed and developed in the two thousands as Batumi repositioned itself from a quiet Soviet port into a tourism and casino hub. The Alphabetic Tower shares the skyline with other bold contemporary landmarks — the Batumi Tower, a high-rise residential building shaped like a sail, and the Ali and Nino moving sculpture just down the coast.

Not everyone in Batumi loves the tower. Some locals see it as an expensive vanity project, a piece of architecture that serves tourists more than residents. Others appreciate it as a symbol of linguistic pride — a monument to the fact that Georgian survived centuries of Persian, Ottoman, and Russian influence without abandoning its own script. The debate is part of the tower's story. Public monuments always carry competing meanings.

At night, the tower lights up. LEDs trace the helixes in blue and white, and the letters glow against the dark. The effect is visible from kilometres down the coast. Fishermen out on the water use it as a landmark. Couples walk the boulevard beneath it, and children run circles around the base, where a small fountain sends up jets of water in choreographed patterns.

The best time to visit is late afternoon, when the sun is low and the aluminum letters catch the golden light. The observation deck is less crowded then, and the air is cooler. If you are interested in the technical side, look closely at the joints where the steel ribs meet the central column — the engineering is visible, honest, unclad. The tower does not pretend to be anything other than what it is: a modern structure celebrating an ancient alphabet.

Batumi is a city of contrasts — old Soviet apartment blocks next to glass-and-steel casinos, Orthodox churches beside mosques, the smell of khachapuri dough mixing with diesel from the port. The Alphabetic Tower fits that pattern. It is not subtle. It is not ancient. But it is unmistakably Georgian, and it marks the skyline in a way that makes you pause and look up, which is exactly what a monument should do.

As you walk away, notice how the letters shift perspective. From the south, the helix appears to lean left. From the north, it straightens. The structure changes depending on where you stand, a reminder that meaning is always a matter of angle.