Kartlis Deda and Mayr Hayastan: Two Mothers Watching Over the Caucasus

Drive across the South Caucasus and you'll meet two women who never blink. One stands on a ridge above Tbilisi, the other on a hilltop above Yerevan. Both are colossal, both hold a sword in one hand and something gentler in the other, and both were born from the same restless Soviet century. Locals call them simply "Mother." Travelers who climb up to meet them rarely forget the view… or the stories.

Here's how the two mothers of the Caucasus came to be, and why standing beneath them tells you more about Georgia and Armenia than any guidebook chapter.

Kartlis Deda: The Mother of Kartli, Tbilisi

If you look up from almost anywhere in Tbilisi, you'll find her: a twenty-meter aluminum figure in traditional dress, standing on the Sololaki ridge above the old town. Her name is Kartlis Deda (ქართლის დედა), usually translated as "Mother of Georgia," though the literal meaning is "Mother of Kartli," after the historic heartland region that became the cradle of the Georgian state.

She was meant to be temporary. The statue went up in 1958, the year Tbilisi celebrated its 1,500th anniversary, and with little time or budget the city built her on a wooden frame clad in aluminum sheets. It never meant to last for decades. The sculptor was Elguja Amashukeli, one of Georgia's most prolific monumental artists, whose other works include the equestrian statue of King Vakhtang Gorgasali, the founder of Tbilisi. For Kartlis Deda, Amashukeli received the State Prize of the Georgian SSR in 1965.

The temporary statue stuck. In 1963 the wooden figure was replaced with a more durable aluminum version, and in the 1990s she was reworked again but now without her traditional headscarf and with slightly more modern lines.

Her meaning is written into her hands, and it's the perfect distillation of the Georgian character: in her left hand a bowl of wine to greet those who come as friends, and in her right hand a sword for those who come as enemies. Hospitality and defense are the two poles of a long, often turbulent national history. Notably, her sword is never raised. She isn't aggressive, she's simply ready.

Visiting: The statue sits beside the Narikala fortress above Old Tbilisi. You can hike up through the winding lanes of Sololaki, or take the cable car from Rike Park. The viewpoint at her feet is arguably the best in the city: the Bridge of Peace, the Mtkvari river, Mtatsminda, and the tangle of the old town all spread out below. Come at sunset and stay for the lights.

Mother Armenia: Mayr Hayastan, Yerevan

Two hundred kilometers south, a second mother keeps watch over Yerevan from Victory Park, above the city's Cascade. 

This story begins in 1944, with a competition for a triumphal arch to celebrate the victory over fascism. The architect Rafael Israelyan won with a design for an arch on what was then Oktemberyan Avenue. But an arch was judged too modest for so great a victory. So the decision was made to build a statue of Stalin, because "Stalin is victory." That was an official logic of that time.

Unveiled in 1950, it became the largest Stalin monument in the entire USSR: a 17-meter figure by sculptor Sergey Merkurov atop a 33-meter pedestal, more than fifty meters in total. Israelyan designed that pedestal with quiet foresight. Drawing on medieval Armenian church-mausoleums (buildings like the Astvatsatsin churches at Noravank (1339) and Yeghvard (1301), the Khreshtakapetats church at Goshavank (1291), and Kaputan's Kaptavank (1349), he gave it the structure of a three-nave Armenian basilica, with the main entrance on the second tier. Years later he admitted the design was deliberate: he never believed Stalin would occupy the pedestal forever.

Kaputan's Kaptavank

He was right. During de-Stalinization, the statue was taken down in the spring of 1962, a removal so fraught that a soldier was killed and others injured in the process. Then the pedestal stood empty for five years. Part of the delay

Surb Astvatsatsin church at Noravank

was the absence of a new charismatic figure to elevate. Part of it, by some accounts, was a gesture toward neighboring Georgia, where many still admired the monument and traveled to Yerevan to see it.

In 1967, the empty plinth finally received its new occupant. In place of the "father of nations" stood a mother - the defender of the homeland. Mother Armenia (Մայր Հայաստան, Mayr Hayastan) was designed by sculptor Ara Harutyunyan: a 22-meter figure of hammered copper, gripping a sword in both hands, raising the total height of the monument to roughly 51 meters. Harutyunyan even used preserved fragments of the old Stalin statue (reportedly an eye and a shoe) to calibrate the proportions of the new figure against the existing pedestal.

The most human thread in the story is the woman behind the face. The model was Genya (Evgenia) Muradian, a 17-year-old whom Harutyunyan spotted by chance in a Yerevan store and persuaded to pose. He told her she represented a strength that could go to war at any moment to defend her homeland. Muradian, who went on to live a difficult life and worked as a Russian-language teacher, kept her role a secret for decades.

The empty plinth.

And later she said the statue helped carry her through her hardest years. Looking up at the figure modeled on her own face reminded her that she was meant to be strong. "She's like my second half," Genya says. When she once asked the sculptor why he'd given the statue a single, stern eyebrow, he told her it was the mark of a strong woman… the strength he saw in her.

Genya (Evgenia) Muradian

Visiting: Mother Armenia stands in Victory Park, reachable on foot up the Cascade complex (a landmark in its own right) or by car. Inside the pedestal is the Mother Armenia Museum of Military History, with exhibits on Armenia in the Second World War and later conflicts. The park around her includes a lake, cafes, a relaxed place to spend an afternoon before the views over Yerevan and, on clear days, Mount Ararat in the distance.