Located in the historic Avlabari district of Tbilisi, the underground printing house was founded in 1903 and a young revolutionary named Joseph Stalin contributed to the printing press.
From 1903 to 1906, the printing press functioned as a center of revolutionary activity. Young people gathered here, driven by the desire to overthrow the Russian Empire and establish a socialist government.
Among the many revolutionaries who worked there was a young Stalin, who contributed to the creation of literature against the Tsar.
During this period, this clandestine location was a lively center of printing and distribution of newspapers, books and illegal proclamations in Russian, Georgian and Armenian languages that were then spread throughout the Russian Empire but also in the rest of Europe.
The building was ingeniously designed with double floors. The visible floor represented a normal residential house, while the underground floor built 15 meters deep revealed its true nature.
Heart of the print shop housed a high-speed printing press, smuggled from Baku and assembled in the cellar.
An ingenious system was in place to warn revolutionaries of impending danger with a bell hidden under a wall.
This momentum of revolutionary activity was interrupted on 15th April 1906, when the police surrounded the building. During a search, the agents discovered the secret tunnel built into a well and set fire to the house.
The printing house was meticulously restored in 1937.
With the onset of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the museum fell into a state of neglect, largely forgotten.
In 2001 it was renovated and in 2019 it was recognized as a cultural monument of Georgia. Today, the building houses artifacts, photographs and letters from that revolutionary period.
