The Cost of Vanishing

The landlord quotes a price in lari. You do the math and laugh — not at the absurdity, but at how simple everything suddenly looks.

Tbilisi has been swallowing expats quietly for three years now. The Vera neighbourhood, once a Soviet administrative district of cracked plaster and warm kitchens, has acquired the particular hum of a city mid-transformation: specialty coffee next to a hardware store, Georgian folk music drifting past a co-working space where a programmer from Berlin stares into a screen.

The numbers are the first thing people get wrong. Estimates floating online are usually eighteen months stale. The city moves. A one-bedroom in Saburtalo that cost $400 in early 2024 costs $550 now — still a fraction of a Berlin studio, still with a balcony over the Kura, still with a neighbour who brings churchkhela on saint days.

What the numbers never capture is the cost of not knowing. The taxi driver who takes the long route. The utility bill you pay twice because the form was in Georgian. The month you spend on a tourist visa before you figure out the freelancer registration pathway. Those costs are real. They're also finite.

Elsewhere's PPP data puts Georgia at 2.3× for a standard Western European basket. What that number means in practice: your rent, food, and transport could run $900 a month and feel generous. It means the freelance income that felt precarious in Amsterdam feels like breathing room here.

The question is never really about money. It's about whether you can bear to be a beginner again — in a language, in a neighbourhood, in the particular social grammar of a place that didn't grow up with you.