When reading time in space, we are often tempted to reduce a place to a specific time. It is especially true for the places that evoke nostalgic feelings. The nostalgia that pervades the post-Soviet space is often not reducible to a given time. As Svetlana Boym would argue, nostalgia with its utopian dimension is neither directed towards past nor future, “but rather sideways” (Boym 2007). 
Based on archival research and ethnography the study looks at the production and commodification of post-Soviet nostalgia on the example of one building in Tbilisi. To make it a perfect place of nostalgia it is robbed of its primary function: to be a residential house. Its emptiness, especially visible during the time of the pandemic, is in stark contrast to the role it performs: a place of diverse, open, accessible Tbilisi courtyard of the nostalgic imagination.

The paper reads different layers of the building as a palimpsest. It looks at this building, which is one of the many with a similar fate, as a chronotope (Bakhtin 1975) where different temporalities and spatialities meet. In the complex entanglement of time-space, the time represented by a building multiplies itself. It produces a heterotopia, not localizable on a spatial or chronological
axis but still there.