In the center of the Martvili village, we found out old Soviet cable car (🎫1 GEL) built in 1986, going to the monastery. Martvili’s monastery, a medieval Georgian cultural center, sits on a serene hilltop overlooking the town and the surrounding valleys and hills. Its church dates...
Nokalakevi is an ancient Colchian fortress (🎫10 GEL) built on the banks of the Tekhuri River in Western Georgia. It’s been mooted as one of the (many) places to have housed the Golden Fleece. The oldest layer dates back to the 8th-7th centuries BC, although traces of life in this...
A rough, steep road brought us to the village Khalde located in the south of Chkhutneri ridge, in Khaldechala valley, just six kilometers from Khalde Glacier, at an altitude of 1900m above sea level. It’s a very tiny mountainous village that is not inhabited during winter. The...
Ushguli is a village community located at the foot of Mount Shkhara (5,268m) and the mouth of the rivers Enguri and Kvishiri at an altitude between 2,060 and 2,200 meters. It is considered the highest permanently inhabited place in Europe. Ushguli consists of the five villages Murkmeli...
Today we hired an off-road car (500 GEL/day) to reach remote villages hidden in Svaneti Mountains. Our first stop was the original and authentic village of Adishi, a small mountain village situated in the middle of the mountains of the Greater Caucasus – in Upper Svaneti between Ushguli...
We parked in the center of the touristic hub of the Upper Svaneti, Mestia. We used it as a base for exploration of the oldest of the hamlets dotted with picturesque Svan towers. Most towers are above the river on the northern side of town: Lekhtagi in the northwest and Lanchvali and...
The whole day we drove through breathtakingly wild and mysterious Svaneti, an ancient land locked in the Caucasus, so remote that any ruler never tamed it. We were passing uniquely picturesque villages and snow-covered, 4000m-plus peaks rising above flower-strewn alpine meadows (in the...
In Georgia’s second city (the capital of Adjara), we parked next to the promenade strolling along Batumis bulvari. With a backdrop of mist-wrapped hills and soaring snow-capped peaks, Batumi is a charismatic place with a charming Old Town fronted by the calm waters of the Black Sea...
We made a short stop at Gonio’s fortress (🎫 5 GEL), an impressive piece of Roman-Byzantine military architecture covering 47,000 sq meters within a rectangle of high stone walls with 18 towers. Built by the Romans in the 1st century AD, it was occupied by the Byzantines in the 6th...
We drove through Adjara, an autonomous republic in Georgia, in the southwestern corner of that country, adjacent to the Black Sea and the Turkish frontier. Adjara was under Turkish rule from the 17th century until 1878 when it was annexed by Russia and attached to Georgia. From 1922 to...