By Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD · 15/09/2026
The Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography occupies a modern building on the hill above Mestia, and it holds one of the most remarkable collections in the Caucasus: gold and silver icons from the 10th to 14th centuries, illuminated gospels, processional crosses, chased metalwork, and a great deal that would be behind glass in a national museum anywhere else. Almost none of it was made in Svaneti. All of it was hidden here.
The safe
Svaneti’s geography made it a vault. One road in, along a gorge that could be held by a few men; mountains on every other side; a population of armed families with towers who did not take orders. When the Mongols came in the 1230s, when Tamerlane came at the end of the 14th century, when the Persians and Ottomans partitioned the lowlands in the 1500s, the churches and monasteries of Georgia sent their most precious objects to Svaneti for safekeeping, to be held in village churches under the protection of the community. The invaders never got up the gorge. The objects stayed.
They stayed, in many cases, for six hundred years. Village churches in Svaneti — tiny, frescoed, locked, with a family responsible for the key — still hold icons that were sent up from Kutaisi or Kartli in the Middle Ages and never reclaimed. The community regarded them as its own, and sold nothing; a Svan proverb has it that a man who sells an icon will not live out the year.
The museum
The Soviet state, which was not superstitious, began gathering the treasures in the 1930s, and the museum was founded in 1936, partly to protect the objects from theft and partly to control them. Its collection now includes the Iprari and Lagurka icons, the illuminated Adishi Gospels of 897 — one of the oldest Georgian manuscripts — and the repoussé icons of Saint George that are Svaneti’s signature: the saint on horseback, spearing not a dragon but the Roman emperor Diocletian, in silver gilt, over and over, from different centuries and workshops. The ethnographic rooms show the tower-house interiors, the carved wooden chairs, the copper cookware and the Svan hats of felt.
The building was rebuilt in 2013 and the display is excellent. Allow ninety minutes; the icon rooms deserve most of it.
The churches
The museum is the concentrate; the churches are the source. Lamaria at Ushguli, Taringzel above Mestia, the church at Lagurka in Kala with its 12th-century frescoes: each holds what it holds, and a guide who knows the keyholders can open doors that are otherwise closed. Photography inside is usually forbidden, and the silence is the point.
See it with GTour
The museum is the third morning of the Mestia & Ushguli tour, and the guide arranges church visits along the road to Ushguli on day two.
This story in Georgian — ქართულად: shenidasveneba.ge
ქართულად: სვანეთის მუზეუმი — ხატები, მონღოლებსა და ბოლშევიკებს დამალული
