Blog Archives

I have shown this country to colleagues from Geneva, to friends from Paris, and to my own relatives from abroad. After enough attempts, one week has settled into a shape. This is it, day by day, with the reasons.

On the road to the desert monasteries, the hills turn red, white, ochre and green in bands, as if painted. They were — by an inland sea, fifteen million years ago.

Ten kilometres south of Gori, in a gorge of vineyards, a 7th-century church holds an 11th-century fresco cycle that art historians cross the world to see. Most days you will have it to yourself.

Seventy kilometres of unpaved road climb from the Kakheti plain over a 2,850-metre pass into a region with no other way in. It is regularly listed among the most dangerous roads in the world. It is also the best drive in Georgia.

From a few villages on the upper Rioni comes a naturally semi-sweet red wine that was the Soviet Union’s most coveted bottle and is still Georgia’s most misunderstood. Here is what it really is.

In the mountain valleys behind Batumi, more than twenty medieval arched bridges still carry people over the rivers — built of dry stone, without a drop of cement, by masons whose names nobody wrote down.

Fifteen kilometres south of Batumi, a rectangle of walls and towers on the shore marks where Rome’s road ran out. Legionaries were stationed here in the first century. So, by tradition, was an apostle.

Svaneti cooks for people who have walked all day in the cold. Meat pies the size of a plate, a spiced salt that goes on everything, and a cheese-and-cornmeal dish that is a meal in itself. None of it is on menus in Tbilisi.

For a thousand years, whenever Georgia was invaded, its treasures went up the Enguri gorge. Most of them never came back down. The museum in Mestia is where they are now.