Monasteries in caves!

After a week in Tbilisi it was good to get out of the city and on to the road. Through our helpful guesthouse host Irakli we booked a tour/transfer to the Georgian wine region Khakheti via the Davit Gareja monastery complex.

Davit Gareja was founded in the 6th century by a Syrian monk called Davit, or David. These days it sits on the Azerbaijan border, just under two hours from Tbilisi, with the second hour or so on increasingly bad roads. Luckily our driver Giorgi has been to Davit Gareja a lot, and he navigated around the potholes admirably.

First up you visit the part of the site still in use – a collection of attractive brick buildings and some cells built into the rock walls. The monastery is still working and monks were praying in the small church; as ever the chanting was haunting.

We then climbed up a pretty decent hill to the ridge line separating Georgia and Azerbaijan. En route we passed a couple of Georgian border guards keeping watch – we didn’t see any Azerbaijanis the whole day and it was unclear whether we’d ever technically crossed the border or not! My phone thought we had as I got one of those “Welcome to Azerbaijan” messages telling me how much calls cost.

On the Azerbaijan side of the ridge we came upon Urbano monastery, a complex of about 80 caves hewn into the mountainside. It’s soft sandstone so must have been fairly easy to dig out and some of the caves have brick elements too.

More interesting are the ancient frescoes still visible in a number of the caves, some dating from the 11th century. Despite the years many of the colours are still bright and you can easily pick out the scenes the monks were depicting. One of the little churches built into the mountainside needed a bit of scrambling to get into but once inside we were rewarded with frescoes of deep indigo blue and well-preserved faces painted over 800 years ago.

But the beauty is slightly marred by history. Davit Gareja was a popular tourist destination during the Soviet era and the Soviets had no respect for religion. So the walls are covered in graffiti from across the years, mostly in Cyrillic although there’s some Georgian too, the signs of 20th century visitors erasing the legacy of the monks who once lived in this harsh environment.

It was an extraordinary place, the other worldliness accentuated by the strong wind whipping up the dust from the rock face.

From Davit Gareja we drove on to Sighnaghi, a town in the south of the wine region perched high on a hilltop. It’s almost Tuscan in look and feel although less well-preserved than most Tuscan towns. Giorgi drove us down to the local convent where one of the best-known Georgian saints, St Nino, is buried. They’re in the process of finishing a new church which has some stunning coloured stonework on the outside, and the old chapel where Nino is buried also has some good frescoes.

Eventually Giorgi dropped us at our guesthouse, run by a warm-hearted lady called Nana, a rickety old house with poor heating that was nevertheless a great place to stay in the heart of the town. We spent that afternoon and the next day meandering the small town, walking a bit of their old city walls (not really a patch on York’s, but to be fair that’s a big ask) and going to the excellent little museum.

The two nights concluded with a lovely meal and wine-tasting at a celebrated local restaurant, where we tried several unusual wines and I taught the waiter how to say “feijoa” – turns out these fruit, beloved of New Zealanders, grows well in Georgia and is a popular ingredient for making fruit brandy. It was a chilled-out couple of days perfect for getting the hustle of Tbilisi out of our systems, before the next adventure.