Shatili

Shatili looks less like a village than a single stone fortress: some sixty flat-roofed towers and tower-houses are packed together on a rocky shelf above the Arghuni River, linked by covered passages and stairways so that the whole settlement could be defended as one block. It stands at about 1,400 metres in a deep gorge on the northern side of the Greater Caucasus, close to the border with Chechnya, in the historic highland region of Khevsureti.

The dwellings, built of flat stone and mortar and stepped up the slope in terraces, date from the medieval and early modern periods, when the gorge was a frontier between Georgian highlanders and the peoples of the North Caucasus. Shatili was the seat of one of Khevsureti's two largest communities; an 1873 census counted five villages and 121 households in the Shatili community. Khevsur men of that era were famous for going about in chain mail and carrying broadswords, their clothes embroidered with crosses believed to protect the wearer, and their villages were governed by elected elders. The region once belonged to the Kingdom of Kakheti.

The twentieth century emptied the gorge. In the early 1950s Soviet authorities pressed the inhabitants to move down to the lowlands, and in the 1960s the abandoned towers served as a ready-made set for Georgian films about the old life of the highlanders. Since then a handful of families have returned; the 2014 census recorded 22 residents. Shatili is listed as an Immovable Cultural Monument of National Significance and is on Georgia's tentative list for World Heritage. Downstream lie the cliff-top fortress village of Mutso and the stone burial houses of Anatori, which hold remains from roughly the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.

Getting there

Shatili lies about 150 km north-east of Tbilisi. The only road runs from the Zhinvali Reservoir on the Tbilisi–Stepantsminda highway through Barisakho and over the Datvisjvari Pass, at about 2,680 metres, into the Arghuni gorge; it was built in the 1970s, is largely unpaved and is closed by snow in winter. The nearest practical airport is Tbilisi International Airport (TBS), about 111 km away in a straight line; the closer towns and airports across the ridge in Russia have no road connection through the border here.