Vardzia
Interesting facts
- The Church of the Dormition holds a portrait of Queen Tamar painted between 1184 and 1186, the earliest of the few images of her made in her lifetime.
- The church paintings are not true frescoes but were applied on dry plaster, and their painter, Giorgi, left his name inscribed in the altar.
- Water reached the caves through an aqueduct about 3.5 kilometres long, brought from springs at Zeda Vardzia.
- Archaeologists counted 185 clay wine jars sunk into the rock floors of the complex.
- The surviving caves stretch for about 500 metres along the cliff, with the eastern section alone holding some 242 rooms, six of them chapels.
- In 1551 the complex was raided by Persian forces under Shah Tahmasp I, and after the Ottomans arrived in 1578 the monks abandoned it.
- Soviet-era excavations showed the cliff had been inhabited long before the monastery, in the Bronze Age and in the time of the Trialeti culture.
- A small community of monks lives at Vardzia again, keeping part of the cave monastery in religious use.
- Since 2012 conservators from London's Courtauld Institute of Art have worked on the church's wall paintings.
Why it is worth it
Work began here under King Giorgi III in the late 12th century, but it was his daughter, Queen Tamar — the only woman ever to hold the Georgian royal title "king" — who turned it into a vast fortress-monastery carved straight into the cliff of Mount Erusheli, built as a hidden refuge from Mongol and Seljuk incursions. Seen from the river below, it was designed to look like nothing but bare rock.
At its peak the complex held roughly 6,000 rooms across nineteen levels, including 25 wine cellars, a throne room, a pharmacy, bakeries and a piped irrigation system running through the solid mountain. The only way in was a single secret tunnel from the riverbank, its entrance deliberately concealed. Local legend adds a flourish: that Tamar had hundreds of near-identical rooms cut into the rock specifically so no enemy — or spy — could ever be certain which one was actually hers.
The disguise held for roughly a century, until a massive earthquake in 1283 sheared away much of the outer cliff face, destroying about two-thirds of the complex and, almost as an irony, tearing open to daylight the very interior that had been carved to stay hidden. Vardzia, built to withstand a Mongol invasion, ultimately escaped the Mongol campaigns of the 1290s largely unscathed — undone instead by the ground it stood on.
Getting there
38 km from Akhaltsikhe. Kars Airport (KSY) is about 92 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Vardzia is a cave monastery site in southern Georgia, excavated from the slopes of the Erusheti Mountain on the left bank of the Kura River, thirty kilometres from Aspindza. The main period of construction was the second half of the twelfth century. The caves stretch along the cliff for some five hundred meters and in up to nineteen tiers. The monastery was an important cultural center, a place of significant literary and artistic work.
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