Akhali Shuamta

Akhali Shuamta was founded in the middle of the 16th century and is still a working convent. Its founder was Queen Tinatin, wife of King Levan of Kakheti, a daughter of the ruling house of Guria who was travelling east to her wedding when she first saw this slope.

The tradition told here is that as a child she dreamed of a hillside and a bramble bush, and vowed to build a church wherever she found them. On the road to her marriage she recognised the place and kept the promise. The dream is not in the documents, but Tinatin's patronage is, and so is her burial in the church she paid for.

The building is brick, which is unusual in a region where stone dominates, and follows a cross-in-square plan with a tall, narrow drum. Inside there are fragments of 16th-century painting including donor portraits, darkened by candle smoke but legible. The queen's grave slab lies near the front of the nave.

The enclosure wall, refectory and cells came later and are kept in good order today: roses, walnut trees and a small vineyard worked by the community. The nuns paint icons and tend the garden, and on an ordinary weekday the only sounds are birds and your own steps on gravel.

Set against Dzveli Shuamta up the road, everything here is later, lighter and alive. That contrast is the reason to see both: two kilometres apart and about a thousand years, one abandoned to the forest and one still keeping its hours.

The church was also a political statement. Levan ruled a kingdom squeezed between Safavid Persia and the Ottoman advance, and building in brick in the manner of the eastern courts, while dedicating the work firmly to the Georgian church, was a way of holding both positions at once.