Alaverdi Cathedral

Alaverdi stands in the middle of the Alazani plain, some twenty kilometres north-west of Telavi. The cathedral was raised in the early eleventh century under the Kakhetian king Kvirike III and remained the tallest building in Georgia for close to nine hundred years, its dome reaching about fifty metres. The figure reads dryly on paper, but the effect on the ground is considerable: on flat farmland, above villages and vineyards, the church is visible from a long way off and gives the whole valley its scale.

The monastery is older than the cathedral. It was founded in the sixth century by Joseph of Alaverdi, one of the Assyrian Fathers, and his tomb is still inside the church. The interior is almost bare, and that is exactly the point — a tall, narrow volume, light falling from high windows, and fragments of wall painting, some of it dating to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The acoustics are unusually good, and a service here is worth timing your visit around.

A defensive wall of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encloses the cathedral together with a refectory, a bathhouse and burial vaults. The monastery keeps its own cellar, and Alaverdi wine — made by the monks in buried qvevri — is among the better-known labels of the region. The Alaverdoba feast in September fills the grounds.