Anchiskhati Basilica

This is the oldest building in Tbilisi still doing the job it was built for. Anchiskhati was raised in the sixth century by King Dachi, son of Vakhtang Gorgasali, after the capital moved from Mtskheta to Tbilisi. It is easy to walk past: a low, broad shape wedged into narrow Shavteli Street, with none of the height that later Georgian churches use to announce themselves.

The plan is a three-nave basilica with no dome, built in courses of stone and brick. It was originally dedicated to the Virgin. The present name arrived in the seventeenth century, when the icon of the Saviour from Ancha monastery in Klarjeti — territory by then under Ottoman control — was brought here for safety. The icon itself is now in the state art collection; the church holds a copy.

At the gate stands a brick bell tower built in 1675 by Catholicos Domenti, and it is nearly as interesting as the church. In the nineteenth century a dome was added to the basilica; the restoration of the 1950s and 60s removed it and returned the building to its original form.

Inside is a low, dark, very quiet space with fragments of nineteenth-century painting on the walls. The reason many people come back, though, is sound. The Anchiskhati Choir, which sings the old Georgian polyphonic liturgy, is based in this church. Catching them at an ordinary service is a matter of luck, but if you do, it is one of the best things to hear in the city.

The polyphony you may hear here is older than the building itself: Georgian folk and liturgical polyphonic singing was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2001 a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. The basilica is an ideal container for it. A low, rectangular stone room lets the voices press against the walls and stay dense, instead of dispersing upward the way they do under a large dome. Even a few singers rehearsing in an empty church fill it completely.