Armaztsikhe-Bagineti

Before Mtskheta was a Christian city it was a pagan one, and Armaztsikhe was its citadel. The ruins lie on a terrace on the right bank of the Mtkvari, directly opposite the mouth of the Aragvi, with Jvari monastery on the skyline above. Almost nobody comes, which is both the charm of the place and its problem: no signs worth reading, no ticket office, no shade.

The city took its name from Armazi, the chief idol of pre-Christian Kartli, and was the seat of the kings of Iberia from roughly the 3rd century BC. Strabo and later Roman writers knew of it. Pompey's army came up the valley in 65 BC; the city was rebuilt, flourished under Roman influence in the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, and was finally wrecked by the Arab commander Marwan ibn Muhammad in the 730s.

Systematic excavation began in 1937 under Andria Apakidze and continued for decades. What you can walk over today, most of it at knee height:

• the foundations of a six-columned audience hall, the stone bases still in line

• a Roman-style bath house with the brick pillars of its underfloor heating intact

• a wine cellar with the mouths of buried qvevri set into the floor

• stretches of city wall in large dressed blocks, and a stepped water cistern

In the side ravine of Armaziskhevi, a short distance away, archaeologists found the graves of the pitiakhshi, the viceroys who governed on behalf of the kings. The Roman silver, engraved gems and gold taken from them are among the finest objects in the National Museum in Tbilisi, and the famous bilingual Armazi stele, inscribed in Greek and in the local Aramaic script, came out of the same dig in 1940. None of that is here. Come for the site and the plan of the city, not for objects.