Dzveli Shuamta

Dzveli Shuamta is a place where three stages of Georgian church building stand side by side. The name means "between the mountains" and is accurate: the churches sit on the northern slope of the Gombori range, deep in oak and hornbeam forest, a few hundred metres off the Telavi road.

The group is compact and easy to read:

• The three-nave basilica, the oldest of the three, dated to the 5th century, with heavy stone walls and narrow slits for windows

• The larger domed church of the 7th century, a cross-in-tetraconch plan that follows the logic of Jvari above Mtskheta in a plainer, sturdier way

• The small domed church of the same period, so reduced in scale that it reads almost as a model of its bigger neighbour

Fragments of fresco survive inside, worn and dim, though figures in the apse conch can still be made out. The interiors are deliberately small and dark: early Georgian churches admitted very little light, and the effect after the forest outside is abrupt.

What sets the site apart is silence. It is no longer a working monastic community, and tour buses usually drive straight past towards the nunnery at Akhali Shuamta, two kilometres further on. It is common to have the whole clearing to yourself. In autumn the hornbeam turns and drops light in patches across the grey stone; in spring the grass comes up to the knee and the ground stays soft for weeks.

Treat it as a half-hour stop rather than a destination in itself. On the drive to Telavi, though, it is a half hour well spent, and it gives useful context for the much later, grander churches further down in the valley.