Gori War Museum and War Memorial

Almost everyone who comes to Gori goes to the Stalin Museum, but the town carries a second, quieter war history. A few minutes' walk along Stalin Avenue from the main museum is the small Museum of Military Glory. It is devoted to Georgians who served in the Second World War: service books, letters home, photographs, medals, uniforms, and lists of the villages that men left and did not return to.

The display is modest and old-fashioned — glass cases, handwritten cards, often no translation. That plainness is what makes it work. This is not a national narrative but one district's accounting. Roughly 700,000 people went to the war from Georgia and something close to half never came back; that proportion is far easier to grasp in this room than in a statistic.

Better known than the museum is the Memorial of Georgian War Heroes at the foot of the fortress hill: large seated stone figures set in a half circle, faceless, looking as if they had been broken apart and reassembled. They were made in the 1980s by the sculptor Giorgi Ochiauri and commemorate Georgian soldiers killed in the war. The work is severe, silent and unusually personal for a Soviet military monument — closer to mourning than to triumph.

Together the two take half an hour and change the shape of a visit to Gori considerably, especially for anyone who has just come out of the Stalin Museum.