Kvetera Fortress and Church

Kvetera is an odd pairing: an abandoned fortified town and a miniature, almost perfect church. It stands a few kilometres from Akhmeta on a free-standing wooded hill, off the road that runs up towards the Pankisi valley.

In the early medieval period this was one of the seats of the dukes of Kakheti. Chronicles refer to Kvetera as a town between the 8th and 10th centuries; afterwards it emptied and the forest took it back. Along the crest you can still trace the line of the curtain wall, the footings of towers and cut cisterns, all half-buried in grass and oak roots.

The reason to come, though, is the church. This 10th-century tetraconch measures only about five or six metres across inside — a chapel for a ruling family rather than a congregation. Its proportions are so exact that photographs give no sense of scale; arriving in person, most people are surprised by how small it is.

The dome is covered in blue-green glazed tiles. That is a later restoration rather than the original finish, and purists find it artificial, but the blue cone visible through green forest has become the image by which Kvetera is known.

Inside there is almost nothing: bare stone, one icon, a candle stand. The visit is about architecture. This is the Georgian domed church reduced to its essentials and executed without a single wasted line, and it is far easier to read here than in the large cathedrals down in the valley. Half an hour on this hill teaches more than a guidebook chapter.

The hill is easy to underestimate from the road below. Kvetera's defensive value lay in watching the whole approach to the upper Alazani, and once you are standing on the crest the reason the dukes chose this particular knoll becomes obvious within a minute.