Mutso

Mutso is a ruined fortress village stacked on a rock spur above the Andaki gorge, thirteen kilometres beyond Shatili and much harder to reach. Around thirty stone houses climb the spur in four tiers, with four defensive towers above them, and the whole thing reads as a single structure rather than a settlement.

It was abandoned in the 19th century. By the 1960s it was a collapsing ruin on a slope that visitors were told not to climb. Between 2014 and 2019 a conservation project stabilised the towers, rebuilt the stair paths and consolidated the walls without prettifying them; the work received a European heritage award in 2019 and is worth noticing in its own right, because it is unusually restrained.

What you see, in order, walking up:

• the burial crypts at the foot of the spur, low stone cells where the dead were laid on wooden shelves

• the ruined lower houses, doorways at knee height, floors long gone

• the four towers, square and battered, the topmost commanding the whole gorge

• a shrine of piled stone near the path, a Khevsur khati still in use, which women traditionally do not approach

Further up the valley lies Ardoti, another abandoned village, and on the way in from Shatili you pass the Anatori crypts, where plague victims went to die and where bones are still visible through the openings. Khevsureti softens none of this for visitors.

The climb from the parking area is twenty to thirty minutes on a rebuilt stone path, steep and exposed in places, with a chain handline on the worst section. Once you are among the houses the scale becomes clear: rooms two metres square, walls a metre thick, and windows aimed at the path rather than at the view.