Open Air Museum of Ethnography

This is Georgia compressed into an hour's walk. On a wooded hillside above Vake, on the way up to Turtle Lake, 52 hectares hold real houses that were dismantled in their home villages and reassembled here. The museum was founded in 1966 on the initiative of the ethnographer Giorgi Chitaia.

The path is organised into zones, each representing a historical province:

• Kartli and Kakheti — darbazi houses with a central hearth and a stepped smoke hole, plus wine cellars with buried qvevri
• Svaneti — a defensive stone tower and a machubi, the single room where family and cattle wintered together
• Samegrelo and Guria — timber houses raised off the ground against damp
• Adjara and Imereti — wooden buildings with wide balconies and ingenious internal water systems
• Khevsureti and Tusheti — dry stone mountain structures built without mortar

Most interiors are fully furnished with pots, rugs, beds and tools, and in several houses an attendant will explain how the space was actually used through the year.

The museum doubles as a park: shade, old trees, quiet paths. In summer it is several degrees cooler than the city, which is a reason to come in itself, and in late October the whole slope turns yellow.