Samtavro Monastery

Samtavro is the quieter half of Mtskheta's UNESCO ensemble — five minutes uphill from Svetitskhoveli, and most coach groups never make the walk. It is a working nunnery, so the courtyard has roses, washing lines and cats rather than ticket desks.

The story starts in the 330s. When Nino, the woman who converted Kartli to Christianity, arrived in Mtskheta she lived in a bramble thicket at the edge of the royal garden. King Mirian III, the first Christian ruler of Iberia, built a church over the spot. The small stone chapel in the north-east corner of the yard, dedicated to St Nino, is a later replacement, but it marks the place; the blackberry bush growing beside it is treated as a descendant of the original.

The large cruciform church next to it, the Church of the Transfiguration, is 11th century, put up under King George I after earthquakes brought down the earlier building. Inside, against the north wall, two low stone tombs hold King Mirian and Queen Nana — about as close as Georgia comes to a national founding grave. Fragments of 17th-century painting survive on the walls, and a squat bell tower of the 15th or 16th century stands separately in the yard.

The crowd in the courtyard, though, is usually there for something else entirely. Gabriel Urgebadze, a monk regarded as a holy fool, who publicly burned a portrait of Lenin in 1965, died here in 1995 and was buried in the grounds. He was canonised in 2012, and his grave — a low railed mound under a canopy — draws a steady queue of pilgrims from all over the country.

The slope behind the walls is also one of Georgia's most important archaeological sites. The Samtavro cemetery, dug from the 1870s onwards, produced thousands of burials running from the Late Bronze Age to the early Christian centuries. Nothing of it shows on the surface now, but the finds fill several rooms of the National Museum in Tbilisi.