Shio-Mgvime Monastery

Shio-Mgvime sits in a dry limestone canyon that looks nothing like the green valley you drove out of. Nine kilometres of narrow road from Mtskheta bring you into a pale, almost treeless gorge; the monastery appears below you, low buildings on a shelf of rock, with caves pocking the cliff above.

The founder was Shio, one of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers who came to Kartli in the 6th century to strengthen a young church. He chose the hardest option available: he lived in a deep cave, was said to be fed by a dove, and finally had himself sealed into a pit, where he died around 560. His tomb is in a small dark chamber below the main church, reached by a flight of stairs, and a candle is nearly always burning there.

The Church of St John the Baptist, built between about 560 and 580, is the oldest surviving structure and one of the earliest domed churches in Georgia — squat, cruciform, austere, cut partly into the rock. The larger Church of the Virgin above it was a domed 12th-century foundation of David the Builder, ruined more than once and rebuilt in the 17th century as a plain barrel-vaulted hall, so the outside looks far older than the interior.

Shah Abbas's troops sacked the site in 1614, Persian raiders again in the 1720s, and it was revived in the 19th century. Besides the churches there survive:

• a 12th-century stone water conduit several kilometres long, built on the orders of Bishop Anton of Chkondidi to bring spring water down to the monastery

• the ruins of the refectory and the monks' cells

• dozens of hermits' caves in the cliffs, a few reachable by a rough path, most not

Come in late afternoon. The rock turns orange, the canyon fills with shadow, and the place stops looking like a car park with a church at the end of it.