Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography

If you have time for one building in Svaneti, make it this one. It explains why the towers stand in these valleys, and why objects that belong by rights in a capital city ended up here.

The museum was founded in 1936; the present building opened in 2013, a low volume of concrete and stone set partly into the hillside so that it does not compete with the towers.

The collection is the point. It holds medieval icons and processional crosses gathered from village churches across Svaneti — gold and silver repoussé work of the tenth to fourteenth centuries. The quality of the metalwork is such that much of it must have come from royal workshops.

The Adishi Gospels deserve a paragraph of their own. This manuscript of 897 is one of the oldest dated Georgian books. It was written at the monastery of Shatberdi in Tao-Klarjeti and later turned up in the Svan village of Adishi, from which it takes its name.

There is a simple reason why such treasure is here: Svaneti was never conquered. When the lowlands were being destroyed by Arabs, Seljuks, Mongols or Timur, churches sent their most valuable objects up into the mountains. A great many never went back down. The valleys became, in effect, the strongroom of medieval Georgian art.

The collection also includes Byzantine and Georgian cloisonné enamel, manuscripts, weapons, textiles and ethnographic material, from household vessels to Svan hats and cradles.

One room is given to Vittorio Sella's photographs of 1889 and 1890. The Italian climber and photographer was the first to record Svaneti systematically, and his plates show the towers, the glaciers and the people as they were before there was a road.

One further merit of the museum is that it shows Svan work as a phenomenon in its own right, not only as treasure carried up from below. Local smiths made their own icons and crosses, and the results are harder and more graphic, with flatter figures. In one room the two traditions stand side by side, and the difference is visible at a glance.

The lighting is deliberately low, which is a conservation requirement for metal and pigment. Your eyes need a few minutes, but the gold then glimmers as it would have by candlelight.

An hour and a half is enough, although a guided visit is a different experience: the labels are bilingual but brief, and without context a good deal stays closed.