Tsaishi Cathedral

Tsaishi was one of the principal bishoprics of Mingrelia, and it is now one of the country's more argued-over restorations. The village lies about twelve kilometres south-west of Zugdidi on flat farmed ground.

The see of Tsaishi took shape at the end of the thirteenth century, when the church organisation of Odishi was revised. The bishop, known as the Tsaisheli, was among the most powerful clerics in Mingrelia and stood close to the Dadiani court.

The building itself has a tangled history. In the lower courses there are traces of a basilica of the tenth or eleventh century; the present domed cross-in-square volume is largely fourteenth century, from the rebuilding carried out under the Dadiani. It was damaged and patched repeatedly in the centuries that followed.

Restoration in recent decades changed it sharply: new stone, a new roof, a reconstructed drum. From a distance the church now reads as a new building, which many art historians dislike. The genuinely medieval fabric has to be looked for in the lower walls, in reused carved blocks set into the masonry, and in the surviving fragments of painting, which include both fourteenth-century and sixteenth- to seventeenth-century layers, neither of them extensive.

The most authentic thing on the site is the bell tower: a tall three-stage structure of the sixteenth or seventeenth century with an open belfry at the top. Its proportions and brickwork are the detail that justifies the stop.

The restoration is itself a document. It was done in years when Georgia was rebuilding many churches quickly and with more enthusiasm than archaeology, and you can see where new ashlar meets old cobble, and where a straight new arch has replaced a sagging medieval one. Whether that counts as rescue or loss is precisely the argument. The diocese, meanwhile, still exists: it was revived in 1995 as the eparchy of Zugdidi and Tsaishi, so the name survives in a living title.

The yard is large and calm, with maize plots and hazelnut orchards around it. Almost nobody stops here. There are no coaches, no ticket desk and no signage to speak of. Half an hour covers it.

Put plainly: if you want untouched medieval architecture, give your time to Tsalenjikha and Khobi instead. If you want to see how a Georgian monument lives in the twenty-first century, and what restoration can do both for and to a building, Tsaishi is where the question is posed most clearly.