Upper Svaneti

Upper Svaneti lies in north-western Georgia, in the upper valley of the Enguri river between the main Caucasus range and the Svaneti range. Its people, the Svans, already appear in the writings of the Greek geographer Strabo. From the 4th century the region was a vassal of the kingdom of Lazica, and when Lazica adopted Christianity in 523 the Svans followed, though older beliefs and rites lived on.

Svaneti was absorbed into the united kingdom of Georgia in the early 11th century, and during the cultural flowering that ran up to the reign of Queen Tamar it became one of the main centres for metalwork, painting, wood carving and architecture. Most of the churches of Upper Svaneti date from this time. They are tiny, but inside they keep wall paintings, carved doors, crosses and illuminated manuscripts. The Mongol invasions never reached the region, yet its growing isolation brought economic and cultural decline from the 15th to the 18th century, and the people of the upper Enguri, with Mestia as their centre, kept their independence until the Russians arrived in the 19th century.

Each village is crowded with towers of three to five storeys built into the houses, their upper floors used only for watching and defence. Chazhashi, in the Ushguli community, still has more than 200 of them; it was made a reserve in 1971 and is kept as a museum-reserve. A survey in 1983 to 1985 recorded 960 monuments, among them 196 churches and 208 towers. An ICOMOS mission could not reach the area in 1994 because of the unrest there; it visited in May 1996, and the site was inscribed that same year.