Georgia is a very mountainous country (ie the Caucus mountains) and it was/is very tribal. Separate languages and ethnicity’s living in heavily defensible mountain fortresses and valleys. Lots of swords and watch towers in really inaccessible places. Mountaintop churches to keep the relics safe from the Persians who surrounded them from the Armenian and Iran sides and also from Chechnya and Dagastan above, which were Persian states.

Here’s a particularly lovely mountain church that I could have ‘hiked’ up to, but I’m due in Italy in 3 weeks, so I went up by four wheel drive instead, which was an adrenaline rush in itself. Health and safety in this country – THERE IS NONE.

Do these look like the sort of roads you want to drive on?

But worth it to get up here.

See how it looks like there’s just a sheer drop of thousands of feet …. ? H&S = 0

7th C grape carvings. Priorities :).

A terrifying Rasputin-a-like Monk polices the church for ladies showing their disgusting lady hair and lady legs in trousers. ( Church supplied lava-lava. )