Mtskheta is twenty minutes from Tbilisi and about two thousand years older. It was the capital of the kingdom of Iberia before Christ was born, the place where Georgia adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and it remains the spiritual heart of the country — the seat of the Georgian Orthodox Church, the town every Georgian seems to carry around as a kind of origin point. I went expecting a tidy little heritage town and found something stranger and more affecting: a working pilgrimage site that happens to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited places I have ever stood in.
Svetitskhoveli, the pillar that lives
The cathedral is the reason most people come, and it deserves the reputation. Svetitskhoveli — the name means “the living pillar” — has stood in its current form since the eleventh century, a great honey-colored cross-domed church inside a fortified wall, and the legend attached to it is the kind of thing Georgia does better than anyone. The story goes that a local Jew named Elias was in Jerusalem at the crucifixion, bought Christ’s robe from a Roman soldier, and brought it home to Mtskheta, where his sister Sidonia took it, was so overcome that she died clutching it, and was buried with it still in her arms. A cedar grew from the grave. The robe, they say, is still down there somewhere under the floor.
Inside, the scale is what gets you — the worn flagstones, the smoke-darkened frescoes, the light coming down through the dome onto a congregation of black-clad women lighting candles and old men crossing themselves with a slow deliberateness that has nothing to do with tourism. I am not a religious person. I stood at the back for a long time anyway. There is a weight to a building that has been the center of a people’s faith for a thousand years, and you feel it whether you believe anything or not.
Jvari, watching from the hill
Across the valley, on a bare hilltop above the town, sits Jvari Monastery — a small, severe sixth-century church that is, if anything, even more important to Georgians than the cathedral below. It marks the spot where Saint Nino, the woman who converted the country, is said to have raised the first Christian cross. You drive up a winding road to reach it, and from the terrace outside you get the view that explains the entire place: the town of Mtskheta laid out below at the exact confluence of two rivers — the muddy brown Aragvi pouring into the green Mtkvari, the two waters running side by side for a stretch before they mix.
Lia and I sat up there for an hour, mostly not talking, watching the rivers and the wind moving over the hills. The church behind us was almost empty — a single monk, a few candles, the smell of beeswax and cold stone. It is fourteen centuries old and feels it, in the best way. I have stood in grander churches. I am not sure I have stood in an older one that still does its job.
We ate lunch back down in the town, at a place off the cobbled main street, where I had khinkali — the great soup-filled dumplings you grip by the topknot and bite carefully so as not to lose the broth — and a jug of the local amber wine, fermented in the buried clay qvevri the way Georgians have done it for eight thousand years. The waiter showed me, with some patience, how to eat the dumplings without disgracing myself. I got better at it. By the third one I was nearly Georgian.
When to go: Late spring (May–June) and early autumn (September–October) are ideal — mild, green, and clear, with the river confluence at its most photogenic from Jvari. Summer is hot and busy with Tbilisi day-trippers; come early in the morning to have Svetitskhoveli to yourself before the tour buses arrive.