Four Windows and a Door

On the third day of the walk from Mestia to Ushguli you have to cross the Adishi river, and there is still no bridge. It runs off a glacier, so it is low at dawn and rises through the day as the ice melts above you - which means the crossing is not a place, it is a time. Arrive by mid-morning and it is thigh-deep and very cold. Arrive at four in the afternoon in June and it is genuinely dangerous. Men from the village wait on the bank with horses and carry you over for 20 to 30 lari. Everything about Svaneti is in that river: the mountains do not stop you, but they do set the hours.

Mestia is the base for all of it - a town of about two thousand people under Ushba, with two museums, an airport and a ski lift, and the trailhead for everything in this dossier. Upper Svaneti around it is the high southern flank of the Greater Caucasus, and what makes it look unlike anywhere else are the towers. Three to five storeys of dressed stone, walls tapering as they rise, machicolated parapets at the top for dropping things on people, attached to a two-floor dwelling where the ground floor was a single hall with an open hearth shared with the animals. ICOMOS dates them from the early ninth century to the seventeenth, with the creative peak in the tenth to twelfth. A survey in 1983-85 counted 208 of them still standing across the region, along with 196 churches and 342 dwelling complexes.

Ushba, the twin-summited peak above the town, is what climbers call the Matterhorn of the Caucasus and generally regard as the hardest ascent in the range. Forty-eight kilometres east up the valley is Ushguli, a cluster of hamlets under Shkhara, Georgia's highest point, where the church of Lamaria stands on a ridge above the houses. It is ninth or tenth century, dedicated to the Dormition, and its name fuses the Virgin Mary with Lamaria, a pre-Christian fertility deity the Svans never quite gave up.

The thing almost nobody writes about sits in a case in the Mestia museum. The Adishi Gospels were written in 897 at Shatberdi monastery in Klarjeti by a scribe named Mikaeli, carried into the mountains, and kept in the village of Adishi for roughly a thousand years. It is the oldest dated surviving manuscript of the Georgian gospels. Adishi is the village on day three - the one where the trekkers queue for a horse.

There are two Svanetis, and almost everyone has only heard of one. Upper Svaneti is the Enguri valley - Mestia, Ushguli, the World Heritage inscription, the airport, the ski lifts, a hundred and fifty walkers a day on the trail in August. Lower Svaneti is over the ridge to the south, in the Tskhenistsqali valley, and it has the same language, the same tower-building tradition and none of the traffic. Lentekhi has four hotels. Mestia has a hundred and seventy-eight.

The two are separated by the Svaneti Range - eighty-five kilometres of it, topping out at Mount Laila at 4,009 metres - and joined by exactly one road, over the Zagari Pass at around 2,620 metres. It opens somewhere around late May and closes in October under two or three metres of snow. For the rest of the year Lower Svaneti faces the other way entirely, down the Tskhenistsqali to Tsageri and Kutaisi, which is why it feels less like the back of Upper Svaneti and more like a separate country that happens to share a language.

Lentekhi Municipality is 1,344 square kilometres, sixty villages, and a town of under a thousand people at 760 metres. The land runs from 450 metres up to Ailama at 4,547 on the main Caucasus watershed; sixty-four per cent of it is forest, and ninety-two per cent of its farmland is pasture, because crops stop growing above nine hundred metres. Eighty-three per cent of the settlements have fewer than two hundred people in them. The largest village, Kheledi, has 258.

What it does not have is a UNESCO plaque, a protected area, a tour operator, or a single attraction listed on TripAdvisor. What it does have is the Zagari road, a three-day trek east into Racha that nobody maintains, a fourteenth-generation dialect nobody has written down, and - genuinely - a hundred thousand tonnes of Soviet arsenic waste sitting in a village by the river.