Travel Guide Tchiatoura

Today, it is a timeless, out-of-the-world, unlikely place, a chapter of history that is still very much alive. The road to Kutaisi is marked by a former "pachyderm" of heavy industry straight out of the golden age of the Soviet era. It is a huge ironworks with chimneys rusted by time, a ghost of a forgotten era. After seeing it, we take a small road that criss-crosses the plateaus, towards the Great Caucasus chain looming on the horizon. The river, source of manganese, with black water, has dug its bed there. An ageless miniature cable car swings and creaks on its cable, which runs up the hill. Too much wind, it's stopped for the moment. The cable connects it to a yellow-walled, colonial-looking building, decrepit by time. The cable car leads to a seemingly deserted plateau Chiatoura, in the heart of the most industrial Georgian valleys of the Greater Caucasus, has everything of the dilapidated Soviet mining town devastated by deindustrialization. In the second half of the 19th century, manganese ore was discovered in the Kvirila Valley. Tchiatura was founded to house the miners, and by 1989 the town had 30,000 inhabitants. The mines were exploited on the surrounding mountain plateaus. Cable cars were built to take people to higher ground, weather permitting. About ten kilometres away, the small town of Satchkhere is the homeland of the post-Saakashvili strongman, the millionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. It looks prosperous next to Tchiatura, because the oligarch financed hospitals, schools, stadiums and other brand new infrastructure. Close to Chiatura, do not miss under any circumstances an extraordinary site: the pillar of Katskhi. Words are weak to describe this exceptional site. The monks could not find a better place to isolate themselves from the world. Imagine a monastery installed on a karstic piton, a pillar of the earth in the true sense of the word, as only seen in South-West China or Vietnam. The monastery is installed on this peak, at a height of about fifty meters, on a surface of 50 m2, that is to say space for the religious building alone, the whole connected only by a ladder. This is enough to be closer to God and further away from men, without interference, or almost.