Lake Bateti in autumn: a green, still lake below forested hills turning gold and orange

Region · Shida Kartliშიდა ქართლი

Shida Kartli

Inner Kartli: the orchard plain in the middle of the country, a rock-cut town older than Georgia itself, a 7th-century church in a gorge of vineyards - and, up a forest track above Kareli, a small forest lake that most people never drive to.

Bateti Lake · 1,313 m · Dzama valley

Down to the lake The region from Gori

Kareli municipality · Bateti Lake

A lake the hillside made.

Bateti is a landslide lake. At some point a slope in the Dzama valley came down across the Batetistskali stream, and the water backed up behind it into a bowl in the forest. It is small - about two hectares - and surprisingly deep for its size.

It is also home to the banded newt, a near-threatened species, so tread lightly at the water’s edge. Come between late spring and autumn - autumn especially, when the woods around it turn. Outside that window the track is mud or snow.

Our field note from an October visit

Depth to scale · width sketched

1Kareli
Drive south up the Dzama
About 23 km from Kareli, toward the village of Kodmani, to where the road gives out.
2No hike
Take the track up
A steep forest track, soft after rain. Go in a high-clearance SUV, or hire one of the local cars that run visitors up to the lake and back.
31,313 m
Sit by it, don't swim in it
No cafe, no kiosk: bring water and food and take the rubbish back down. The national tourism board lists swimming and fishing as not allowed.

Gori at the centre

Everything here is an hour from Gori.

The east-west highway and railway both run through the middle of the region, so the sensible way to see it is from one base. Pick a place to draw its road. One of them stops short.

The cave town, east along the Mtkvari.

Go to Uplistsikhe

Gori · on the Mtkvari and the Liakhvi

A fortress, a ridge, and a long memory.

The region’s town sits where the Greater Liakhvi runs into the Mtkvari, an hour west of Tbilisi. It is a working market town more than a sight - but two of its high points are worth the climb, and it has not forgotten 2008.

I
Gori Fortress
Goristsikhe sits on a rock in the middle of town. It appears in the records from the 13th century; most of what stands is a 17th-century rebuild, cracked again by the earthquake of 1920. Free to walk up, with the whole plain below.
II
Gorijvari
A church of St George on the ridge across the Mtkvari, south of town. Rebuilt more than once, and where Gori goes for the view back over itself - best near sunset, when the fortress catches the light.

12 km east of Gori · above the Mtkvari

Uplistsikhe, read from the top down.

უფლისციხე

A whole town carved into a sandstone outcrop on the river’s high left bank: halls, lanes, wine cellars, a main street climbing to the top, and a tunnel down to the water for when the gates were shut. Each age that lived here cut into what the last one left, so the rock keeps them all.

Allow two hours, wear shoes with grip - the worn rock is slick - and bring water. Tickets are sold at the visitor centre at the foot of the rock.

Tap a layer to dig

Stairs and lanes cut into the sandstone, the Mtkvari below, the whole site on UNESCO's tentative list since 2007. Go early or late: there is almost no shade on the rock.
The Mongol invasions ended its life as a town, and it was largely abandoned afterwards. An earthquake in 1920 brought down more of what was left.
With Tbilisi under Arab emirs, the old rock town grew important again as a Christian stronghold. The stone-and-brick basilica on the summit dates from these centuries.
Christianity arrived by moving in, not knocking down: the first basilica was cut in among the old halls of the pagan town.
Halls hewn straight out of the rock, their ceilings carved to imitate timber beams and coffers. The oldest structures that still stand date from the start of the first millennium AD.
People were living on the rock by the end of the second millennium BC. Medieval chroniclers credited the founding to Uplos, a mythical forefather, and the name means "the lord's fortress".

Older ↓

The Kartli plain · the orchard of the country

What’s on the roadside stalls.

Between Gori and Kareli the highway runs through orchards, and a large share of Georgia’s apples come off them. From early summer the verges fill with crates and buckets - whatever is ripe that week, sold by the people who picked it.

CherriesRing 1The first fruit of the summer, sold by the bucket on the roadside.
PlumsRing 2Green and sour in May for tkemali sauce, ripe and dark by August.
ApricotsRing 3Short and glorious. The surplus is dried into tklapi sheets.
PeachesRing 4 · in seasonThe Kartli plain's other big crop after apples.
PearsRing 5 · in seasonLate summer, in the same crates as the first apples.
ApplesRing 6 · in seasonThe crop the region is known for. Crates stacked along the highway from late summer.
GrapesRing 7 · in seasonRtveli, the grape harvest - Chinuri and Goruli Mtsvane in the Ateni gorge.
WalnutsRing 8 · in seasonKnocked down from the trees with long poles, and the stains last for weeks.

Out of season there’s still the dried fruit - and the hot nazuki of Surami, which never has an off month.

The western edge · Khashuri and Surami

The ridge that splits Georgia in two.

The Likhi Range runs north-south across the country, joining the Greater and Lesser Caucasus, and it divides more than two regions: east from west, dry from wet, and the Black Sea’s rivers from the Caspian’s. A raindrop on the Surami Pass has to choose.

← Black SeaCaspian Sea →

Send the drop down one side of the ridge.

949 mSurami Pass: The lowest crossing of the range and the hinge of the country. The railway goes under it in a tunnel; the main highway takes the Rikoti Pass a little to the north-west.
SuramiThe fortress: Its walls, the legend goes, kept falling until a young man named Zurab was built into them. Daniel Chonkadze wrote the story down in the 1850s; Sergei Parajanov filmed it in 1984.
Hot, alwaysNazuki: Sweet bread with raisins and cinnamon, baked against the walls of a clay tone and sold from stalls along the road through Surami. Buy two; one won't make it to the car.

More from the Kartli table on the food page.

North of Gori

The road north stops at a fence.

Shida Kartli is the region the August 2008 war ran through. Russian aircraft bombed Gori, and Russian troops held the town for about ten days. When they pulled back from Gori they stayed in the Tskhinvali Region - the occupied north of Shida Kartli and of parts of its neighbours - less than thirty kilometres up the Liakhvi valley. The Georgian villages there were burned after the ceasefire.

The families from them still live in the rows of identical cottages you pass along the highway around Gori. And since 2011 the line itself has been fenced and moved, field by field - at Khurvaleti it runs a few hundred metres from the main road.

If you’re travelling

Nothing on this page is near the line. Don’t go looking for it: in places it isn’t marked on the ground, and people are detained every year for crossing it without knowing.

The occupied territories, in full

Field notes