[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]
Georgia's Mountain Towers Were Built to Survive Avalanches and Blood Feuds
High in the Caucasus there's a valley full of medieval stone towers, built so families could hide from avalanches and from each other during blood feuds. It's called Svaneti, it's in Georgia, and it's about to blow up. Go first.
The Svaneti Georgia towers are the kind of thing you see a photo of and assume has been heavily edited, and then you stand in Ushguli at 2,100 metres with snow peaks looming over a cluster of nine-hundred-year-old stone towers and realise the photo was, if anything, underselling it. I’ve been a lot of places. This one made me go quiet.
Svaneti is a region high in the Greater Caucasus in northwestern Georgia — the country Georgia, not the US state, a distinction I had to make about forty times on that trip. It’s isolated, fiercely proud, historically almost ungovernable, and absolutely stuffed with these medieval defensive towers. Tall, square, stone, tapering slightly toward the top. They’ve stood since roughly the 9th to 13th centuries and they’re UNESCO World Heritage now.
Towers against avalanches and against each other
This is the part that hooked me. The towers — Svan towers, koshki — were built for two kinds of survival, and both are wild.
One: avalanches and invasion. Svaneti gets brutal winters, and historically every army that tried to conquer the Caucasus had a go at the passes. The towers were refuges. When trouble came — armed men or a wall of snow — the family climbed up inside, pulled the ladder up behind them, and waited it out. The thick stone could shrug off a lot.
Two, and this is the dark one: blood feuds. Svan society had a code of honour and revenge that could run for generations — an insult or a killing would obligate a family to retaliate, and the cycle could last decades. So each family fortified its own tower partly against its neighbours. You’d literally retreat into your tower because the people three houses over were honour-bound to kill you. Whole villages built like a standoff frozen in stone. The guide who told me this said it with a sort of rueful pride, like, yes, we were a difficult people, and you could tell he didn’t entirely mind the reputation.
Where you actually go
Two names matter most. Mestia is the main town and the practical base — it’s grown a lot, has guesthouses, restaurants, a surprisingly good museum, ATMs, and the small airport with those nerve-jangling little flights from Tbilisi. From Mestia you can do day hikes, and the towers are dotted right through the town and the surrounding villages.
Then there’s Ushguli, further up the valley — a community of villages at around 2,100 metres, one of the highest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe, sitting under Mount Shkhara (Georgia’s highest peak, over 5,000 metres). The road there is rough and gorgeous and takes a couple of hours from Mestia, and Ushguli is the postcard: towers, stone houses, cows wandering the muddy lanes, snow mountains filling the sky behind. It’s the most “I’ve stepped into the past” I have ever felt.
The classic active thing to do is the Mestia-to-Ushguli trek, three or four days walking village to village, sleeping in guesthouses, eating whatever the host family makes. I only did a chunk of it and regret not doing the whole thing. The walking is moderate, the hospitality is staggering, and you pass through hamlets where the only sound is sheep bells and the only buildings are towers.
Eat this, drink that, and pace yourself
Georgian food is one of the great underrated cuisines, full stop, and in Svaneti it gets its own twist. Get the khachapuri (cheese bread — the Svan version, kubdari, is stuffed with spiced meat instead and it’s a revelation). The dumplings, khinkali, you eat by hand, biting a hole and drinking the broth first. And the wine — Georgia’s been making wine for eight thousand years, in clay qvevri buried in the ground, and the homemade stuff your guesthouse host pours from an unlabelled bottle will be better than anything you’ve paid for.
Pace the wine, though. Svan hospitality involves toasts, and toasts involve a designated toastmaster (the tamada) and a lot of full glasses, and there’s a real risk of a hangover at altitude, which is its own special kind of misery the next morning on a switchback road.
Getting there takes commitment, which is exactly why it’s still quiet. Most people fly into Tbilisi or Kutaisi, then it’s a long drive (or a marshrutka minibus, cheap and bumpy) up to Mestia, or one of those tiny prop-plane flights if you’re brave. Build in buffer time — mountain weather closes roads and grounds the little planes without much warning, and you do not want a tight schedule fighting the Caucasus.
I’ll be honest about why I’m pushing you to go now. Georgia is having a moment. The combination of cheap, friendly, dramatically beautiful, and visa-easy for most people is catnip, and Svaneti is the jewel everyone’s about to point their camera at. Five years ago it was the preserve of hardcore trekkers. Now there are boutique guesthouses in Mestia. The towers aren’t going anywhere — they’ve survived avalanches and blood feuds and a thousand years, they’ll survive Instagram — but the feeling of having Ushguli nearly to yourself is the bit with an expiry date.
Go while a cow in the lane is still more likely than a tour group.
Get to the towers before the crowds find the road. Drink the wine, climb the koshki, and stand under Shkhara feeling very small and very lucky.
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