Travel to Vardzia

In the 1150s, King Giorgi III of Georgia began carving a fortress into the volcanic tuff of Erusheti Mountain, creating a refuge on the contested frontier with the Muslim world. But it was his daughter—the legendary Queen Tamar, often styled ‘King’ in medieval chronicles—who transformed this defensive stronghold into one of history’s most ambitious architectural achievements.

By the 1180s, Vardzia had grown into a fully functioning underground city: 6,000 apartments, 25 wine cellars, a pharmacy, libraries, and a sophisticated irrigation system channeling water from the ‘Tears of Tamar’ spring. At its peak, the complex housed up to 2,000 monks and served as a spiritual bastion of Eastern Christendom. The caves stretch 500 meters along the cliff face and descend 13 levels into the rock—a scale almost impossible to imagine without modern machinery.

At Vardzia’s spiritual heart lies the rock-carved Church of the Dormition, built in the 1180s during Georgia’s Golden Age. Its barrel-vaulted interior preserves some of the finest medieval frescoes in the Caucasus, depicting the life of Christ from Annunciation to Ascension in vivid colors that have survived eight centuries.

On the north wall, portraits of King Giorgi III and Queen Tamar gaze down at visitors—one of only three surviving images of Georgia’s most celebrated monarch. Uniquely, Tamar appears without the traditional headdress of a married woman, suggesting the fresco was painted before her first marriage in 1185. Beneath her image, an inscription reads ‘God grant her a long life.’ The artist Georgi signed his name in the altar, leaving a rare personal mark on this masterpiece of the Georgian School of painting.

In 1283, a catastrophic earthquake tore away the outer walls of Vardzia’s caves, exposing the hidden city to the world and rendering much of it uninhabitable. Yet the monks persisted, rebuilding what they could and continuing their sacred work. The disaster, ironically, created the spectacular honeycomb vista visitors see today—the original Vardzia was almost entirely concealed within the mountain.

The final blow came in 1551 when Persian forces invaded, massacring the resident monks and leaving Vardzia abandoned for centuries. But the monastery’s story didn’t end there. After Soviet-era excavations revealed the site’s full scale, monks gradually returned in the late 20th century. Today, Vardzia is once again a functioning monastery—the sacred flame kept burning in the Church of the Dormition, exactly as Queen Tamar intended.