Georgia: Motsameta Monastery Perched Over Kutaisi’s Gorge

I’d set my heart on Gelati Monastery, which sits a mile or so east of Kutaisi, up in the hills, and I’d been looking forward to it for weeks, in the way you look forward to things when you’ve read a bit about them and convinced yourself they’re going to be marvellous. Gelati was founded in 1106 by David the Builder, who was by all accounts an extremely busy monarch — not only did he more or less reunify Georgia after it had spent a good while in bits, he also found time to found one of the great monuments of the whole Caucasus region. It’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994, which tells you roughly how seriously everyone else takes it, even if I was about to be denied the pleasure.

In its heyday, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Gelati wasn’t just a monastery, it was the Gelati Academy, a proper centre of learning that pulled in scholars, scientists and theologians from all over the medieval world. Think of it as the Oxford of its day, except with more frescoes and considerably fewer bicycles. David the Builder himself is buried there, and — this is the detail I liked best — he had himself interred beneath the gate at the main entrance, so that everyone who walked in would, quite literally, walk over him. The idea being humility. I’m not entirely sure I’d have chosen that particular way of demonstrating it, but kings of the twelfth century clearly had their own notions about these things, and who am I to argue with a man who’s been dead for nine hundred years.

Anyway, I never got to test the theory, because when I turned up the whole building was wrapped in scaffolding and plastic sheeting like something that had been sent away for repair, and a chap on the gate informed me, with the particular cheerfulness that people reserve for delivering bad news to tourists, that it was only open at weekends. It was a Thursday. I’ve travelled enough now to know that this sort of thing happens roughly as often as the opposite, so there wasn’t much point getting worked up about it, though I did have a little internal grumble, as is my right as an Englishman abroad.

🎶 Four Men, a Gorge, and Some Extraordinary Singing

So, Plan B. I pointed the car towards Motsameta Monastery instead, a smaller place out on the edge of the city, and one I knew rather less about, which is often how the best days turn out. Motsameta dates from the eleventh century and is dedicated to two brothers, David and Constantine Mkheidze, Georgian princes who were captured by the region’s Arab ruler back in around 736 AD. When they refused to convert to Islam, they were thrown into the gorge of the Rioni River below the monastery, which strikes me as a thoroughly brutal way to go, though I suppose if you’re going to be martyred you could do worse for scenery. They were later canonised and are now among the most venerated saints in the whole of Georgia, which is not a bad outcome, all things considered, even if it came rather too late to be of any use to them personally.

I parked up and was sitting there getting my bearings — a habit of mine, sitting in car parks doing nothing in particular — when several more cars arrived in a great commotion of spinning wheels and revving engines, the way people drive when they’re either very late or very happy. It turned out to be the second, a wedding party, and rather a boisterous one. I got out and started down the path towards the monastery, and as I went I could hear music drifting through the trees, which I naturally assumed was something to do with the wedding.

It wasn’t. What I found, standing near the entrance, were four men in traditional Georgian costume, singing traditional Georgian polyphonic music, with no wedding in sight. I stood and listened, because you’d have to be made of stone not to. Georgian polyphonic singing is on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and having heard it, I can tell you the fuss is entirely justified — three or four voices winding round each other in a way that sounds impossibly old and yet completely natural, as though they’d been doing it since the gorge was first carved. They sang a couple of songs, took a modest little bow, and wandered off, presumably to do something equally splendid somewhere else, and I carried on into the monastery feeling rather pleased with how the day had turned out, scaffolding notwithstanding.

⛪ A Wedding, a Church the Size of a Garden Shed, and the Rain

Motsameta itself is small, as monasteries go, but the setting more than makes up for it. It sits out on a narrow spur of rock with the Rioni River running several hundred feet below in a proper gorge, the sort that makes you take an involuntary step backwards from the edge even though you weren’t particularly close to it in the first place. I don’t throw the word stunning around lightly, being from London and therefore constitutionally suspicious of enthusiasm, but it really was.

Wandering round, I passed the door of the church and looked in, and there, to my considerable surprise, were the bride and groom from the wedding party I’d seen arriving earlier. She looked lovely, as brides generally do, and the groom looked the way grooms generally look, which is to say slightly terrified and overdressed. The church itself dates largely from the eleventh century, though it’s been patched up and restored a fair bit since, and it is tiny — genuinely the size of a garden shed, or not far off — so there was nowhere near enough room for the whole wedding party, and half of them were stood about outside the door, shuffling and craning their necks.

It was at precisely this point that the heavens opened. Not a light English drizzle, the sort you can ignore, but proper, committed rain, the kind that means business. I found a bit of shelter under an overhang and sat down to watch the whole scene play out — a Georgian wedding, in a thousand-year-old monastery, perched over a gorge, with the rain coming down in sheets all around. It occurred to me, sitting there getting gently damp and feeling rather smug about my choice of shelter, that I’d had considerably worse afternoons than this one, and quite a few of them hadn’t involved either a gorge or a wedding.

💭 Reflections

Funny how these things work out. I’d gone to Kutaisi with my mind fixed on Gelati, read up on it, pictured it, and the whole thing was shut, swaddled in scaffolding like a broken arm, for no better reason than it being a Thursday. And yet the day I actually had — stumbled into almost by accident — turned out to be one I’ll remember rather better than the one I’d planned. There’s a lesson in there somewhere about not getting too attached to the itinerary, though I daresay I’ll ignore it completely the next time a UNESCO site lets me down.

What stays with me isn’t really the history, interesting as it is — the martyred princes, the gorge, David the Builder lying under his own gate so people would tread on him. It’s the small, unrepeatable collision of things that happened to occur on the same wet Thursday afternoon: four men singing something older than the stones around them, a wedding squeezed half in and half out of a church built for a congregation of about twelve, and me, sat under a rock, getting rained on and thoroughly enjoying myself. You can’t plan that sort of afternoon. You can really only be lucky enough to have Plan A fall through.