Ushguli

Ushguli grew where the Enguri valley narrows below the glaciers of Shkhara, in a pocket of Upper Svaneti that was among the hardest places in the Caucasus to reach. Its towers, like those elsewhere in Svaneti, were built mainly between the ninth and twelfth centuries: tapering stone shafts of three to five storeys attached to family houses, entered high up and used as shelter from raiders, from feuding neighbours and from avalanches. Chazhashi alone holds more than two hundred towers and is preserved as a museum-reserve, and Upper Svaneti was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 for that reason.

The community sat beyond the effective reach of most of the powers that ruled Georgia. Svaneti's remoteness turned its churches into a repository of Georgian religious art, with icons, crosses and manuscripts sent up from the lowlands during invasions, and one of the castles at Chazhashi is named for Queen Tamar, who ruled Georgia at its medieval height. Clan organisation and customary law governed the valley, and blood feud was settled by agreement rather than by any outside court.

Upper Svaneti came under Russian imperial control in the nineteenth century: its princes signed a treaty of protectorate in 1833 and the principality's autonomy was abolished in 1857. Soviet rule brought a school and a rough road, but the settlement stayed isolated, and hard winters and the avalanches of 1987, which killed at least eighty people across the region, drew families down to the lowlands. Since the 2000s tourism has changed the economy again: houses have become guesthouses, towers have been repaired, and the village has become one of the best-known places in Georgia.

Life here is Svan before it is anything else. The Svan language, a Kartvelian language distinct from Georgian that UNESCO classes as definitely endangered, is spoken at home, and the songs sung at feasts and funerals belong to what is often called the most archaic of Georgia's polyphonic singing. Round felt hats, woven cloth, carved wooden chairs and the low, dark interiors of the old Svan houses, where family and animals wintered under one roof, all belong to the same tradition.

Religious practice mixes Orthodox Christianity with older custom. Each village keeps its own chapel and feast days; icons are the property of the community and are treated with great care; and ceremonies such as Lamproba in early February, when torches of dried birch or oak are lit, one for each member of a household, keep pre-Christian farming purposes. Religious space was traditionally divided by gender, men praying at remote mountain churches and women at the hearth or at small shrines outside the village, and traces of that division remain.

Svan society was built on clans and on obligations of hospitality and revenge that the towers were made to outlast. Reputation matters, guests are fed generously, and toasts at the table follow an order set by a tamada. Residents are aware that the towers now bring in most of the village's income and are generally welcoming, but the villages are homes and workplaces: hay is cut, cattle are driven through the lanes, and people dislike cameras pointed into their yards.

A few hundred people live in the villages, a number that swells in summer with returning relatives, guests and seasonal workers, and shrinks sharply in winter when snow blocks the pass. It is often described as one of the highest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe, at about 2,100 metres, and daily life is shaped by that altitude.

The old economy has not disappeared. Households still keep cows, pigs and horses, cut hay by hand on steep slopes in late summer, grow potatoes and store cheese, salted meat and preserves for the winter. Alongside it, almost every family with space now runs a guesthouse or hires out horses and vehicles, and the summer months bring in the cash that carries the community through the rest of the year. There is a school, a small clinic and a handful of shops.

The rhythm follows the season. In summer the track fills with 4x4s from midday, walkers arrive off the mountain route, and the cafés are busy until evening; in winter the village is snowbound, wood-heated and largely closed to outsiders. Persistent concerns are the state of the road, the reliability of electricity, the pressure of visitor numbers on a settlement with World Heritage status, and whether new building respects the appearance that brings people here.

Cooking in Ushguli is Svan mountain food, made from what the valley produces. Kubdari is the dish to look for: a leavened bread stuffed with chunks of lamb, kid or pork, onions and Georgian spices, and listed as part of Georgia's intangible cultural heritage. Chvishtari is a cornmeal bread with sulguni cheese worked through it, and petvraali is a bread filled with cheese and millet. Fresh cheeses and soured milk appear at almost every meal, and soups and stews of potato, beans and greens carry the colder months.

Svan salt, svanuri marili, seasons nearly everything: coarse salt ground with coriander, dill, blue fenugreek, marigold, garlic, cumin and red pepper, and sold in bags by the village shops along with honey from hives on the slopes. Dried and smoked meat, preserved in the cold, is a winter staple, and mchadi, a dense maize bread, is eaten in place of wheat bread when supplies are short.

Because nothing ripens at this altitude beyond hardy vegetables, wine, fruit and most fresh produce come up the road from Imereti and Samegrelo. Chacha, the clear pomace brandy, is the usual drink at a guesthouse table, often home-made and offered with toasts, while tea, soured milk and spring water fill the rest of the day.