Javakheti tours | Off the beaten track
The Javakheti Plateau lies to the east of the Mtkvari canyon. It is vast, mountainous, and full of feelings of emptiness. At this elevation, few trees grow and only small settlements dot the landscape – mostly ethnic Armenians, who keep themselves busy raising animals and potatoes and fishing in the alpine lakes. There are also a few villages of the pacifist Russian dissenters known as Doukhobors, famous for their brightly painted and intricately decorated houses, their knowledge of medicinal plants, and their eschewing of all forms of violence, which caused them to flee from Russia in the 19th century and settle here in a place which did, and still does, feel like the edge of the known world.
The lakes are what bring the few travelers that come here. Six of them, one shared with Turkey, each an order of magnitude larger than any other natural lakes in Georgia: Tabatskuri, Paravani, Saghamo, Madatapa, Khanchali, Kartsakhi – plus a few smaller ones for good measure. Besides the fish which provide a welcome variety to the hardscrabble diet of the rugged plateau, the lakes also swarm with birds in the summer. In the winter, frozen inches thick, the lakes are like silent eyes staring up at heaven – snowed in, cut off from the rest of the country atop cellars full of potatoes, locals race cars across the icy surfaces for fun.
What you might not notice at first in Javakheti is that the perfectly conical mountains surrounding you are actually volcanoes. Javakheti was a land born of fire. Though the Samsara caldera has been dormant for millennia now, the tell-tale shapes, the ground covered with basalts, obsidian, and pumice, and the occasional shudder of the earth reveal the tumult still raging beneath. For now, the winding paths between or along the peaks is a magnificent and otherworldly experience for the kind of hiker who doesn’t mind walking on a few stones. The highest points, not very difficult to reach, are more than 3300 meters above sea level and provide a view to literally half the country.
The cultural heritage of Javakheti includes plenty of starkly beautiful medieval churches abandoned in the middle of a plateau or under haphazard restoration in a village, but no discussion of this region’s history is complete without mentioning its spectacular megalithic sites. Like in Lower Kartli, Javakheti is also full of dolmens, menhirs, standing stones, stone circles, and other mementos of a vanished civilization, whose universe was vastly different from ours. The uncontested ultimate megalithic experience Georgia can offer is at Abuli and Shaori, two Bronze Age sites located impossibly high above the plateau. Abuli, which resembles a defensive fortress, is halfway up a mountain and Shaori, apparently an ancient temple, observatory, or other kind of cultic site, is at the peak of another. These huge structures, built of extremely large stones at extreme elevations without any kind of cement or mortar, confuse one’s sense of reality a bit. Somebody clearly made them at one point, somebody quite powerful. But who, and how, and for what reason? Due to their extreme remoteness, these sites have never been properly studied by archaeology, and the imagination is free to wander.
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Abuli megalithic fortress by Paravani Lake.
Winter landscape in Javaketi.
Megalithic staircase at Shaori Fortress.
The former Doukhobor village of Tambovka in winter.
Cows graze by Madatapa Lake.
Paravani Lake frozen in winter.
Saghamo Lake in the autumn.
The spectacularly beautiful Tabatskuri village by Tabatskuri lake.