Tales of Georgia This was a highlight of our time in Georgia, it's an ancient 6th to 12th century town built into a mountain, it housed 60,000 at it's peak with thousands of dwellings. Queen Tamar though called King despite being a woman, lived here and evidently had 365 bedrooms, so she slept in a different room each night of the year, for security reasons. Tamar the Great (Georgian: თამარი) (c. 1160 – 18 January 1213) reigned as the Queen of Georgia from 1184 to 1213, presiding over the apex of the Georgian Golden Age. A member of the Bagrationi dynasty, her position as the first woman to rule Georgia in her own right was emphasized by the title mepe ("king"), afforded to Tamar in the medieval Georgian sources. Georgia has always been a Christian country, (after it's pagan period) and the town had many churches mostly ruins caused by erosion and collapsing stonework over the centuries, several monks still reside in the monastery, and the whole place is a true wonder, it was an 8 hour round trip by car and is a few miles from the border with Turkey. The region is much colder than the rest of Georgia and was around 40f while we were there. Here are some photos I took... Posing for a photo on a balcony...... This is part of the remains of the monastery For some reason I love this photo, it seems to convey so much wonder
@Terry Page , Fascinating place. You and Lisa have certainly seen some interesting places in your travels. When I see pictures like these, my first thought is, "How'd they do that?" How did they make the rooms? Are all the rooms accessible from the outside? Did they have readily available water? Where did they grow their food? How about toilet facilities? In a city of 60,000 people, all those things would be of great importance.
I always feel the same @Shirley Martin, carving out a city into solid rock with primitive tools, seems an impossible task to me. Here is a video I took of one of the many tunnels inside the mountain, there are literally miles of them... ignore the sound, the camera is worn out and on it's last legs, but I can't afford a new one at the moment This is the original water storage reservoir for the town deep inside the mountain, but it was nowhere near large enough, so they built a pipe/aqueduct system from another source a few miles away, which gave them hundreds of gallons of water a minute.....