Why go
Lailashi sits on a sun-drenched hillside above the Rioni River, its stone houses and narrow terraces of Tsiteli Tavkveri grapes unchanged for generations. The village guards an extraordinary secret: a 7th-8th century Hebrew palimpsest manuscript discovered in 1963, one of the oldest Jewish texts found in Georgia, its sacred writing scraped and overwritten yet partially legible beneath later Georgian script. This speaks to the deep, often overlooked Jewish presence in the Caucasus. Beyond the manuscript, Lailashi offers something rarer still—authenticity without performance, where families still press wine in hollowed logs and the only sound is wind through walnut trees.