Why go
Likhauri sits in the forested hills of Imereti where villagers still live in wooden houses with open galleries and carved columns—the classic gandzal (balcony) style that defined 19th-century Imeretian noble estates. The village matters because it guards the approach to Zarzma Monastery, a 13th–14th-century complex built by the Jaqeli princes of Samtskhe, its domed church rising from a wooded ravine like a lost kingdom. Likhauri offers what few places in Georgia can: the chance to walk through living vernacular architecture before descending to one of the country's most atmospheric medieval monasteries, where frescoes of the Dormition still glow in the apse and the silence is broken only by the Kvirila River below.