Why go
Shatili is the last inhabited medieval fortress village in the Caucasus, a cluster of sixty interconnected stone towers clinging to a mountainside where the Arghuni River cuts through Khevsureti. Built between the 7th and 13th centuries, these residential fortifications protected families through centuries of isolation, blood feuds, and raids from across the Chechen border. The village was abandoned in 1951 when Soviet authorities forcibly resettled the population, then slowly reclaimed by a handful of families after 1980. Walking its roof-level passageways, you move through a living archaeology of highland Georgia—where medieval defensive architecture still shelters shepherds, and the surrounding valleys preserve rituals and ballads found nowhere else.