Gori

Gori grew up around a citadel on a rocky hill where the Mtkvari and Liakhvi rivers meet. The fortress has been fought over since at least the seventh century, and the climb to its walls gives the best view in the region, out across the plain to the wall of the Greater Caucasus.

The town is inseparable from the man born here in 1878. The Joseph Stalin Museum, opened in 1957, preserves his childhood house under a marble pavilion, along with his personal railway carriage. It remains one of the most argued-over museums in the country, and visiting it is an exercise in reading what a place chooses to say and leave unsaid.

Ten kilometres east lies Uplistsikhe, the rock-hewn town that predates the fortress by more than a thousand years. South of Gori, the seventh-century church of Ateni Sioni holds frescoes and some of the earliest Georgian inscriptions.