Oni Museum of Local Lore

The bronzes of Racha, in an old house on Rustaveli

The museum in Oni was created in 1948 and occupies an old two-storey house on Rustaveli Street. For a district town the holdings are unexpectedly large — some fifteen and a half thousand items, from the Stone Age to the late Middle Ages.

The core is the bronze of Racha: a cast figurine of a ram, openwork astral plaques, women's jewellery, fragments of weapons and tools. Beside them are architectural details and relief fragments from the churches of St George and the Trinity at Mravaldzali (10th–11th centuries), coins of the 10th–14th centuries, 19th-century ethnography, manuscript and early printed books, and paintings by Georgian artists of the twentieth century, among them Ucha Japaridze.

The town itself is worth the stop: a Jewish community lived in Oni for centuries, and its synagogue of 1895 — the third largest in Georgia after those of Tbilisi and Kutaisi — stands a few blocks from the museum.