Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography

Icons and manuscripts of highland Svaneti

The museum in Mestia gathers what was kept for centuries in Svan towers and churches: repoussé icons, processional crosses, revetments, manuscripts. Neither the Arabs nor the Mongols took Svaneti, and for centuries holy objects were carried up here from more accessible places — and here they survived.

Among the manuscripts are Svan deeds written on wood: only twenty-seven such documents are known, and five of them are kept in this museum.

The display also explains the towers themselves: why every yard has a stone vertical, how people lived inside one under siege, and why there are some three and a half thousand of them across Svaneti.