Ushguli guards the head of a Caucasus gorge with more than 200 stone towers, in a land no empire — Mongol, Persian or Russian — ever fully conquered. This cluster of four hamlets sits around 2,100 metres up, among the highest villages in Europe still lived in year-round, beneath Shkhara, the 5,193-metre pyramid that is Georgia's highest peak. The tapering towers are three to five storeys of dry stone, raised during the Georgian Golden Age between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Armies almost never got this far, so the towers were built against a closer danger. Because Svaneti stayed unreachable, Georgia's kings sent their crowns, icons and manuscripts up here for safekeeping, and the region became the country's treasure house.
Reaching Ushguli is still half the journey: the mountain road from Mestia lies under snow for much of the year, so most travellers come between June and September and winter arrivals depend on a 4x4. Arrive, and the day moves at the pace of the animals. Smoke rises from stone-roofed houses, horses and cattle graze the meadows, and hay stands stacked against tower walls eight hundred years old. On a hilltop above Zhibiani sits the Lamaria church, which carries a name older than the Christianity now practised inside it. At dawn the glaciers of Shkhara turn pink above the towers while the valley below stays in shadow. Around 200 people, the same lineages who raised these stones, still live out the long winters here.