Iprali to Ushguli – Between Glaciers and Ghosts of Villages

The last day of the trek has a deceptive gentleness to it. Twelve kilometres, a mere four hundred metres of ascent, five or six hours on the road. After the crucible of the Chkhunderi Pass and the delirium of rivers without bridges, it should have been easy. But endings have their own gravity, their own weight of expectation.

From Iprari, the track descends through Lalkhori, the valley narrowing to a gorge where the Enguri rushes on its endless journey from glacier to plain. Here, the route follows the unsealed road, the domain of lorries and marshrutkas, and the air is often filled with dust and diesel. It is not beautiful in the way of high passes or hidden meadows, and yet the monotony forces a different kind of attention. Every step is a meditation on fatigue, on the body’s weariness and its stubborn refusal to stop.

Lorena walked beside me, quieter than usual, her strength tempered by the miles behind us. Sometimes she reached for my arm, and in those small gestures—the brush of her hand, the tilt of her smile—I felt the intimacy that landscapes alone cannot provide. The mountains are magnificent but impersonal; it is the person beside you who makes them habitable.

By midday, the valley opened, and the first towers of Ushguli rose in the distance, half-shadowed, half-illuminated, like sentinels of another world. The sight was almost hallucinatory: medieval watchtowers scattered across the hillsides, four and five storeys tall, stone against sky, as though Tolkien had sketched them from memory.

Ushguli is not one village but five, stitched together at the head of the Enguri gorge. At 2,100 metres, it claims to be the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Europe, and it feels like the edge of the map—where human tenacity collides with altitude, snow and stone. About seventy families live here, enough to keep a school alive, sufficient to maintain the stubborn continuity of centuries. For half the year the road is buried in snow, Mestia cut off, and the towers stand alone with their ghosts.

It is precisely that isolation that has preserved them. In Mestia, many towers have crumbled or been gutted by modernity; here, in Ushguli, they endure. Chazhashi, one of the hamlets, holds more than two hundred towers, a forest of stone rising out of the grass. Walking among them you feel dwarfed not just by their size but by their intent: these were not ornaments but fortresses, each one a refuge against invasion, blood feud, hunger, the long winter.

We climbed the hill to Lamaria church, its chapel built in the 12th century, where the frescoes still speak in the colours of Georgia’s golden age. The church takes its name from a pre-Christian goddess of fertility, and in that syncretism—Orthodox saints layered over pagan deities—you sense the deep braid of Svan identity, never wholly conquered by either religion or empire.

The trek ended at Old House, our guesthouse in Zhibiani. From its wooden balconies, we could see the towers in silhouette, the evening light catching their edges, the peaks of Shkhara looming behind like frozen waves. Ushguli, the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Europe, is a labyrinth of medieval towers and narrow lanes that felt more like a dream remembered than a place lived in. However, the dream had its own inconveniences: the electricity failed as the light began to fade, plunging the village into a darkness thick with the smell of wood smoke. At the Old House, a restaurant built beneath a medieval tower, no dinner could be served—the kitchen silenced by the outage. We wandered the lanes, half-hungry, until at last we found refuge in a modest guesthouse where a wood-fired stove glowed like a small sun.

There, at a rough-hewn wooden table, we shared bread, stews, and laughter with strangers who felt like companions. An Italian couple, curious and warm, and a French pair whose stories bent the room outward, enlarging it. They had cycled all the way from France to Mongolia, carrying the dust of continents on their shoes and the fire of the road in their voices. By candlelight, their tales mingled with ours, and the night seemed less about the absence of power than the abundance of it—human, shared, enduring.

That night, lying in the quiet of the guesthouse, I felt the peculiar sadness that comes at the end of a long walk. For day,s the rhythm of our lives had been dictated by ascent and descent, river and ridge, hunger and exhaustion. The road ahead—back to Mestia, back to the lowlands, back to cities—felt less real than the dream we had been living.

And yet there was also gratitude: for the towers that had endured a thousand winters, for the strangers who had shared the trail with us, for the horses that had carried us across rivers, for Lorena’s hand in mine through every step of the way. In the silence of Ushguli, high among towers and snowfields, the journey had not ended but deepened, carved into memory like the stones themselves.