The Katskhi Pillar

The Katskhi pillar is a natural limestone monolith standing about forty metres clear of the ground in a valley in western Georgia, and on its flat top sits a small church. Local people had long regarded the column as a place of power and left it alone; when climbers finally went up in the 1940s they found the ruins of a chapel and a crypt, evidence of stylite monks who lived on top in the early Christian centuries, following the tradition of hermits who withdrew from the world by living on pillars. In the 1990s a monk restored the chapel and moved up there himself, climbing a metal ladder pinned to the rock, spending years in near-total solitude. Visitors can walk around the base and see the church and ladder from below, along with a small monastery complex at ground level, but nobody else goes up.

What you actually see

• The pillar and its church - the small chapel on top of the forty-metre column.
• The ladder - the metal climb pinned to the rock face, seen from below.
• The ground-level monastery - the church and buildings at the foot.
• The valley setting - the column standing alone in the Imereti countryside.

When to go

April to October gives the best weather and light on the rock; the site is open year-round and takes only an hour. It combines well with Chiatura's Soviet-era cable cars and with Katskhi's other church nearby.

Honest expectations

You cannot go up, and visitors who arrive expecting to climb are always disappointed; the top is reserved for the monastic community. The visit is therefore short, essentially looking up at a striking object and walking round the base. It is off the main routes near a post-industrial town, and the roads are indifferent.

Nearby

Chiatura and its cable cars are close; Kutaisi and Gelati are an hour west.