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, at first taken for the work of early Christian stylites but now dated by excavation to a hermitage of the ninth or tenth century, still in use in the thirteenth. 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.

History

The pillar first appears in writing in the 18th century, when Prince Vakhushti described a high rock like a pillar with a small church on top that nobody could climb, and local legend said its summit was once chained to the dome of the Katskhi church about 1.5 kilometres away. In July 1944 a group led by the mountaineer Alexander Japaridze and the writer Levan Gotua made the first documented ascent, and in 1946 the architect Vakhtang Tsintsadze dated the ruins on top to the 5th and 6th centuries and linked them with stylites; but research from 1999, and digs in 2006 by Giorgi Gagoshidze of the Georgian National Museum, re-dated them to the 9th-10th century as a monastery church with hermits' cells, a wine cellar among them, and a limestone plate found in 2007 shows the hermitage still in use in the 13th century. Religious life returned in 1995 with the monk Maxim Kavtaradze, who lived on the pillar for 20 years, the chapel was restored between 2005 and 2009, and since 2012 visitors may no longer climb the ladder (Wikipedia, Katskhi Pillar).

The main sights

• 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.

What to expect

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.

Key facts