Surami

Surami fortress stands on a rocky hill above the town on the old road between eastern and western Georgia, walls and towers of stone and brick built and rebuilt over centuries at a point that controlled the pass. It carries one of the best-known Georgian legends: that the walls kept collapsing until a young man agreed to be immured alive in them, after which they stood, a story retold in a nineteenth-century novel and in a film that made it widely familiar. The fortress is unrestored and free to walk into. The town below is known for a different reason: rows of women selling nazuki, a sweet spiced bread baked in clay ovens, to passing traffic.

History

People first settled here in the early Bronze Age, and the town is probably the Surium that Pliny the Elder placed in eastern Colchis. Guarding the entrance to the Borjomi Gorge and the road between eastern and western Georgia, Surami became a heavily fortified town in the 12th century, and from the 1170s to the later 14th century the fortress was the hereditary fief of the eristavs, or dukes, of Kartli, who took the surname Surameli, "lord of Surami". The fortress was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries, and by the mid-18th century, according to Prince Vakhushti, the town had 200 households of Georgians, Armenians and Jews. Prince Givi Amilakhvari used it as his base in the 1740s; after his surrender in 1745 the fortress was pulled down, then restored and used again during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. In the 19th century Surami housed a military post and became known as a mountain climate resort, and in 1926 it was given the status of a daba, an urban-type settlement (Wikipedia, Surami).

The main sights

• Walls and towers on the hill - the unrestored fortress above the town.
• The immurement legend - the story attached to the walls.
• Nazuki sellers on the roadside - sweet spiced bread sold to passing cars.
• The pass position - the point the fortress was built to control.

When to go

April to October. Two hours as a stop on the Tbilisi to Kutaisi road. Nazuki is best bought warm from the ovens rather than from the roadside baskets.

Practical notes

The fortress is a ruin with loose stone, unfenced drops and no interpretation. The town is a busy road corridor. Nazuki sellers can be persistent. The site takes half an hour.

Nearby

Khashuri is east; Borjomi lies south.