Achi Church of St George

Achi is a quiet farming village in the green foothills about 9 km south of Ozurgeti, and its church of St George is one of the oldest and finest buildings in Guria. It sits on an artificial mound on the right bank of the Achistskali, inside a tall, well-built stone wall that once protected it. The church is a small single-nave hall of hewn stone, faced with porphyry and limestone. Its carved windows and the cross on the east facade rank among the best stone carving in the region, and a Georgian inscription over the south door names St George and the mason who worked on it.

Step inside and every wall is painted. The murals, dated on style to the late 13th century, are close to the Palaeologan art of the Byzantine world and include unusual scenes from the life of St George, along with the Crucifixion and the Annunciation. Many inscriptions are in Greek, and one names Onesimos of Trebizond, probably the painter. The archaeologist Ekvtime Takaishvili found a gilded silver cross of Queen Tamar's era here. Neighbouring Likhauri, his home village, has another medieval church with a free-standing bell tower, a fortress and a museum about his life.

The church was built at the end of the 13th century or early in the 14th, and it was later reroofed, renovated and enclosed by its defensive wall. The oldest written records about it, mostly donation documents, date from the second half of the 16th century, when Guria was ruled by the Gurieli princes. Today it is listed as a monument of national significance and is one of the best places in western Georgia to see late medieval painting in the Byzantine manner.