What Ananuri actually is
Ananuri was the fortified seat of the dukes of Aragvi, the family that held this valley and the road through it for several centuries. What stands today is mostly seventeenth-century work on older foundations: a curtain wall following the shape of the spur, round bastions at the corners, and inside them two churches, a bell tower and a square keep. It is small. You can walk the whole perimeter in ten minutes and see everything properly in forty-five.
The larger church, the Church of the Assumption, is the reason art historians come. Its north and south facades carry deep relief carving in the local stone — a great cross rising out of vines, beasts and angels around it, and inscriptions worked into the borders. Inside, the frescoes are damaged and blackened, and the story usually told is of a fire during one of the sieges. The smaller church next to it is older, plainer and often quieter.
The square tower is the one you climb. It is known as Sheupovari, the unyielding, and it is tied to the events of 1739, when the neighbouring duke of Ksani took the fortress and the last defenders of the Aragvi line died here. The stair inside is steep and worn and the middle section is dark, but the top gives you the whole complex from above with the water beyond it.
One thing to be plain about from the start: this is a stop, not a destination. Nobody comes to Georgia for Ananuri alone, and nobody should. It is the first thing worth pulling over for on the road north, it takes under an hour, and it is best seen as the opening of the military road rather than as a day of its own.
What is inside the walls
The complex divides into an upper and a lower fortress, and the lower one is largely ruined — walls, a gate and grass. Everything people photograph is in the upper enclosure, and it is arranged tightly enough that a slow circuit takes half an hour.
Nothing here is ticketed or roped off in the way you might expect. Doors are open, the churches are in use, and the tower is climbed at your own judgement.
The tower and the view
The climb up Sheupovari is short and slightly awkward. Stone steps run up inside the thickness of the wall, worn smooth in the middle, unlit for one stretch, and with a low doorway at the top that catches most people once. There is no queue system, so if a group is coming down, wait at the bottom rather than meet them on the stair.
What you get for it is the reason to do it. From the top the whole enclosure lies below you — the two roofs, the bell tower, the line of the wall — and beyond the parapet the reservoir opens out south and the valley narrows north towards the mountains. It is the one place where the plan of the fortress makes sense as a piece of engineering rather than a set of buildings.
The second viewpoint costs nothing and is often better. Walk out of the main gate, cross the road carefully and follow the verge fifty or so metres uphill: from there you see the fortress with the water behind it, which is the photograph everyone actually wants and cannot take from inside.
When to arrive
The single decision that changes this visit is the hour of arrival. Leave Tbilisi at eight and you are inside the walls by half past nine with the place close to empty; leave at ten and you arrive in the middle of the theatre. Nothing else about the site rewards planning as much as this does.
Season matters less, because the fortress does not close and the road below it is the main highway north. What season changes is the water. The reservoir is at its fullest and most improbably turquoise in late spring and early summer, when snowmelt is feeding the Aragvi. By late summer the level has usually been drawn down, the colour flattens to a dull green and mud banks show around the edges — the same view, considerably less postcard.
Winter is honest and underrated here. The complex against snow with almost nobody in it is worth the cold, though the pass beyond Gudauri can shut and a Kazbegi day trip may turn into an Ananuri and Pasanauri one instead.
Getting there from Tbilisi
Ananuri sits directly on the Georgian Military Highway, about seventy kilometres and an hour to an hour and a quarter from Tbilisi depending on traffic out of the city. Everything heading north — Pasanauri, Gudauri, Kazbegi — passes the gate.
The catch with public transport is the return. Marshrutkas from Didube leave full and pass Ananuri full, so getting on is easy and getting back on afterwards is a matter of luck and of standing where the driver can see you.
What the stop costs
Almost nothing, which is part of why the coaches all come. There is no admission to the complex and no ticket office, and the money you spend here is spent at the stalls by the car park rather than at a gate.
Those stalls sell churchkhela, honey, wool socks and dried fruit, and the prices are tourist prices rather than village prices. Nobody is cheating you; you are simply buying at the busiest lay-by on the military road.
The reservoir below
The water is not old. The Zhinvali dam was built in the Soviet period to supply Tbilisi and to generate power, and the valley floor with its fields, orchards and part of a village went under when it filled. The fortress that had watched a river for three centuries suddenly stood above a lake.
It is worth knowing this because the famous colour is an industrial artefact as much as a natural one. The turquoise comes from glacial silt in suspension, and the level rises and falls with demand: at full pool the water reaches close under the walls, and after a dry summer it can sit metres lower with pale banks exposed.
What Ananuri is the beginning of
The reason to see Ananuri as a stop is that everything it introduces lies further up the road. Half an hour north is Pasanauri, where the black and white Aragvi rivers meet and run side by side for a stretch before mixing. Beyond that the valley steepens into Gudauri, and beyond Gudauri the road crosses the Jvari pass at a little over two thousand metres and drops into the Terek valley for Kazbegi and Gergeti Trinity.
That is the shape of a full day: Ananuri at half past nine, Pasanauri for a mid-morning stretch of the legs, the pass around midday, and the church above Stepantsminda in the afternoon. Doing it in reverse and stopping at Ananuri on the way back also works, and has the advantage that everyone else has already gone home.
In the other direction Mtskheta is twenty minutes towards Tbilisi and belongs in the same day only if you are unhurried. Jvari monastery above the confluence, Svetitskhoveli in the town, and then Ananuri, is a defensible morning and a lot of stone before lunch.
Manners inside a working church
Both churches are in use, and services happen at Ananuri as they do anywhere else. On a Sunday morning or a feast day you may walk into a liturgy rather than a monument, which is a good thing to have happen provided you behave like a guest.
The conventions are simple and nobody will scold you for getting them slightly wrong. There is usually a basket of wraps and scarves by the door.
The five mistakes
We have made four of these ourselves, and the first one costs the whole visit.
The questions that always come
These six reach us every season, and none of them needs a long answer.