On a wooded hillside above Turtle Lake, a short drive from the centre, the whole of rural Georgia has been gathered into one place. The Open Air Museum of Ethnography is a village made of villages: dozens of traditional buildings, taken apart in their home regions, carried here, and rebuilt stone by stone and beam by beam.
There are mountain houses from Svaneti with their tall defensive towers, low timber dwellings from the western lowlands, wine cellars with their clay vessels half-buried in the floor, a basilica, watermills, and granaries — each furnished as it would have been, so that you walk not through a museum so much as through the country as it lived a century and two ago. The differences between regions, so easily missed on a quick trip, become suddenly clear: how people built against snow in the high Caucasus and against heat in the valleys.
It is set among trees on the slope, so the visit is also simply a good walk in the shade, with views back over the city.
Allow a couple of hours and wear comfortable shoes, as the paths climb. The concierge can arrange a car, and the museum pairs naturally with the nearby Turtle Lake for an easy half-day out of the centre.
