Katskhi Column in Georgia

I want to tell you today about a small monastery complex with a chapel on the top of a 40 meter rock formation. He is in Georgia, in the Imereti region in the village of Katzha.
We came to him on the way from Tbilisi to Kutaisi. Such a unique place you will not see anywhere else.

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Until the 15th century, prayers of solitary hermits and monks were raised from the Pillar of Katzha to heaven, but then civil war broke out and invasions of Ottoman Turkey, and these places came to desolation ...

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Up to 1944, no one was particularly interested in Katzkhis Sveti, but it was in this year that the time came for another rebirth. And on the top of the Pillar was sent a research expedition that discovered the ruins of the temple and the remains of the last monk, who are now buried at the base of the chapel.

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In 1993, the monk Maxim, who grew up in the neighboring city of Chiatura, decided to realize his old dream and survived the winter in the grotto under the mountain. According to him, he was still a boy resorting here with friends and, looking at the Pillar, envied the hermit, who once lived there.

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In 1999, the temple was restored at the foot of the Pillar of the Pillars. And in 2005 brought order to the top and recreated the old buildings of the surviving stones. Later, one of the rich local residents at his own expense built a good road. And only in 2007 was installed a safe metal staircase with handrails, called "Stairway to Heaven", and electricity was conducted.

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Near the museum there are lodges for guests, a church, a bathhouse and cells, though a little further from the place where tourists gather, and in the middle of the courtyard there is a real Bolnis cross on the stone.