Ushguli is four hamlets at 2,100 metres at the head of a Caucasus gorge in northwest Georgia, and more than 200 medieval stone towers stand among the houses. They were not built against armies. Snowbound half the year at the end of a gorge, Svaneti was a place invaders rarely reached, so the families who raised these towers were defending themselves against each other. Under the Svan code a single killing obliged the victim's kin to answer with another, and a feud could run for generations. Each tower is three to five storeys of dry stone with walls thickening toward the base, a family's house and its last refuge in one, and they held grain and sheltered people from avalanche as well. Daily life carries on around you much as it has for centuries: hay stacked against eight-hundred-year-old walls, horses and cattle in the lanes, smoke coming off the stone roofs toward dusk.
Above the hamlet of Zhibiani stands the small church of Lamaria, with frescoes from the same Golden Age inside. Long before Christianity reached these valleys the Svans worshipped Lamaria as goddess of the hearth, the herds and the harvest, and when the church came they kept her name. The hill it stands on is where you go at dawn: the towers dark against the glaciers of Shkhara, at 5,193 metres the highest peak in Georgia. First light reaches the ice long before it reaches the ground, so the mountain turns pink while the valley is still in shadow and the towers stay dark. A full day out and back takes you up the valley to the foot of that ice, through summer meadows with the towers dropping away behind you. Around 200 people live here all year, which makes this the highest settlement of any real size in Europe. These towers were never besieged the way a castle is. A threatened family shut itself inside and stayed there until the village elders had talked the two sides back down. That is what they were for.