Stalin's birthplace and Uplistsikhe cave city — two of Georgia's most compelling, contradictory attractions in a single afternoon
Gori is a mid-sized Georgian town on the Mtkvari River, straddling the main east-west highway and railway between Tbilisi and the western regions. It is best known internationally as the birthplace of Joseph Stalin (born Ioseb Jughashvili, 1878), and the Stalin Museum — set in a pompous Stalinist building that literally encases and preserves his small birth-house in a marble colonnade — is one of the world's most unusual museums of personality cult, maintained largely intact since Soviet times. Three kilometres west of town on a volcanic rock spur above the Mtkvari is Uplistsikhe, a pre-Chris…
Uplistsikhe ('Lord's Fortress') was one of the most important cities of early Georgian civilization — a major political and religious center of the Kingdom of Kartli (Iberia) from around 500 BCE, carved into volcanic tuff on a nearly vertical rock above the river. It was a pagan religious center with a pre-Christian temple later converted to a Christian church, and it served as a royal refuge during the Arab occupation of Tbilisi (7th–9th centuries CE). The city declined after the 13th-century Mongol invasions and was largely abandoned by the late medieval period. Stalin was born in Gori on 1…