The Anatori Crypts
Slate huts in a Georgian gorge hold skulls and skeletons lying on stone shelves, visible through the openings. The story is that plague victims walked up here and lay down to die so the sickness would not reach the village. A Georgian scholar has said on the record there is no evidence for that at all.
Field Guide Entry
Where the Argun tributaries meet, half a kilometer from the Chechen border, a cluster of low slate structures stands beside the track. They have openings at ground level, and inside, on stone shelves, are skulls and skeletons. You can see them from the path without going in.
The account given locally is that when plague, zhami in Georgian, reached the village of Anatori, the infected walked to these huts, lay down inside, and waited, so that the sickness would go no further into Khevsureti. Nobody can say when this happened. The village of Anatori is gone.
The problem with the story
Shorena Kurtsikidze, a Georgian-born scholar who co-authored a study of Khevsur customs, told RFE/RL in 2020 that there is no evidence for the plague account. Her reading is that the structures match the above-ground necropolises found across neighboring Chechnya and Ingushetia, where the dead were placed in stone chambers rather than buried, and that a self-isolation legend attached itself later to a burial practice that was already normal in the region.
The crypts are dated between the 11th and 15th centuries, and that dating comes from the architecture. Nothing has been excavated to check it.
What the location means
Khevsureti was one of the most isolated inhabited regions in the Caucasus, cut off by a pass above 2,600 meters for most of the year, and its people kept customs that had disappeared elsewhere long enough that Soviet ethnographers treated the valleys as a living archive. The crypts sit in that context rather than in the plague story.
There is no fence, no ticket, and no attendant. Georgian border police have a presence in the gorge, and Chechnya begins a few minutes' walk away.
Visiting Information
Free, unstaffed, and open air, standing directly beside the road between Shatili and Mutso.
Season is the hard constraint. The Datvijvari Pass clears somewhere between mid-May and late June depending on snow, and closes again in November or December, with July through September the reliable window. Outside it the road is shut and there is no other way in.
The road from Korsha is unpaved with long drop-offs and wants a high-clearance vehicle; jeep tours run from Tbilisi in season. Walking from Shatili takes about 90 minutes each way. Carry a passport, because the border is close enough that police may ask for it.
Human remains are plainly visible inside the crypts, which is worth knowing before arriving with children. Georgia carried a US advisory of Level 1 as of 2026, with Abkhazia and South Ossetia excepted.
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