Gori

Gori (გორი) is a provincial town on the Mtkvari that most people reach for two reasons on opposite ends of Georgian history. Joseph Stalin was born here in a one-room cottage that now stands under a marble canopy in front of a museum built in 1957, which still narrates his life largely as the Soviet Union told it and is startling to walk through. Ten kilometres east lies Uplistsikhe, a town cut into soft rock from the first millennium before Christ with halls, a theatre and streets carved out of the cliff, abandoned after the Mongols came through.