Three days in Kutaisi: everybody's cheap flight lands here and everybody leaves too soon

Cross the river and walk up to Bagrati. King Bagrat III had it consecrated in 1003 as the church of a Georgia unified for the first time, and it stood for nearly seven centuries until an Ottoman army blew the dome and the roof off it in the 1690s. It stayed a ruin so long that the ruin became the symbol, and then between 2009 and 2012 it was rebuilt with a new roof, glass lift and modern stone. UNESCO objected and struck it from the World Heritage list in 2017, the only Georgian site ever delisted. Georgians are still arguing about it. Go and decide for yourself: the shell is genuinely enormous, the hilltop is the best view in town, and the new work is not hard to tell from the old.

The fortress walls of Uqimerioni sit on the same crown of the hill and take ten minutes to walk round.

Then come back down for the bazaar, which is the other reason to be here. Cheese, herbs, spice blends, walnuts, sacks of dried fruit, and a row of stallholders on the first floor selling homemade Imeretian and Kakhetian wine out of reused plastic bottles. It costs a couple of lari, they will pour you a taste first, and it is better than it has any right to be.

Take a taxi for the day and start at Gelati, up in the hills northeast of town and about twenty minutes by road. David IV, called the Builder, founded it in 1106 at the height of the Georgian golden age and attached an academy to it that taught philosophy and astronomy while most of Europe was doing neither. He is buried under the south gate, at his own request, so that everybody entering would step over him. The mosaic of the Virgin in the apse is twelfth century and among the finest anywhere outside Constantinople, and the walls and vaults are covered in frescoes from four different centuries that were never painted over.

Motsameta is a few kilometres back down the road and then along a spur, and it is the one people remember. A small church of the eleventh century stands on a rock in a loop of the Tskaltsitela gorge, with a sheer drop on three sides and a view up the valley. It is named for two brothers, dukes of Argveti, who were killed by an Arab army in the eighth century and thrown into the river below; their relics are in a casket in the church, and the local custom is to crawl under it three times.

In the afternoon, cross to the other side of town for Sataplia, a wooded hill riddled with karst caves. The reason to go is on the surface: a slab of rock with more than two hundred dinosaur footprints in it, herbivore and carnivore, left in what was mud around 120 million years ago and now under a pavilion. Underground there is a lit cave walk with a stream in it, and above there is a glass viewing platform cantilevered off the cliff for anybody whose knees permit.

Kutaisi had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Caucasus, settled here for well over a thousand years and several thousand strong until almost all of it left for Israel in the 1970s. The surviving synagogue on Gaponov street was built in the 1880s, is still in use, and sits in a quarter of low brick houses that has changed very little. It is usually open and the caretaker will show you round for the asking.

Finish at the state historical museum a few minutes away, ten rooms of Colchian bronze, medieval church metalwork and icons collected from village churches across Imereti, some of it very fine and almost none of it explained in English. It takes an hour, which is exactly right before a shuttle bus.