Twelve days from Tbilisi to Trabzon: the empty road between the Caucasus and the Black Sea

Tbilisi airport is seventeen kilometres out and there is a train into the central station a few times a day, a bus that runs all night, and taxis for about the price of a restaurant main course. Any of them work.

Give the first evening to the old town on foot. Metekhi Church sits on a rock directly above the river with the statue of the city's founder beside it, and the view from the terrace covers the whole of the old town, the baths and the fortress on the ridge opposite.

Then walk down over the bridge and eat. Georgian food takes some ordering the first time: get khachapuri to share, one meat dish and one walnut dish, and let the wine be whatever is open.

The old town packs an Orthodox cathedral, an Armenian church, a synagogue and a mosque into about four hundred metres of hillside, which is not a coincidence: this was a caravan city and everyone who traded through it built something.

Sioni was the cathedral of Tbilisi for centuries and still holds the cross of St Nino, made according to tradition from two vine branches bound with the saint's own hair. Norashen, two minutes away, is Armenian, has been locked and disputed for years, and is worth seeing precisely because it is boarded up.

The Jumah Mosque below the baths is the one place in the Caucasus where Sunni and Shia congregations have shared a hall since the middle of the last century. Take your shoes off, cover up, and do not go at prayer time.

The Museum of Georgia on Rustaveli is the one museum on this trip that needs a proper two hours, and the reason is downstairs: a treasury of Colchian goldwork from the second and first millennia BC, worked to a standard that explains where the Golden Fleece story came from.

Rustaveli itself is the grand avenue of the Russian and Soviet city, and Kashveti church halfway along it is an early 20th century copy of an 11th century cathedral, built by a German architect for Georgian patrons. It takes ten minutes and it is a useful thing to have seen before the real medieval churches later in the trip.

Ride the funicular up Mtatsminda at the end of the afternoon. Halfway up is the pantheon where Georgia's writers are buried, and at the top there is a park, a ferris wheel and the whole city laid out below.

Marshrutkas for Akhaltsikhe leave Didube station through the morning and take about three hours, climbing out of the Kura lowlands past Borjomi and into the hills of Samtskhe. Sit on the right for the river.

The castle above town is unmissable in the literal sense: it fills the whole ridge. What stands is a very thorough reconstruction finished in 2012, complete with a hotel inside the walls, and opinions on it are strongly divided. The mosque, the madrasa and the history museum within are worth the ticket whatever you conclude about the rebuilding.

Spend what is left of the afternoon working out tomorrow's transport. Vardzia needs either a marshrutka each way with a long wait in the middle, or a shared taxi arranged through your guesthouse, which most people end up doing.

The road south follows the Mtkvari into a narrowing gorge, and the first stop is Khertvisi, a castle on a rock at the meeting of two rivers that has been fortified since the 2nd century BC. Twenty minutes and a scramble.

Vardzia is another half hour on. It was cut into the cliff in the 1180s as a fortified monastery and town, thirteen levels deep, with a church, wine cellars, bakeries and a spring inside the rock. Then an earthquake in 1283 sheared the outer face of the cliff away and left the whole warren open to the air, which is why you can see it at all. Two to three hours, closed shoes, and take water: there is no shade on the terraces.

On the way back, turn off for Sapara. The monastery is ten kilometres east of Akhaltsikhe up a rough road, was founded in the 10th century, and survived three centuries of Ottoman rule intact because nobody could find it.

The whole day goes to two hundred kilometres, which tells you what kind of day it is. From Akhaltsikhe a marshrutka runs the twenty minutes to Vale, you clear Georgian and Turkish control at Türkgözü on foot, and on the far side a dolmuş or a shared car takes you down through Posof to Kars. If the through bus from Tbilisi runs on your day, take that instead and sleep through it.

Kars appears suddenly out of the plateau: a grid of grey stone streets laid out by Russian engineers, with high windows and iron balconies, and a fortress on the hill above. It is the coldest provincial capital in Turkey and it feels it even in September once the sun is off.

Do very little with the evening. The Kümbet Mosque near the centre started as a 10th century Armenian cathedral, became a mosque, then a church, then a mosque again, and its carved apostles are still around the drum outside.

Ani is forty five kilometres east of Kars on a grass plateau that ends in a gorge, and there is nothing between the two but grassland and a few basalt villages. Get there when it opens. The site is enormous, entirely exposed, and the wind across it is a permanent feature.

You enter through a gate in a kilometre of double walls and then walk out into open fields with churches standing in them. The cathedral was finished around the year 1001 by Trdat, the architect who had been called to Constantinople a decade before to rebuild the dome of Hagia Sophia after an earthquake, and the ribbed pointed arches inside it were built two hundred years before anything similar in western Europe.

The gorge at the far edge is the frontier: the river below is the border with Armenia and this land crossing does not open, so the country you can see from the cliff is reached by air or the long way round through Georgia. Take four hours, take water and a hat, and do not rush the walk between buildings, which is most of the experience.

A slow day in a town that rewards one. The citadel was begun in 1153, knocked down and rebuilt repeatedly, and now holds a small mosque and a good view over the grid of Russian streets below. The cobbled track up from the south is the way in.

Below it, the Taş Köprü crosses the river in three basalt arches beside a row of old bath houses, and the whole ensemble is the oldest corner of the town.

Then the museum, and then the cheese. Kars makes a hard gruyère style cheese, brought here by Alpine dairy farmers in the Russian period and made the same way ever since. The shops around the centre will cut you a piece to try, and the small museum devoted to it explains why a Turkish border town makes Alpine cheese.

The train leaves Kars in the morning and takes about four hours to Erzurum, running west along the same line the Doğu Ekspresi uses on its way to Ankara. It is slow, almost empty outside the tourist season, and the plateau it crosses is the point.

Erzurum is a big modern provincial city with two extraordinary buildings in the middle of it. The Yakutiye Madrasa of 1310 comes first from the station side: a single portal of deeply undercut stone with a stump of a fluted minaret, now an ethnography museum.

The Twin Minaret Madrasa, five minutes away, is the one people come for. Built around 1260 and never finished, it has two brick minarets over a carved facade and an open court behind. Go at dusk, when the stone turns orange and the local families come out to sit on the steps.

The bus to Trabzon takes five to six hours and changes climate entirely. You leave a treeless plateau at nineteen hundred metres, cross the Zigana pass, and come down through beech and spruce forest into a valley that gets more than a metre of rain a year. By the time you reach the coast it will probably be drizzling.

Trabzon's own Hagia Sophia is two kilometres west of the centre, a Byzantine church of the 1250s with a free standing bell tower added in 1427 and a set of frescoes that are among the best surviving anywhere in Anatolia. It has changed use more than once and the paintings were covered and then uncovered again in 2020.

In the evening, walk into the old centre for St Anne's, a small basilica of the 6th or 7th century wedged between shops on a busy street, restored in 2022 and easy to walk past.

Sümela is forty five kilometres south of Trabzon up the Altındere valley, and the monastery is built into an overhang most of the way up a forested cliff. Dolmuşes run from the centre in the morning; tour minibuses also go and are barely dearer.

From the car park a shuttle takes you up the last part, then there are steps. The complex was founded in the 4th century, rebuilt many times, and abandoned in the 1920s. Its frescoes cover the rock face itself as well as the chapel walls, and they have suffered badly from a century of visitors carving their names, though sections found in sealed chambers are intact. It closed for restoration for several years and reopened with the higher levels still fenced off.

Back down in the afternoon, Kaymaklı on the hill southeast of town is the opposite experience: an Armenian monastery church of the 15th century sitting in a working farmyard, with hay in the nave and frescoes above the hay, and usually nobody there at all.

Trabzon airport is six kilometres east of the centre along the coast, ten minutes by taxi and about twenty by dolmuş, with flights to Istanbul and Ankara through the day. That leaves a morning.

Spend it up on the Kalepark bluff over the harbour, where the Genoese fortress is now a tea garden, and then in the covered market lanes below it for one last plate of something. Then go, and note on the way that you have crossed from the Caspian side of the Caucasus to the Black Sea entirely on public transport.