Russian through living culture
Literature salons, city labs, cooking workshops, and guided excursions — language beyond the classroom.
Here are our excursion routes — including the landmark itinerary shaped with guide Vadim Ivanov for the Yale Study Abroad program. Smorodina’s path is fuller and more finely balanced: we listen to what students hope to see, and show Georgia in its many layers — not only through the historical weight of each site, but through the living culture, atmosphere, and encounters that make the country feel whole.
Masterclasses and cultural life run with the in-person study season. The landmarks tour week is an add-on you can take with a flagship package or on its own.
Solo travelers are welcome. Days mix walking, travel, and tasting — light fitness is enough; tell us about mobility needs on the consultation call.
Autumn and summer on the road
Two seasonal landmark weeks — choose a season below, then open the full day-by-day itinerary. Masterclasses and cultural life are shared by both sessions.
Masterclasses & cultural life
Cooking, dance, voice, script, poetry, museums, and the Black Sea — language through doing and listening.
The same studio program runs in both the autumn and summer sessions.
Adjarian khachapuri
Hands in the dough: boat-shaped Acharuli, cheese, egg, and the words of the kitchen.
Georgian dance
A masterclass in posture, rhythm, and the shared vocabulary of Kartuli movement.
Georgian calligraphy
Mkhedruli on the page — form, hand, and the beauty of the Georgian letter.
Vocal studio
Breath, phrase, and Georgian polyphony — singing as a way into the language’s music.
Poetry evenings in Russian
Salons of verse and voice — reading, listening, and talking about poems together.
Concerts of local ensembles
Live Georgian song and dance — evenings with ensembles that carry the tradition on stage.
Museums in Batumi and the regions
Gallery walks and museum days — Batumi collections and stops along the tour route.
Gonio fortress & the beach
Roman walls at Apsaros, then pebbles and the Black Sea — history with salt air.
Autumn Excursion Week
First come the weekend outings during the study weeks: rtveli in Racha, then golden autumn in Svaneti among the towers. After that — the landmark week, the summer itinerary without the Kakheti day.
First — during the study weeks, before the landmark excursion week
Weekend outings
Rtveli in Racha
Vineyards of Racha — harvest and tasting
A day among the vines of Khvanchkara country: pick grapes with the family, follow the harvest table, and taste the wines of mountain Racha — living Georgian hospitality at the heart of the autumn season.
Golden autumn in Svaneti
Svaneti — towers and mountain autumn
A weekend among the Svan towers when the valleys turn gold — highland villages, Caucasus peaks, and a living culture of hospitality that opens another layer of Georgia beyond the classroom.
Day 1
Imereti: canyons, caves, Kutaisi
Martvili Canyon
Turquoise water between mossy limestone walls — Western Georgia’s nature as a first lesson in landscape vocabulary, and a place Russian travelers have long described as a “living painting.”
Prometheus Cave
Kumistavi’s underground halls of stalactites — geology as theatre, and a modern Georgian landmark that invites careful looking and shared words for light, stone, and myth.
Kutaisi & Gelati Monastery
The old capital of Imereti and UNESCO Gelati — King David the Builder’s academy and cathedral, where Georgian medieval learning and Orthodoxy meet a story familiar to the Russian cultural world.
Day 2
From Kutaisi toward Samtskhe-Javakheti
Borjomi
A mountain spa town loved by the Russian imperial elite — mineral springs, park promenades, and a shared leisure culture that still reads in both Georgian and Russian memory.
Rabati Fortress, Akhaltsikhe
A fortress of layered faiths and empires — Georgian, Ottoman, Armenian — a living map of the Caucasus, where Russian travelers long paused on the road inland from the Black Sea.
Day 3
Cave monasteries and the road to Kartli
Vardzia
Queen Tamar’s rock-cut monastery city — medieval Georgia carved into a cliff. A place where epic, Orthodoxy, and landscape meet, and where Russian literature later found one of its favorite Caucasian images.
Gori Fortress
An ancient Kartli citadel above the town — centuries of Georgian statehood before the twentieth century rewrote the skyline of memory around this valley.
Day 4
Gori and Mtskheta
Museum of Joseph Stalin, Gori
A careful stop in a charged place of public memory — we approach it as historical context for how the twentieth century still echoes in family stories and language, not as celebration.
Jvari Monastery
Early Christian Georgia above the confluence of two rivers — the spiritual geography that Mtskheta holds for the Orthodox world, familiar to Russian pilgrims for generations.
Svetitskhoveli Cathedral
The cathedral of Georgian kings and national myth — liturgy, stone, and language in one place; a key for understanding how Georgian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy converse.
Day 5
David Gareja and arrival in Tbilisi
David Gareja
Desert monasteries on the cliff edge — Georgian monasticism at its most austere, a landscape of borderlands, frescoes, and silence that rewards slow looking and careful words.
Tbilisi & the Chronicle of Georgia
The capital as a long meeting point of Georgian and Russian culture — and the Chronicle monument as a stone epic of the nation’s story, before the city weeks begin.
Summer Excursion Week
A cultural route through Georgia’s landmarks — each stop chosen for how it speaks to Georgian history and to the Russian cultural world that long met it here. Exact timing stays with the group.
Day 1
Imereti: canyons, caves, Kutaisi
Martvili Canyon
Turquoise water between mossy limestone walls — Western Georgia’s nature as a first lesson in landscape vocabulary, and a place Russian travelers have long described as a “living painting.”
Prometheus Cave
Kumistavi’s underground halls of stalactites — geology as theatre, and a modern Georgian landmark that invites careful looking and shared words for light, stone, and myth.
Kutaisi & Gelati Monastery
The old capital of Imereti and UNESCO Gelati — King David the Builder’s academy and cathedral, where Georgian medieval learning and Orthodoxy meet a story familiar to the Russian cultural world.
Day 2
From Kutaisi toward Samtskhe-Javakheti
Borjomi
A mountain spa town loved by the Russian imperial elite — mineral springs, park promenades, and a shared leisure culture that still reads in both Georgian and Russian memory.
Rabati Fortress, Akhaltsikhe
A fortress of layered faiths and empires — Georgian, Ottoman, Armenian — a living map of the Caucasus, where Russian travelers long paused on the road inland from the Black Sea.
Day 3
Cave monasteries and the road to Kartli
Vardzia
Queen Tamar’s rock-cut monastery city — medieval Georgia carved into a cliff. A place where epic, Orthodoxy, and landscape meet, and where Russian literature later found one of its favorite Caucasian images.
Gori Fortress
An ancient Kartli citadel above the town — centuries of Georgian statehood before the twentieth century rewrote the skyline of memory around this valley.
Day 4
Gori, Mtskheta, and the Kakheti road
Museum of Joseph Stalin, Gori
A careful stop in a charged place of public memory — we approach it as historical context for how the twentieth century still echoes in family stories and language, not as celebration.
Jvari Monastery
Early Christian Georgia above the confluence of two rivers — the spiritual geography that Mtskheta holds for the Orthodox world, familiar to Russian pilgrims for generations.
Svetitskhoveli Cathedral
The cathedral of Georgian kings and national myth — liturgy, stone, and language in one place; a key for understanding how Georgian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy converse.
Day 5
Sighnaghi, Bodbe, and a Kakheti winery
Sighnaghi
Kakheti’s hilltown of wine, walls, and Pirosmani — a painter whom the Russian avant-garde helped the world notice, and a landscape where Georgian hospitality becomes the lesson.
Bodbe Convent
The resting place of St. Nino, who brought Christianity to Georgia — a quiet convent that ties local sacred history to the wider Orthodox story students know from Russian culture.
A Kakheti winery
Qvevri wine, the table, and the toast — living Georgian hospitality in the language of the feast, long familiar to Russian travelers as the heart of the Caucasian encounter.
Day 6
David Gareja and arrival in Tbilisi
David Gareja
Desert monasteries on the cliff edge — Georgian monasticism at its most austere, a landscape of borderlands, frescoes, and silence that rewards slow looking and careful words.
Tbilisi & the Chronicle of Georgia
The capital as a long meeting point of Georgian and Russian culture — and the Chronicle monument as a stone epic of the nation’s story, before the city weeks begin.