A short documentary about Georgia’s highland village of Mutso, winner of this year’s European Heritage Award for Conservation, was released on social media as a Georgian delegation collected the prize at a formal ceremony in Paris on Monday. As the team from the National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia joined their colleagues from across the continent in the French capital for the European Cultural Heritage Summit, they brought with them the film introducing the story of a recent restoration of village perched 1,900m above sea level in Georgia’s north.

The documentary introduces a brief history of the settlement as well as the 2014-launched project for its rehabilitation. Dedicated to late Soso Bandzeladze, the author of the six-year-long restoration effort, it was screened as the project received the Europa Nostra Award for conservation. This region was one of the most impenetrable and well-defended fortresses in the Greater Caucasus mountains. The village of Mutso is the central link in this chain of fortifications.

The film narrates the story of this, one of the “most impenetrable and well-defended fortresses in the Greater Caucasus”, as well as a resettlement of locals from Mutso during the first half of the 20th century before the inhabitants began returning to the village in the 1950s. Another round of locals deserting the hard-to-access Mutso, with its lack of infrastructure, followed later in the century, with the location falling into a state of disrepair and at the mercy of erodision under natural elements. The documentary interviews a sole local who returned to the settlement in recent times and a decision of the government of Georgia to mobilise resources for rehabilitating the village six years ago. It also details technical challenges and circumstances for restoration, not least the difficulty of accessing the disintegrating buildings built on top of narrow hills of the north-eastern Khevsureti province. The restoration project for Mutso received the conservation award in May this year. The formal awards for winning projects in Paris on Monday will be followed with an announcement of the Public Choice Award, which involved online voting for nominees, on Tuesday.

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