At almost every stop, John had a story about the monks and church leaders who had left their mark on these mountainsides. Manuscripts from the monastery at Otkhta in Dortkilise, a village near Yusufeli, eventually made their way to the St. Catherine monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. St. George the Athonite, revered father of the Georgian Orthodox church who wrote some of the texts we heard, had been educated at the monastery at Khakhuli, now a mosque buried in brambles also outside Yusufeli.

St. Gregory of Khandztha, a leading church figure in the eighth century, began his ecclesiastical life founding the Khandzta monastery in Klarjeti (now in Turkey), and helped his disciples establish other ones such as the monastery of Ubisa in central Georgia. “They were crawling all over these hills building churches,” John said.

Our trip wasn’t just about churches. A determined hiker, John led us up scraggly paths to explore mountain fortresses: one built in the fifth century above the Turkish city of Artanuc, another above Borjomi, an old Soviet spa town in Georgia. We scrambled through Hell’s Canyon, outside Artanuc, whose soaring cliffs provided good acoustics for our singers to exercise their vocal cords and visited two cave complexes, one at Uplistsikhe, built in 1500 BC, and the other at Vardzia, about 35 miles from the Georgian border city of Akhaltsikhe.

Built in the 12th century as a haven during a time of Persian invasions, the honeycomb cave complex at Vardzia is associated with Georgia’s famed Queen Tamara, a charismatic ruler who can be seen in a fresco in the Church of the Dormition, itself carved out of soft rock. Legend has it that when an earthquake struck in 1283, crumbling the rock face that hid the caves, the population and resident monks were safe inside the church, celebrating Easter; it was deemed a miracle.

Looking out over the valley below from a newly installed safety barrier, Liza compared the view to a scene from “The Lord of the Rings.” Another group member, Michael, an intrepid Australian, said, as he crouched through a low tunnel, that it reminded him of the mountains of Ethiopia.