With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’ve launched a new series — The World Through a Lens — in which photojournalists transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Robert Presutti shares a collection of photographs from a convent in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia.

A decade ago, I accompanied a friend to a convent in rural Georgia: the Phoka Nunnery of St. Nino. A nun and two novices had moved to the area years earlier, in 1992, and had begun resurrecting an 11th-century church from its ruins. Initially they lived in a nearby house owned by Patriarch Ilia II, the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church.