Seen from the surrounding ridges, the Monastery of the Cross looks less like a church than a fortress: a blank, buttressed block of stone set alone in a green valley west of the Old City, now enclosed by the modern districts of Jerusalem. Its origins are Georgian, and for centuries it was a centre of Georgian Christian life in the Holy Land, associated in particular with the memory of the poet Shota Rustaveli; it later passed to the Greek Orthodox Church, which holds it today. Behind the heavy walls lies a very different world: a church with painted walls and vaults, an older mosaic pavement, small courtyards and cells, and the tradition that the tree from which the Cross was made grew on this spot — a memory marked within the church itself. The film contrasts the monastery's severe exterior with the density of its interior decoration, follows the valley setting through the seasons, and tells the story of a Caucasian Christian presence in Jerusalem that most visitors to the city never suspect.
