I was exploring some of the back alleys of Tbilisi when I stumbled across this church:

I could see that it looked abandoned and so I slipped in past a boarded up section where I was shocked to discover that the entire church had been absolutely gutted by fire – and fairly recently too. The visual impact of the interior was fascinating to me. And this was enhanced by the impact on my other senses as well. Given the acoustics within the church, all of the sound from the outside world was deadened. The smell of destruction was so powerful that I could taste the ash in my mouth – like walking around after a very recent forest fire… Every step I took inside would raise a small ash cloud around my feet which soon began creating strange patterns in the light trickling in from the outside:

Toward the front of the church, heaps of burned bibles came up to my waist:

The floor had collapsed in some places, exposing the crypts beneath… I would have given nearly anything to have had proper clothes and a flashlight with me at that time, so I could have crawled down there and explored the labyrinth of passages that snaked away from the church underneath the streets of Tbilisi:

It’s worth getting into areas that are not visited very often and practicing situational awareness. And not just because of discoveries like this one…

Here is a video I shot of the interior: