In the stone-tower villages of Upper Svaneti, painted icons were sheathed in hammered silver — a gilded sheet worked from behind into high relief, nailed over the red-brown wooden panel, set with turquoise and carnelian cabochons, and chased across the plate with an asomtavruli inscription.

The valley churches served as vaults, and what survives there is the largest body of early medieval icons outside St Catherine's on Sinai. The Svan chasers pushed the relief unusually deep, so in this system the darkness lives in the recesses, never in the ground.