The Wilderness of Gareji
The Gareji wilderness lies on the half-desert slopes of Mount Gareja in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, some sixty to seventy kilometers southeast of Tbilisi. The community David founded there grew, over the centuries, into an extensive rock-hewn monastic complex of hundreds of cells, churches, chapels, refectories and living quarters hollowed out of the rock face, comprising several monasteries. Since the Middle Ages it has been counted among the most important centers of Georgian Christian culture.
By tradition, the local deer of the wilderness furnished the monks with sustenance when the summer heat killed the vegetation: Lucian would milk them, and when David made the sign of the cross over the milk it became cheese. The fathers kept their fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, on which days, the synaxarion relates, the deer did not appear.
The original lavra was expanded by David's disciples Dodo and Lucian, who founded further monasteries nearby. From the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries the complex reached its highest phase of economic and cultural development. It survived the Safavid attack of 1615, when, according to the record, the monks were massacred and the monastery's manuscripts and works of Georgian art were destroyed.