Georgian Sweets, Churchkhela & Dried Fruit Guide: What to Try, Buy & Take Home

What Georgian sweets are actually made of

The Georgian sweet repertoire runs on four raw materials: grapes, nuts, fruit and honey. Wheat flour and cornflour appear as thickeners rather than as the basis of cakes and pastries, dairy is comparatively rare, and chocolate is a recent import. Once you see that pattern, the whole category stops looking like a random list of unfamiliar names and starts looking like what it is, which is a preservation system. Almost everything here exists because a harvest arrived all at once and had to be made to last.

That has two consequences a traveller notices immediately. The first is seasonality: these are autumn products above all, made when grapes and nuts come in together, so what you buy in October is a different thing from what is on the same stall in April. The second is that they keep and travel well, which is why Georgian sweets make unusually practical presents compared with the fresh and fragile things most countries offer visitors.

Badagi, tatara and pelamushi: the grape-must family

Most of the confusion around Georgian sweets comes from not knowing this one sequence, so it is worth getting straight before anything else. Fresh grape juice is boiled down to concentrate it, and the resulting syrup is badagi. Badagi is then thickened with flour into a smooth, pourable mass. That thickened mass is what churchkhela is dipped in, and it is also what pelamushi is when poured into a dish and left to set. The same preparation, in other words, becomes a coating or a pudding depending on what you do with it next.

The naming follows a documented regional split in which flour the thickened must uses. In eastern Georgia, including Kakheti, Kartli and Meskheti, wheat flour is used and the result is generally called tatara. In western Georgia, across Racha, Lechkhumi, Guria, Samegrelo and Adjara, cornflour is used and the preparation is called pelamushi. That is the pattern the reference sources describe, and it is genuinely useful because it also tells you something about gluten, which the allergy section returns to.

Spoken usage is looser than that tidy split suggests, and it is worth not being pedantic about it. In Tbilisi restaurants pelamushi is simply the name of the dessert on the menu, whatever flour is behind it, and plenty of Georgians use the two words interchangeably or according to family habit rather than region. Treat the east–west distinction as a real documented pattern rather than as a rule that every seller will observe, and ask if the difference matters to you.

Churchkhela: what it actually is

Churchkhela is a string of nuts, most often walnut halves, threaded onto a thread and repeatedly dipped into thickened grape must until a firm coating builds up around them, then hung to dry for several days. The finished object is candle-shaped, usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty centimetres long, and is sliced crosswise to eat rather than bitten from the end. There is no added sugar in the traditional preparation, because the concentrated grape must supplies all the sweetness, though commercial versions vary and some do add sugar.

The thing most visitors get wrong is treating it as a snack bar. Churchkhela is dense, chewy and quite serious to eat, and a whole one is more than most people want in a sitting. It is also not a single standardised product: reference descriptions of the traditional form allow walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds and pieces of dried fruit on the thread, and the dipping liquid can be mulberry juice rather than grape. Anyone telling you that only one version is the real one is describing their own region's habit.

It is made in autumn, when the nuts ripen and the grapes are harvested at the same time, which is not a coincidence but the entire logic of the product. That timing matters commercially: churchkhela hanging on a stall in June was made the previous autumn, and while it is perfectly good, it is a firmer and drier thing than the same product in October.

How churchkhela is made

Nuts are shelled and threaded onto a long thread with a needle, leaving a loop at the top to hang from. Grape juice is boiled down to concentrate it, then thickened with flour and cooled to the right consistency. The strings are lowered into the warm mixture, lifted out, and hung to set before being dipped again. Repeating the dip is what builds thickness, and how many times it is done is one of the main things separating a substantial churchkhela from a thin one. The finished strings hang to dry for several days, traditionally in the open air.

That drying stage is why the product keeps without refrigeration, and it is also why the texture changes over the following months. Churchkhela continues to lose moisture slowly after it is sold, so the same string that was yielding and slightly tacky in autumn becomes firm by late winter and genuinely hard after long storage. Neither state is a defect. They are stages of the same object, and knowing that saves you from assuming an old churchkhela is a bad one.

How to judge a churchkhela before you buy

The single most useful test is to press it gently. A good churchkhela gives slightly under the thumb rather than feeling like a stick, and the coating should be continuous rather than crazed with deep cracks that expose the nuts. Ask what nut is inside, because sellers expect the question and the answer tells you what you are paying for. If you can, smell it: the coating should smell of grape and dried fruit, and the nuts inside should smell of nothing much at all.

The one genuine warning sign that is easy to miss is rancid nuts. Walnuts are high in oil and go rancid with age and heat, and because they are sealed inside the coating you cannot see the problem. A sharp, bitter, paint-like smell or taste is the giveaway, and it is much more likely in stock that has spent a summer in direct sun on a roadside stall than in a market where turnover is high. This is a quality issue rather than a safety emergency, but it will ruin the thing you carried home.

The white coating: sugar bloom or mould?

A fine white film on churchkhela or on dried fruit is usually sugar, not mould, and mistaking one for the other is the most common way visitors throw away perfectly good food. As these products dry, the sugars inside become concentrated past the point they can stay dissolved and crystallise on the surface. On dried persimmon in particular this is expected, and a good even bloom is treated as a sign the fruit has dried properly rather than as a fault.

A few physical differences usually separate the two. Sugar bloom is typically flat, powdery and crystalline, sitting flush against the surface like a dusting of icing sugar, and it tends to smear or dissolve if you rub it. Obvious mould is more often three-dimensional: it stands up from the surface, looks fuzzy or velvety, and rarely stays white for long, developing grey, green, blue or black tones as it matures. A musty or fermented smell is a further warning sign. These signs can help distinguish common sugar bloom from obvious mould, but appearance and smell cannot guarantee that a product is safe, and if you are uncertain about a piece of fruit, do not eat it.

Why churchkhela is not really candy, and not a health food either

Structurally churchkhela has little in common with modern confectionery. There is no refined sugar syrup, no fat added for texture, no chocolate and, in the traditional form, nothing in it but grape must, flour and nuts. That makes it closer to a dried fruit and nut preparation than to a sweet, which is why it behaves so differently: it keeps for months without preservatives, it is filling rather than moreish, and it does not melt.

None of that makes it a health food, and it is regularly sold to visitors as though it were. Concentrating grape juice concentrates its sugar, so churchkhela is a high-sugar food whether or not any sugar was added, and the nuts make it high in fat and calories as well. It is a nourishing, traditional, minimally processed food with a lot of energy in it. That is a fair description. Descriptions involving the words superfood, guilt-free or medicinal are marketing, and the Georgian sellers who make it are generally not the ones using them.

Pelamushi

Pelamushi is concentrated grape must thickened with flour, poured into a shallow dish or mould and left to set into a soft, sliceable pudding, usually served cool and often scattered with walnuts. The texture is closer to a set custard or a firm blancmange than to a jelly, and the flavour is straightforwardly grape, deeper and less sharp than fresh juice because of the boiling down. It is commonly encountered on Georgian restaurant and dessert menus, particularly in places serving traditional cuisine.

It shares its base with churchkhela's coating, which is a genuine relationship worth knowing, but describing it as melted churchkhela gets the direction of travel backwards and misses what makes it its own dish. The mixture is made to be eaten as a pudding in its own right, set rather than dried, and served fresh rather than stored for months. A home version made at harvest time, still slightly warm, is a noticeably better thing than a chilled restaurant portion, and if you are offered one in a household in autumn it is worth accepting.

Gozinaki and why you may not see it

Gozinaki is toasted walnuts bound in caramelised honey, spread out, cooled and cut into diamonds. It differs from most nut brittles in that honey rather than sugar does the work, which gives it a softer, chewier bite and a distinctly floral flavour instead of the hard, glassy snap of a sugar caramel. It is very rich and is eaten in small pieces.

The important practical point is that it is a festive sweet rather than an everyday one, and this catches visitors out. Gozinaki is strongly associated with New Year celebrations and commonly appears on festive tables around the thirty-first of December and the days that follow, often remaining through the visiting season that runs towards Old New Year on the fourteenth of January. Exactly when a household serves it varies. Outside that window it is not a normal part of daily eating, and it is not something most restaurants will have. Commercially packaged versions do exist and can be found in shops at other times of year, and it is sent as a gift because it travels without losing its shape, but if you visit in July do not expect to find it fresh on every corner.

Tklapi: fruit leather that is often not a sweet at all

Tklapi is fruit purée spread thinly onto a sheet and dried, traditionally in the sun, into a flexible leather that is then rolled or folded. It comes in two quite different registers, and confusing them is how travellers end up with a mouthful of something startlingly sour. Sweet tklapi is made from apricots or peaches and is eaten as a snack. Sour tklapi is made from cherry plums, the same fruit behind tkemali sauce, and is primarily a cooking ingredient rather than a confection.

The sour version has a genuinely clever use. Drying sour plum purée into tklapi was one traditional way households preserved the fruit for later cooking, and a torn-off strip dissolved in hot water or stock reconstitutes into sauce or seasons a dish. It is used this way in kharcho, where a small piece melted into the broth adds sour depth without thinning it. If you buy tklapi as a gift, establish which type you have: the sweet apricot kind is a snack, and the dark sour kind will disappoint anyone expecting one.

Dried fruit

Dried fruit occupies a larger place in Georgian eating than in most of Europe, and market stalls carry a wider range than a Western supermarket does. It is eaten as a snack, offered with tea, cooked into stews and compotes, and threaded onto churchkhela strings alongside the nuts. Quality varies enormously between a stall selling this year's carefully dried crop and one shifting bulk imported product, and the price usually tells you which you are looking at.

Two assumptions are worth dropping before you shop. The first is that dried fruit in a market is automatically unsweetened and additive-free: some is, and some has been sugared or treated with sulphur dioxide to preserve colour, which is a normal and legal practice rather than a scandal but matters if you are sensitive to sulphites. Bright, uniformly orange apricots have usually been sulphured; dull brown ones usually have not. The second is that everything on the stall is Georgian. Ask, because imported product is common and sellers will generally tell you straight.

Dried persimmon in particular

Persimmon deserves separating out because it is both one of the best things on a Georgian market and the product most likely to be misread by a visitor. Fresh persimmon arrives in late autumn and is dried whole or in slices, concentrating it into something dense, jammy and extremely sweet, with a texture closer to a soft dried fig than to dried apple. Hung in strings, it is a common autumn sight in producing areas.

This is where the white coating causes trouble. Well-dried persimmon develops a pale surface bloom of crystallised fruit sugar, and rather than being a defect it is generally taken as evidence that drying went well. Travellers who assume it is mould discard good fruit, and occasionally are talked out of buying the best thing on the stall. The flat-and-powdery versus raised-and-fuzzy comparison described earlier will usually tell you which you are looking at, though it is a guide rather than a guarantee, and anything you are unsure about is not worth eating. Fresh persimmon, incidentally, is a different proposition to buy and carry, because unripe astringent varieties are unpleasant and fresh fruit faces far tighter import rules than dried.

Walnuts, hazelnuts and why they are everywhere

Walnuts run through the Georgian sweet repertoire as they run through the savoury one, and hazelnuts are the major second nut, grown commercially at scale in the west of the country. Both go into churchkhela, gozinaki depends on walnuts, and walnuts are the standard scatter over pelamushi. Nuts are sold shelled and unshelled on every market, and the unshelled ones keep considerably better.

It is worth resisting the tourist-brochure line that this makes Georgia uniquely nut-centred, since walnut-heavy cooking is characteristic of a broad region stretching well beyond its borders. What is fair to say is that nuts here are a structural ingredient rather than a garnish, which is why so much of the sweet repertoire is built on them. When buying, taste first: rancidity is the only real risk with nuts, and it is immediately obvious on the tongue.

Honey

Georgian honey is sold by varietal rather than as a single undifferentiated product, and the differences are large enough to be worth caring about. Acacia is pale and mild with a light floral character and stays liquid a long time. Chestnut is dark, aromatic and distinctly bitter behind the sweetness, and divides opinion sharply. Alpine honey from high meadows is polyfloral and more complex than either. Linden and mixed blossom honeys are also widely sold.

The most interesting is jara honey from Adjara, produced in traditional hives hollowed from whole tree trunks and hung in trees. The practice has been recognised as intangible cultural heritage in Georgia and survives in only a handful of places worldwide, which makes jara honey genuinely unusual rather than merely marketed as such. It is correspondingly expensive and worth buying from a seller who can tell you where it came from.

Two cautions, stated proportionately. Honey attracts more health claims than almost any other food, and this guide makes none: buying honey because you like how it tastes is a good reason, and buying it as a remedy is not something the evidence supports. Separately, honey produced from rhododendron nectar can contain grayanotoxins and cause a well-documented if uncommon poisoning, a phenomenon associated with the wider Black Sea region and one reason Georgian listings of honey types include a toxic variety. This is rare and not a reason for anxiety about ordinary honey, but it is a good reason to buy from sellers who identify what they are selling rather than from an unlabelled jar of unknown origin.

Muraba: preserves that are not quite jam

Muraba is the Georgian form of a preserve found across the South Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia under related names, and it differs from Western jam in an important way. Rather than being cooked down into a uniform spread, whole fruits or large pieces are preserved intact in a thick sugar syrup. It is eaten by the spoonful with tea rather than spread on bread, and offering a dish of it to a guest is a standard piece of hospitality.

The famous one is green walnut muraba, made from unripe walnuts soaked at length, then slow-cooked in syrup until they turn almost black with a dense, meaty texture and a flavour nothing else quite matches. It is the one to try if you try only one. Fig, cherry, quince, cornelian cherry and rose petal versions are all traditional and widely made. Home preserves and market jars are generally superior to the decorated supermarket product, though the latter is easier to buy sealed if you intend to fly with it.

Wine ice cream: modern, not traditional

Wine ice cream is exactly what it sounds like, an ice cream flavoured with Georgian wine, and it is a genuinely enjoyable thing to eat on a hot afternoon. It is also a contemporary wine-tourism product rather than a piece of Georgian culinary heritage, and it is worth saying so plainly because it is frequently presented to visitors as though it were ancient. It is not. Nothing about that makes it worse, but it belongs in a different category from churchkhela and gozinaki.

In practice it is easiest to encounter around Old Tbilisi and Abanotubani, the sulphur-bath district, where several small kiosks and street-side machines sell it near the baths and along the walk up the gorge towards the Leghvtakhevi waterfall. A long-established local wine-ice-cream stand near the waterfall, known locally as Vito, is one of the area's established examples, though it is not the only one and several newer machines now operate nearby. Ice cream parlours elsewhere in the city also run named varietal flavours built on Saperavi or Kindzmarauli, and it turns up at wine-region venues aimed at visitors. It is a warm-season product and not something you should expect to find in winter.

The question travellers most need answered is whether it contains alcohol, and the honest answer is that it depends on the producer and that very few of them publish a figure. Recipes vary: some use wine reduced to a concentrate, some use wine directly, and how much alcohol survives depends on the recipe and the processing. Any product made with an alcoholic wine base can retain some alcohol, typically a small amount relative to the volume of the mixture, but no single number applies across producers and this guide will not invent one. If you need to avoid alcohol completely, for medical, religious, pregnancy-related or any other reason, ask the seller directly rather than assuming, and treat an unclear answer as a reason to choose something else. It should not be described as non-alcoholic unless the producer states that it is.

Traditional, modern, and the space between

Georgian food marketing leans hard on the word traditional, and applying it to everything drains it of meaning. The distinction below is not about authenticity policing or about modern products being inferior, several of which are very good. It is about knowing what you are buying, which matters when you are choosing a gift or deciding what a fair price is.

Regional differences

Regional variation here follows agriculture rather than any formal boundary. Where there are vineyards there is grape must and therefore churchkhela; where there are hazelnut orchards the nut in the string changes; where the climate suits persimmon and citrus the drying tradition differs. The east-west flour split described earlier is the clearest single line, and most other differences are a matter of emphasis rather than sharp division.

Kakheti: grape country and the churchkhela heartland

Kakheti produces most of Georgia's wine and therefore most of its grape must, which makes it the natural centre of the churchkhela tradition and the best place to see it being made if you visit in autumn. Strings hanging to dry outside houses are an ordinary September and October sight. Telavi has a proper working market and is the most useful base for buying rather than sightseeing, Kvareli sits among wineries whose shops carry grape products alongside the bottles, and Sighnaghi is the most visitor-oriented, which means convenience and higher prices in roughly equal measure. For the grape varieties and wine regions behind all of this, our Georgian Wine Guide covers the subject properly.

One structural point ties the region together neatly. Pressing grapes for wine produces juice, which becomes must for sweets, and solids, which are distilled into the grape spirit covered in our Georgian Chacha Guide. The same harvest supplies the region's wine, its sweets and its spirit, which is why all three peak at the same time of year and why an autumn visit shows you the whole system at once.

Western Georgia and Adjara

The western regions use cornflour rather than wheat in their thickened must, grow hazelnuts commercially at scale, and have the humid subtropical climate that supports citrus, feijoa and persimmon along the coast. Imereti, Samegrelo, Guria and Racha-Lechkhumi each have their own emphases, and the household preserving tradition is strong throughout. In Adjara, the jara beekeeping practice described above survives in the hills inland, and Batumi is the practical place to buy it along with the region's other produce. Expect fewer formal food-souvenir shops here than in Tbilisi and more buying directly from markets.

Tbilisi: where to compare everything in one place

Nothing is grown in the capital, but Tbilisi concentrates everything the rest of the country makes, which is why it is the sensible place to do your buying even if you have travelled the regions. The markets carry produce from everywhere, specialist food shops sell packaged versions suitable for luggage, and the contemporary end of the scene, including wine ice cream and modern confectionery, is here rather than in the villages. The one thing the capital cannot give you is the autumn experience of seeing churchkhela made, which belongs to the wine regions.

The seasonal calendar

Timings below are approximate and shift by several weeks with altitude, region and the year's weather, so treat them as a guide to sequence rather than as fixed dates. Almost everything in this guide is available year-round in some form; the calendar tells you when it is at its best and when you can watch it being made.

Markets, shops and roadside stalls

Working food markets are where the best of this is sold, and Dezerter Bazaar near the central railway station is the largest in Tbilisi, with stalls of hanging churchkhela, dried fruit, nuts, honey and preserves. Regional towns have smaller markets that are often more pleasant and cheaper. Sellers expect you to taste before buying, and that expectation is your main quality tool. Our Georgian Food Guide covers how Georgian markets work more generally.

It would be lazy to say souvenir shops are always worse. They are usually more expensive, sometimes considerably, but they offer sealed packaging, labelling, printed ingredients and a product that will survive a suitcase, and for a gift those things have real value that a loose market string does not. The genuinely poor option is neither of these: it is the isolated stall at a scenic viewpoint, where stock turns over slowly, sits in the sun, and is priced for people who will not be back. Buy your food at markets or proper shops, and buy the view at the viewpoint.

What things cost

The ranges below are approximate, in Georgian lari, and current as of September 2026. They are here to tell you when you are being quoted a tourist price rather than to serve as a price list, and they vary with size, nut type, quality and how far you are from a working market. Where a figure is not well supported, this guide gives a comparison rather than inventing a number.

Storing what you buy

These are preserved foods, so the general rule is cool, dry and out of direct light, and the enemies are heat and moisture rather than time. Precise shelf lives are not worth quoting for market-bought and homemade goods, because they depend on how the thing was made and how dry it was when you got it, and any confident number would be invented. Packaged products carry their own dates and those are the ones to follow.

Taking food home: customs and import rules

There is no single worldwide rule, and the allowances that apply to you depend entirely on where you are flying to. What is broadly true across many destinations is a hierarchy worth understanding before you shop: dried and processed foods in sealed packaging are the easiest category, fresh fruit, vegetables and plant material are the hardest, and products of animal origin sit somewhere in between with meat and dairy the most restricted of all. Sweets, dried fruit, nuts and preserves generally fall on the easy side of that line.

The European Union illustrates the pattern, and is given here as an example rather than as your rule. Travellers entering the EU from a non-EU country may not bring meat or dairy products at all. Limited quantities of honey are permitted, and honey is treated as a product of animal origin with a quantity cap rather than being freely importable. Fresh fruit and vegetables face plant-health rules and may require a phytosanitary certificate, which is not something a market stall will supply. Nuts, dried fruit and manufactured confectionery are far more straightforward.

Other destinations set their own rules and some are considerably stricter, particularly countries with strong biosecurity regimes, where undeclared food can attract substantial penalties. The practical advice is the same everywhere: check the rules published by the country you are entering before you buy, favour sealed and labelled packaging over loose market goods for anything crossing a border, and declare food when a form asks you to. Declaring something that turns out to be permitted costs you a minute; not declaring something prohibited can cost a great deal more.

Flying with Georgian sweets

Solid foods are straightforward and liquids are not, which is the whole of it. Churchkhela, tklapi, dried fruit, nuts and gozinaki are solids and pass security without difficulty in either cabin or checked baggage. Honey and preserves behave as liquids for cabin-baggage purposes and will generally be taken off you at security if they exceed the container limits, so they belong in checked baggage regardless of how well you have wrapped them.

Two practical notes. Glass jars survive checked baggage if they are padded and packed centrally among clothes, and a leaking jar of preserve will ruin everything around it, so a sealed bag around each one is worth the trouble. And anything honey-based, gozinaki especially, will soften in a hot hold or a hot car and can weep sticky syrup, so pack it in a container rather than loose. Airport retail sells packaged versions of most of this if you would rather not carry it across the country, though usually at a premium.

Food safety, in proportion

Dried and preserved foods are among the safest things you can buy anywhere, because low moisture and high sugar are exactly what stops microbes growing. Georgian markets are working markets with fast turnover, and buying from them is not a risk to be managed; it is generally how you get the better product. The genuine issues are quality problems rather than dangers, and they are easy to spot.

What actually to look out for: raised fuzzy growth of any colour, which is mould rather than sugar bloom; a fermented or alcoholic smell from dried fruit or an opened preserve, meaning it has taken on moisture; the sharp bitter smell of rancid nuts; a bulging lid or a broken seal on a jar; and stock that has clearly sat in direct sun. Homemade preserves given as gifts are usually excellent but carry no processing guarantees, so refrigerate them once opened and use judgement rather than optimism if one smells wrong.

Allergies, gluten and vegan questions

This category is built on tree nuts, so anyone with a nut allergy should treat the whole subject with care rather than looking for exceptions. Churchkhela, gozinaki and most preparations here contain walnuts or hazelnuts as a defining ingredient, market stalls handle nuts and non-nut products side by side, and loose goods carry no allergen labelling at all. This is one area where sealed, labelled packaging is worth paying for.

The gluten question has a specific and frequently missed answer. Churchkhela is often described online as gluten-free, and this is not reliably true: the thickened grape must it is dipped in is made with wheat flour in eastern Georgia, including Kakheti, where a great deal of it is produced. Western Georgian preparations use cornflour instead. Since a market seller may not know which they have and packaging may not say, anyone avoiding gluten for medical reasons should not assume, and should ask specifically about the flour rather than about the product.

Sugar and what these foods actually are nutritionally

Stated neutrally: drying fruit and reducing juice both concentrate sugar, so dried fruit and grape-must products are high in sugar whether or not any was added. Nuts contribute fat and protein, which makes churchkhela and gozinaki energy-dense foods rather than light snacks. Honey and muraba are sugar in the ordinary sense. Portion size does most of the work here, and a slice or two of churchkhela is a different proposition from an entire string.

It is fair to note that traditional versions of these foods are minimally processed and, in the case of churchkhela, often contain no added sugar at all. It is not fair to translate that into health claims, and this guide does not offer dietary advice. If you have a condition affected by sugar intake, these are foods to treat as sweets, whatever the stall sign says.

Which of these actually work as presents

The ranking below is by practicality rather than by quality, because the best thing to eat and the best thing to carry three thousand kilometres are not the same object. A jar of homemade green walnut muraba is more interesting than a bag of dried apricots and considerably more trouble to get home intact.

Travelling with children

Most of this suits children well, with a few sensible cautions. Whole nuts are a choking hazard for young children, and churchkhela contains large pieces of walnut inside a chewy coating, so slice it thinly rather than handing over a whole string. Older or heavily dried churchkhela can be genuinely hard work to chew, and a fresher, softer one is the better introduction. Fruit leather and softer dried fruit are the easiest things on the list for small children.

Two further points. Nut allergy is the significant risk in this category and market goods carry no labelling, so err heavily towards sealed products where allergies are in play. And wine ice cream should not be assumed to be alcohol-free, so if you would rather children did not have any, ask the seller or choose another flavour. General guidance also advises against giving honey to infants under one year old, which is worth remembering when honey is offered as hospitality.

Common myths

What to try first

If you want one recommendation rather than a table: buy a fresh walnut churchkhela from a working market in autumn, ask the seller to cut it, and eat it the same day. That single purchase tells you more about this whole category than any amount of reading, and it costs a few lari.