A series of archaeological expeditions, beginning in 1984, have uncovered various features of a large settlement, but its extent remains unknown because of a densely forested landscape and lack of written sources.

Nekresi—sometimes referred to as Nekrisi, and unusually, Nelkarisi or Nelkari—appears in the early medieval Georgian chronicles as a royal project in Kakheti, in the far east of Kartli, which was known to the Classical authors as Iberia.

The ninth king, Arshak (r. 90–78 BC[3]), is reported to have embellished it[4] and Mirvanoz, a tutor of the boy-king Mirian (r. 284–361[5])—eventually the first Christian monarch of Kartli—is said to have strengthened the city’s walls.

[14] Ruins of two large early Christian basilicas were uncovered at the wooded plots of Dolochopi and Chabukauri, some four kilometers apart, the former carbon dated to 387[15] and the latter identified by its excavator, Nodar Bakhtadze, with King Trdat's church.

[17] Nekresi was reduced to a rural settlement or group of villages, while the once flourishing town fell into oblivion and was largely reclaimed by nature by the Late Middle Ages.

Subsequent turmoils and incessant marauding raids from the neighboring tribes of Dagestan compelled the bishop to transfer his see from the monastery to the relative security of the church of the Mother of God in the nearby village of Shilda in 1785.

Both were restored in modern Georgia after the fall of the Soviet Union: the former bishopric was reconstituted as the Eparchy of Nekresi within the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1995 and the monastery became repopulated by monks in 2000.

[20] The Nekresi site occupies a plain of arable land and wooded slopes at the foot of the southernmost offshoot of the Greater Caucasus, between the Duruji and Chelti river beds.

The former typologically dated to the 4th–5th century and the latter carbondated to c. 387, these discoveries challenged the hitherto dominant interpretation—based on an argument from silence—that the early Christian church buildings in eastern Georgia were typically limited to small and simple chapels.

[25] Archaeological digs on the hillock of Samarkhebis Seri, in the western portion of the Nekresi site—at the place locally known as Nagebebi—have unearthed a stone winery, rectangular in plan and measuring 20 x 20 m. It contained five spacious winepresses and two cisterns.

[27] The Nagebebi winery was the scene of resonant discovery, in 1986 and 1987, of at least six fragmented Georgian inscriptions carved in the ancient asomtavruli on stone slabs, reused in the construction of later structures.