The Davit-Gareji Wilderness
The Monastery of Saint John the Baptist that Serapion led belongs to the David Gareji complex, a network of cells, churches, chapels, and refectories hollowed from the rock on the half-desert slopes of Mount Gareja, on the edge of the Iori Plateau in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, roughly sixty to seventy kilometers southeast of Tbilisi.
The complex was established in the sixth century by Saint David of Gareji, one of the thirteen Assyrian monks who came to Georgia, and the John the Baptist house — known in Georgian as Natlismtsemeli — is attributed to his disciples Dodo and Luciane. By tradition the complex expanded under Saint Hilarion the Iberian in the ninth century and reached its height between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.