Panaskerti

Panaskerti was a fortified center of Tao, a Georgian region in the valleys of the Çoruh and its tributaries. The castle gave its name to the Panaskerteli noble family, whose possessions lay in this mountainous frontier country. Together with Kalmakhi and Bana, Panaskerti had emerged as an administrative center of Lower Tao in the ninth and tenth centuries.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the Panaskerteli family had left its old lordship and settled in Kartli, where it later became influential under the name Tsitsishvili. Panaskerti itself remained among the strongholds of Samtskhe until the Ottoman campaign against the Georgian atabegs in 1549. Ottoman records of 1595 list two settlements under the name Panaskerd, one called Rabat and the other Upper Panaskerd, within a district bearing the same name.