Once home to the largest Jewish community in the western part of Georgia, Lailashi is now a remote village with no Jews to speak of, although efforts have been made recently to preserve its synagogue. It is also the location of an extremely rare codex of the Pentateuch, thought to have been written in the 10th century and complete save for a few chapters. Thea Gomelauri writes in a December 2020 article:
The provenance of the Lailashi codex . . . is as mysterious as its authorship and its ownership. According to the legend, the codex was brought to Georgia on an angel’s wings. The villagers saw a floating book in an unnamed river, and they rescued it from the stream. This unique codex was said to have miracle-working powers. It became an object of [veneration] for both Jews and Georgians.
How this priceless codex was “found” in a small, unprotected community synagogue during the unfortunate times of the Soviet reign is unclear. . . . The codex . . . was seized by the Communist authorities, and was brought to Tbilisi. Originally, it was kept in the Georgian Museum of Jewish History, but the museum was closed in 1951 [at the height of Stalinist anti-Semitism]. In 1957, the Lailashi manuscript emerged in the possession of the Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
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What makes the Lailashi codex unique among its counterparts is that this treasure of biblical scholarship is entirely understudied. The only scholarly article about it appeared in 1968 in [a Georgian-language journal], but the codex has never been studied by Hebrew paleographers. . . . Supposedly, it was written by different people and at different locations: in Palestine, Egypt, and Persia.
Read more on JewThink: https://www.jewthink.org/2020/12/01/introducing-the-best-kept-secret-of-georgian-jewry-the-lailashi-codex/