Scholars date the Old Georgian period from the fifth century to about the eleventh, after which the language of texts shades into Middle Georgian, the register of the medieval epics, and eventually into the modern language. The name Classical Georgian is often applied to the older literary language as a whole. What did not change was the church.
The Georgian Orthodox Church continues to celebrate its services in the old liturgical register, and its clergy still learn to read the Khutsuri scripts in which the service books were copied, so a Georgian priest today reads letterforms unchanged for a thousand years. The Old Georgian corpus is large and still yielding discoveries, hagiography, hymnography including the distinctive iadgari chant books, homiletics, and translations that preserve early Christian works lost in Greek.
Georgian manuscripts from Sinai, Jerusalem and Athos have proved essential witnesses to the early liturgy of Jerusalem, which Georgian monks recorded while it was still living practice. In 2016 the living culture of the three Georgian scripts, Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli, was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, recognition that the oldest layers of the written language remain in active ecclesiastical use rather than behind museum glass.