Site: Ninotsminda Cathedral
Date: c. 575 CE
Geography: Sagarejo, Kakheti region, Georgia
Culture: Georgian Christian
Medium: stone; tetraconch centrally-planned church

Keywords: Ninotsminda, tetraconch, Jvari, Georgia, church, architecture, Holy Land, Syria.

Citation: Angus Docherty, “Ninotsminda Cathedral,” in “The Material Culture of the Medieval Black Sea,” Medieval Black Sea Project, edited by Teresa Shawcross et al., https://medievalblackseaproject.princeton.edu/ninotsminda-cathedral-angus-docherty/

Ninotsminda, nestled on the outskirts of the quiet Kakhetian town of Sagarejo, stands as an historic artifact of Georgian Christianity. Partially ruined (fig. 1), the cathedral dedicated to Saint Nino, Illuminatrix of Georgia, is an essential piece in the puzzle that is the development of ecclesiastical architecture in Georgia and the Caucasus.

Though accompanied by a sixteenth-century belltower and surrounded by pentagonal walls, the cathedral itself is far older, dating from c. 575 CE. The current structure is not the first on this site. Medieval prince-historian Juansher notes that the legendary fifth-century King Vakhtang Gorgasali created a bishopric there, owing to its proximity with the major fortress at Ujarma.¹

Ninotsminda’s plan (fig. 2) is tetraconch, formed by four apses in quatrefoil. These four apses are complemented by four side-bays placed diagonally to the apses, such that the church, prior to its partial collapse, resembled an octagonal, symmetrical flower. Thus, Ninotsminda’s design develops on Manglisi Cathedral (believed to have housed the relic of the footrest of the True Cross) by translating the latter’s external side-chambers into the former’s internal structure.

Like other centrally-planned Georgian churches, it is assumed that Ninotsminda’s roof comprised an octagonal drum on squinches, rather than pendentives. Squinches, inherited from Persian architecture, were the primary supports used to construct domes in medieval Caucasian church-building. 

Unfortunately, Ninotsminda remains archaeologically unstudied, except as a minor part of Georgian art historian Giorgi Chubinashvili’s survey of the architecture of Kakheti region. Historic restorations – to the dome between the ninth and eleventh centuries, to the supports between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and throughout the building in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – have obscured any trace of the pre-sixth-century structure.² The stonework is patchwork, reflecting these restorations, and the inside walls, lower down, are marked by a strip of black soot, presumably from fire. The church’s damaged frescoes, preserved best on the underside of the arches, are late Byzantine in style. Two earthquakes in 1824 and 1848 devastated Ninotsminda, collapsing the roof and southwest side.

Ninotsminda’s eastern exterior displays five inscriptions. The four in Asomtavruli script (dominant fifth-tenth centuries) are standard dedications naming congregants. The fifth is in an unknown script—resembling, but distinct from, Greek—that is called Heruli by scholars.³ This inscription shares a dedicated stone-brick (fig. 3) with three rosette patterns, similar to hexafoils found across Europe and the Near East. The inscription’s apparent gibberish, accompanied by these rosettes, might suggest a magical, apotropaic purpose, though this remains conjectural.⁴ A sixth inscription, in Mkhedruli script (the modern alphabet), is located within the western doorway, to which a gatehouse, rebuilt in 1617, was appended. 

The complex, also hosting the bishop’s palace and wine-cellar, has yielded some artifacts: a Bronze Age dagger; snake-head bracelets; red- and black-fired vessels; a Late Antique buckle of a twisted deer; and a silver drachma of Shahanshah Bahram I (r. 271-274). The church also housed a gold icon donated in the seventeenth-century by King Archil of Kakheti (r. 1664–1675).

Ninotsminda’s significance derives chiefly from its crucial, intermediate position within the development of Georgian and Caucasian architecture, ever since Chubinashvili’s 1948 Monuments of the Jvari Type proposed Ninotsminda as the model for Jvari Monastery at Mtskheta, Georgia’s holiest site. Ninotsminda’s design maintained and transmitted the influence of the Levant upon the architecture of the Caucasus. Manglisi, c. 500, Ninotsminda’s direct antecedent, has been associated with two fifth-century churches in the Holy Land: the Theotokos Church on Mount Gerizim and the Kathisma Church between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The c.500 replica of the Anastasis Rotunda found near the village of Vardisubani strengthens this connection. Recent research has highlighted this Syrian influence, at the expense of Chubinashvili’s traditional theory that Georgian monumental architecture was derived from the vernacular darbazi house (a sort of domed courtyard house). 

Syrian origins also imply a connection with Chalcedonian Christianity. All tetraconch churches in Syria were built under the Orthodox Antiochian Patriarch. Additionally, those at Bosra, Resada, Seleucia-Pieria and Apamea always hosted a bishop or a higher-ranking clergyman. Other Caucasian churches exhibit these features, such as the seventh-century cathedral at Zvartnots in Armenia, which was an episcopal see whose “double-shell” tetraconch design was likely shaped by its patron Catholicos Nerses III’s Chalcedonian sympathies. The Georgian tetraconches at Ninotsminda, Manglisi and Jvari follow this pattern, with each also being the center of an episcopate. Thus Ninotsminda serves as an archetypal Caucasian church, transmitting Syrian influence.

Through its emulator at Jvari, Ninotsminda carries this influence into succeeding Georgian and Caucasian architecture. The “Jvari-Type” proliferated in the seventh and eighth centuries, with numerous examples, including the churches Ateni Sioni and Martvili. The ninth- or tenth-century Bana cathedral in the Tao-Klarjeti region (now part of northeastern Turkey) even combines the “Jvari-Type” with the “double-shell” tetraconch plan of Zvartnots. As such, Ninotsminda is the architectural ancestor of all Georgian ecclesiastical architecture, not only of monumental structures, like Bana, but also of ordinary local churches descended from the “Jvari-Type”.

We can therefore detect architectural descent from Syria and the Holy Land in the case of Ninotsminda. The apostolic succession is reflected in an architectural succession, extending forth, through Ninotsminda, into all Georgian architecture, past and present, ecclesiastical or otherwise. 

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1. G. Quakhchishvili, ed., ქართლის ცხოვრებ ტომი (Life of Kartli), vol. I (Tbilisi: Sanamegam: 1955), 198.15-199.5. ↩︎
2. G. N. Chubinashvili, Architecture of Kakheti. Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR: 1959, 238 suggests a detailed study of the vaulted side-bays for the purpose of discovering the original church. ↩︎
3. A. Shanidze, “Alphabet des Albanais du Caucase récemment découvert et son importance pour la science”, Bulletin de l’Institut Marr de Langues, d’Histoire et de Culture Matérielle 4.1 (1938): 43. ↩︎
4. I do not rule out its being an actual, meaningful inscription. The lettering does resemble Greek, Caucasian Albanian and Asomtavruli scripts in certain ways, but remains undeciphered. Its function could also be decorative, as with Pseudo-Kufic or other imitative scripts. ↩︎

Biography
Angus Docherty recently completed an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford. He is interested in poetry (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Modernist), architecture (ecclesiastical or otherwise), aesthetics and political history, among other competing obsessions. 

Selected Bibliography
Alpago Novello, Adriano. Art and Architecture in Medieval Georgia. Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, Collège Erasme, 1980.

Gamkrelidze, Gela, Mindorashvili Devid, Bragvadze, Zurab, and Kvachadze, Marine. A Topoarchaeological Dictionary of Kartlis Tskhovreba (ქართლის ცხოვრების ტოპოარქეოლოგიური ლექსიკონი). Tbilisi: Georgian National Museum, 2013.

Giviashvili, Irene. “Georgian Polyapsidal Church Architecture.” In Proceedings of the Vakhtang Beridze 1^st International Symposium of Georgian Culture: Georgian Art in the Context of European and Asian Cultures June 21-29, 2008, Georgia, edited by Peter Skinner, Dimiti Tumanishvili and Anna Shanshiashvili. Tbilisi: Georgian Arts & Culture Center, 2009.

Khoshtaria, David. Medieval Georgian Churches: A Concise Overview of Architecture. Tbilisi: Artanuji Publishing, 2023.

Loosley Leeming, Emma. Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Mepisashvili, Rusudan, Vakhtang Tsintsadze, Rolf Schrade. The Arts of Ancient Georgia, tr. Alison Jaffa. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. 

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