Ketevan Abashidze
First, only in general terms, about pre-Christian temples.
A pagan temple is the dwelling of a deity. It is assumed that the deity really lives in the temple building. So in the temples of the ancient pre-Christian era, built at different times and in different countries, there usually stood a statue of the deity. Only the chief priests could go inside, and only on certain days.
As an example, let us consider the Egyptian temple at Luxor, dedicated to the god Amun. It was built in the 2nd millennium before the Nativity of Christ (15th–16th centuries BC). The architectural composition here is built along a single central axis. The first thing that strikes the visitor is the so-called pylons, of grandiose scale; from here is the entrance into the temple complex. The pylons hide from the visitor's eyes entirely the buildings spread out behind them. Then begins an alternation of colonnaded courts and halls, each again preceded by pylons. So the composition develops gradually in depth, and at the end is the temple proper — the sanctuary, where the statue of the god Amun stood. Around the sanctuary are small rooms of various ritual purposes. The other temples of Egypt are built on this type too, and in the sanctuary stood the statue of one or several deities.
Now let us consider the Greek temple. The Parthenon in the city of Athens was built in the second half of the 5th century BC and is dedicated to the goddess Athena. The temple is a rectangular building. It is surrounded by columns on all four sides. The main part of the temple is the naos, or cella, with rows of columns on both sides, at the head of which, opposite the entrance, stood the 12-metre statue of Athena Parthenos made by Phidias. So it was in other Greek temples too. The chief sacred service, that is, the main ritual, took place outside, around the temple, which was reflected on its walls — in the reliefs of the friezes.
Like the Egyptian and Greek temples, the Temple of Jerusalem was based on the same principle. It consisted of three parts — the porch, the sanctuary and the Holy of Holies. The last, the Holy of Holies, was separated from the sanctuary, that is, the Holy Place, by a veil. In the Holy of Holies stood the ark of the Old Covenant (of the law), and on the ark were placed two cherubim wrought of gold. “…And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be. And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims…” (Exod. 25:19–22). The Temple was oriented to the west; the entrance was from the east — “Solomon's porch.” In the east too, in the Holy Place or sanctuary, sacrifice was offered, while in the west was the Holy of Holies. In the Holy of Holies God's presence was understood as almost physical, as in an entirely real dwelling. A priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year. The Hebrews had no other temple, for here was the place of God's revelation. It was a temple of expectation. The Hebrews were waiting for the Messiah, the Saviour. The coming of the Messiah-Redeemer had been promised to them, and so they were to be the first to hear the Gospel of the Kingdom of heaven. With the coming of John the Baptist prophecy ceased, for everything foretold had been fulfilled: that is, Christ had come and the nearness of the Kingdom of God on earth had been proclaimed. But the Hebrews pictured the Messiah as a mighty king who would free them from Roman slavery. So they did not see or recognise the true God in Christ, and they nailed Him to the cross. At the hour of Jesus Christ's death several miracles took place, among them the veil that divided the Holy Place, or sanctuary, from the Holy of Holies was torn in two.
“And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent” (Matt. 27:51).
The Christian church, unlike the pagan temple, is characterised by omnipresence… “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20).
At first the Church was only the assembly of the faithful. The building was not sacred: these were the “Christian houses of prayer” and the burial chambers, the catacombs, connected with the cult of the dead. In the course of time — from the recognition of Christianity and its proclamation as the official state religion — the building of Christian churches began. In the 4th century every church is one and the same house of God, an image replacing the heavenly, true temple. Gradually, together with the changing and taking shape of worship and the Liturgy, the Christian church too undergoes changes; certain norms and rules appear that must be kept. One such unchanging rule after the 5th century is the orientation of the church building to the east, unlike the Temple of Jerusalem and pagan temples; thus the church, finished with its altar, looked to the east.
The first churches were most often built where divine power had been directly manifested: thus, for example, churches were built in Jerusalem over the Lord's Tomb, in Syria around the pillar of Symeon the Stylite, in Rome over the tomb of St Peter, and so on. So too in Georgia: St Nino built the first church where the Saviour's tunic was buried; churches were also built at Erusheti (Meskheti) and Manglisi — relics brought from Constantinople were kept here: “a nail and the footboards of the Lord's Cross”; at the place of St Nino's burial, the village of Bodbe (Kakheti), the holy King Mirian built a church, and so on.
If the pagan temple did not presuppose a congregation, the Christian church is first of all a church of assembly. The holy Church is first of all an assembly of people, while the church as an architectural building is the place where people are brought into communion and union with the world above. The holy father Maximus the Confessor says that from the point of view of architecture a church is a single building which, by the particular purpose of its parts, is divided into the place for the clergy — this is the sanctuary — and the middle space of the building, the place open to every believer.
According to Archpriest Pavel Florensky, the church has various symbolic meanings, and so the sanctuary too carries various symbolic weight. Thus, for example, in the view of the holy father Symeon of Thessalonica, when the church represents Christ, the God-man, the sanctuary reflects His invisible, divine nature, and the middle space of the church the visible one, the Son of Man. He also says that the sanctuary is a symbol of heaven, and the middle space of earth. In an anthropological interpretation, notes Archpriest Pavel Florensky, the sanctuary reflects the human soul, and the middle space the body. He calls the middle space of the church “Jacob's ladder,” which lifts us from the visible to the invisible, while the sanctuary is a space not of this world, the place of the invisible; here is the altar “above the heavens.” The sanctuary and the middle space, that is, two worlds, are separated from one another by the iconostasis — the screen. It is the boundary between the visible and invisible worlds, and at the same time what unites them.
In every case, within the architectural organism of the church the sanctuary is set over against the middle space in the sense of the invisible world. It is precisely this difference that makes them one and makes the church an image of the whole world.
The holy father Maximus the Confessor explains this as follows: the spiritual essence of the church is known through its three basic symbols, which we see in the visible forms and images of the church. The church is an image of the Church of Christ, and at the same time it is an image of the whole world and an image of man.
The world, which has its beginning from God, is divided in two: the intelligible world, which is contemplated only by the mind and is filled with rational bodiless beings; and the sensible world, bodily, “majestically woven of all forms and natures.” The first, the intelligible, is the invisible world, the world above, or heaven, whose symbol in the church building is the sanctuary; the second is the visible world, the world below, or earth, whose symbol is the middle space. Both make up the whole world, just as parts make up the whole (or the whole is made from the parts).
1. Oshki (building begun in the 950s–960s) 2. Svetitskhoveli (1010–1029) 3. Alaverdi (first quarter of the 11th century) 4. Samtavisi (1030)
The image (that is, the likeness) of the world not made with hands and untouchable is known, wisely contemplated and revealed through the visible world. “Standing in the church, we are like those standing in heaven.” It is precisely here, in the wholeness that Christian culture presents to us in visible images — whether an architectural building, wall painting or icon painting, the miniatures of holy books or their embossed covers, sacred objects and so on — that the whole world is contemplated.
“And He made that temple an image of the whole world, sensible and intelligible. For as there are heaven and earth and between them the dividing firmament, so God commanded its building too, and divided that temple in two and separated them by a veil; and the outer part, outside the veil, He allowed everyone to see, but the inner He made impassable and invisible to all, save only the high priest” (the holy father John Chrysostom).
Thus the Christian church, unlike pagan temples, is a church of assembly; it unites or gathers within itself the faithful — the congregation and the clergy — and establishes them in their places in the separate parts of the spatial building, which together symbolically reflect the image of the whole world. And this image “comes alive” in the church's worship — when the holy Church performs the mysteries and sacred rites; when all of us together offer prayer to God, earth and heaven meet. Our ascent from earth to heaven begins from the moment we enter the church. “The church is the house of God, the dwelling of God, the visible heaven.”
The Orthodox Christian Georgian people created a Christian culture deeply bound up with its creed and faith, sprung from the depths of its confession. One of its main parts is church architecture, painting, icon painting, metal-chasing… that is, what we today call the fine arts. The chief of these is architecture, and everything else depends on it and forms part of it.
Christian teaching is made manifest in the architectural forms and structures of the church, which can be presented on the basis of the general appearance of the Georgian cross-domed church. In Georgian church building several types of church developed, the leading one being the cross-domed church. The name itself shows that it consists of two important parts: the “cruciform” lower body and the dome crowning it. At the base of the lower body lies the most important symbol of the Christian faith — the cross. In plan it is a cross inscribed in a rectangle, whose west–east axis is lengthened and ends in the east in a semicircular form, the so-called apse — this is the sanctuary. The areas left between the arms of the cross and the rectangle (the so-called spaces between the arms) are given over in the west to open spaces, while in the east, on either side of the sanctuary, there are small rectangular rooms, also ending in apses — these are the prothesis (to the north) and the diaconicon (to the south).
The division of the plan stands out clearly in space in a gradual, rising “stepped” rhythm — first the spaces between the arms (the diaconicon and prothesis are often two-storeyed), and then the arms of the cross. Inside, in the interior, they are roofed with semicircular vaults; only the sanctuary (and the apses of its side rooms) ends in a conch — a quarter of a sphere.
Where the arms cross, a square area is formed. At its corners, set diagonally across them, are small triangular (point downwards) walls curved like “sails.” Leaning towards one another, they widen upwards and close into a circle. They are called pendentives. The pendentives give the church's interior greater lightness, airiness and upward pull, and act as the link between the two important parts of the church, both structurally and spatially. On the circular ring they form rests the dome, which continues the upward thrust of the space towards heaven. It is round in outline, with a high drum, and is finished above with a hemisphere. On the dome, in monuments of the early period — before the 10th century — a large relief cross was depicted, and so the cross made manifest spatially in the lower body of the building was traced as an image on the dome. For Georgian believers the sight of the cross was always the main thing.
1. Kvatakhevi, 12th–13th centuries 2. Ikorta, 1172 3. Kintsvisi, 12th–13th centuries 4. Betania, 12th–13th centuries 5. The main church of the Akhtala monastery complex, 12th–13th centuries 6. Akori, 13th century
The whole weight of the dome is distributed onto the walls of the church and onto the piers raised in the central space. Corresponding to the number of pendentives, there are four piers; often in the east two piers merge with the sanctuary and appear as projections of the sanctuary.
Thus a single, enclosed interior is obtained — an inner space with a rising rhythm directed towards heaven, which is nowhere broken: one form flows into another, one spatial section pours into another, and so the forms rising up into space grow lighter by degrees and seem to lose their materiality. This is strengthened still more by the light coming through the windows, which are also distributed over the walls in a rising, stepped rhythm. It pours with special force into the dome, and an exalted, spiritualised, truly mystical space is created, detached from this world — a space where, together with the celebration of the Liturgy, the grace of God flows down abundantly.
The inner division of the building, in the stepped, rising rhythm of its spatial sections, shows itself clearly outside too, in the form of volumetric masses in a straight line (along a single line) (see plan). The solid walls rise gradually from the ground and in space, again upwards, in a growing rhythm directed towards heaven, begin to divide into volumetric masses.
The volumes of the spaces between the arms appear with single-pitched roofs, while the arms of the cross rising above them end in triangular gables (point upwards). Their roofs, accordingly, are double-pitched.
The upward thrust of the church's outer masses is continued again by the outer structures of the pendentives. This is then completed by the dome with its conical roof, directed towards heaven. This is the symbol, the logical conclusion (ending) of this whole movement towards heaven — on top of it the cross is set.
An important quality of Georgian domed architecture is the “transparent clarity” of its structure: every structural element or spatial form has a clearly distinguished and finished appearance on the outside; from outside it is already perfectly clear what the interior is like. Here there is complete correspondence between exterior and interior, and also between function and form.
A clear example of this is the triangular niches on the east façade of the Georgian church. These niches are cut, on Georgian churches, mainly only in the east façade. On this side, between the semicircular apses, because they are inscribed in a rectangle (see plan), a superfluous clumsy mass forms in the wall. These triangular niches are a structural lightening of it. Besides, they make perceptible from outside too the inner division of this part of the church into three, of which the central, larger one is the sanctuary. In this way the east façade acquires a special artistic significance. Thus again we are dealing with an artistic, structural and ideological unity.
How does the painting answer to the architecture — that is, how are the individual main spatial sections understood in terms of content? Let us recall that the church is the image on earth of the true heavenly temple, the visible heaven, the likeness of the whole world. Accordingly, the programme of the painting unfolds from top to bottom. In the hemisphere of the dome is “heaven,” which dominates; over the whole inner space is depicted the Lord, “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” (characteristic of Georgia is the depiction of a triumphal cross on the sphere of the dome, that is, on the vault of heaven). On the drum of the dome, between the windows, there are two registers: at the base of the sphere the archangels, and below them the prophets of the Old Testament — God's chosen ones, who foretold the coming of the Messiah;
On the pendentives (which join the dome, that is, “heaven,” to the lower cruciform body of the building) the Evangelists are depicted — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — precisely those who joined heaven and earth; by whose labours the teaching of Christ, the incarnate Son of God, and the account of the life He lived on earth have been left to us in writing.
On the piers that hold up the dome (heaven) and ground it on earth are depicted those people who have been numbered among the saints through their martyr's end: blessed women, desert-dwellers, stylites, holy martyr-warriors and others. Like the piers, they established Christ's teaching on earth, and on their holy labour and self-sacrifice the Church on earth rests and is founded.
An important spatial section of the lower cruciform body of the church building is the sanctuary, ending in a conch, that is, half a dome. Here is always depicted the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, seated on the Lord's throne: a) “Christ in Glory” — the Saviour accompanied by a host of angels; b) “Deesis” — the Saviour between the interceding Mother of God and John the Baptist; and c) most characteristic of Georgia, the depiction in the conch of the sanctuary of the Most Holy Mother of God enthroned with the Child, as Queen of paradise.
Below the conch is most often depicted “The Communion of the Apostles by the Saviour,” that is, the heavenly prototype of the earthly Liturgy, of what is performed in the sanctuary. Below this are the holy fathers of the Church — God-wise hierarchs: St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian and others.
On the walls of the cruciform body of the church's interior the scenes of Christ's earthly life unfold — in sequence, framed one by one. The scenes are clearly separated from each other by rectangular frames. Often here too are scenes from the life of the Most Holy Mother of God, or of the church's “patron” (the one in whose name the church is built). These scenes are presented mainly on the vaults and walls in two or three registers.
In the lowest row (register) of the painting, close to the ground, saints are depicted again: desert-dwellers, stylites, martyrs and others. And together with them, most often near the sanctuary, the ktitors were depicted with raised hands in postures of supplication before the Mother of God or the Saviour — those who commissioned and built the church, among them kings, upon whom holy grace comes down (they are descendants of the prophet David).
Thus the lower register is given to people of earth who served the Lord in deed — by a martyr's life, by overcoming the passions, by unceasing prayer for the nation and the homeland, by caring for them, by building churches…
The painting never begins directly at ground level. It is always raised a little, and before the first register begins there is painted either a thick ornamental border or a decorative curtain, which once again stresses that the images on the wall are separated from us, the congregation.
The wall is understood as an abstract space in which the holy Gospel is unfolded, in which Christ's life as it were “comes alive” — the prophecies, the miracles, the preparation of the sacrifice, the Ascension… Since the church is an image of the heavenly world, the world above, its walls are conventionally understood as this other-worldly, mystical, invisible space, the “fourth dimension” — that is, what is unchanging and eternal and stands outside time and space. This is timeless time. Accordingly, the main artistic means of expression of the wall paintings of the Orthodox world are flatness, linearity, patches of colour… The painting submits to the plane of the wall and spreads out along it; the plane of the church wall is a mystical space, and the images of people or things are their image, their symbolic likeness, spirit and not flesh, not matter.
Thus the church is a whole bound together in content and function, in which the inner space is of special importance. Here holy grace flows down together with the Liturgy celebrated by the earthly Church. It is a mystical space in which man is brought into communion with the heavenly world.
Symbolically, the sanctuary reflects the invisible intelligible world — heaven — and the middle space of the church the visible, sensible world, that is, earth. These two are divided from each other by the iconostasis — the screen. It is not a structural form of the building; it is “set in,” “built in” between these two spatial sections. It is the boundary between them, both dividing and uniting. The study of the chancel screens of Georgian churches shows that in the early period they were fairly open and consisted of several linked arches. In the Middle Ages, and particularly from the 11th century on, slabs were set between the arches; on the side of the screen facing the laity (the congregation) there were most often reliefs. Here are images of St George and St Symeon the Stylite, or of the holy Evangelists; the holy Daniel in the lions' den, and others. They are in fact, if one may say so, “icons in stone.”
In ancient times a great processional cross was set up in front of the screen — a large embossed cross, on whose arms, like the wall paintings of the church, scenes from the life of Christ or of some saint (St George) are often unfolded. Thus, before the eyes of the believer standing in prayer before the sanctuary during the Liturgy, the cross, that greatest symbol of Christians, rises once again; then the open arched screen, spread with icons, behind which the sanctuary could be glimpsed here and there. United with this whole harmony of the fine arts (architecture, wall painting, icon painting…), the Georgian church chants, together with the prayers offered by the Church's ministers during the Liturgy, spiritually prepare us, ordinary mortals of this world, and join us to the heavenly, the invisible world — to the fourth dimension, if one may call it that. “Standing reverently in the temple of God, take a living part with all your heart in all the divine hymns and prayers.” “When you hear prayer in church, try to let not only your ear but your heart listen, so that the supplication of the Church may become your own prayer.”
No less important was the outward appearance of the church — the image, the exterior. The outer wall of the church is the part of the “house of God” that is in direct contact with the secular space — it looks straight out at the world, the visible world (as was the case with the iconostasis). If in the interior the unity of the wall's plane could not be broken, here, on the contrary, the powerful spiritual charge accumulated within “bursts out” in the form of relief decoration; the wall seems to breathe out ornamental and relief images, swelling out and curving in by degrees; but however strongly the relief decoration projects, it never separates from the surface of the wall and never stands as sculpture in the round in three-dimensional space (our space). Here too the plane of the wall remains the frame of reference. On the façades are depicted the Saviour, the Mother of God, kings, holy martyr-warriors or monks, the tree of life, the animals of paradise and so on. That is, all these images are connected with the world above, with heaven; they are parts sharing in it (they belong to the world above), and naturally, on earth, they cannot separate from the “house” of the true heaven, the “visible heaven,” and become material objects, become matter.
If we look closely at the relief images on the walls, it is as if a single imaginary, invisible plane passes over them, preventing the image from being completed as a solid, closed form in the round. This invisible dividing plane is the boundary between the praying person, or the world, and the church, the world above.
The architectural building knows no “splitting” of the wall's plane. Even the niche cut in triangular form on the east façade is always included in the decorative system of that same façade, as one of the elements “woven” into it. Thus in Georgian church architecture the main thing is the wall, the plane, which remains the frame of reference for the relief decoration.
Georgian creative thinking is characterised by the creation of harmonious ensembles in which the new is in every respect in keeping and in proportion with what already exists — with nature and the architectural setting. The world, nature, as the “handiwork” of the greatest Creator, God, was the first thing to be taken into account in building a church.
Thus, for example, the church of the Holy Cross (Jvari) at Mtskheta is the compositional continuation of the mountain and forms the logical conclusion and crown of its summit. It gathers and orders the whole space around it. The architect had an astonishing sense of the grandeur of the place and its ideological and spiritual meaning, and, as a truly great creator, he incorporated his building organically into the outer world created by God and revealed still more — now through architecture — the essence and meaning of this place.
The same can be said of Alaverdi: it is as if the Georgian creative genius had “burst out” onto the boundless, mightily outspread Alazani valley in the form of the church of Alaverdi, reaching up to heaven. The church soaring into the sky is visible from every side like a mighty sword, uniting the whole outer world. It takes possession of vast spaces — the wide, limitless valley of the Alazani and the mighty massif of the Caucasus — and gathers, unifies and orders all these surroundings, appearing as their truly ideological, spiritual and compositional centre.
In early architectural planning, church and secular architecture were always clearly distinguished. This is natural: the spiritual is eternal, while the secular is passing.
There was a hierarchical subordination: nature, the outer world, determining the appearance, scale and character of the building; then the church — the symbol of eternity — as the dominant feature of the ensemble; and finally secular building, observing its own social hierarchy. All this was united by one great idea: to balance one with another, to fit the new to what already existed, to inscribe it within it, to reveal its main idea and essence, and to be united with it in composition too.
The temple of God is the dwelling of God, the visible heaven, the school of faith and piety; a place of healing for our infirmities of body and soul; a place of communion between those of heaven and those of earth; a house of prayer, where your prayer will be joined with the prayer of the saints; a place of the special presence of the grace of God, without which the human soul dies to the spiritual life, just as grass withers without rain and at last dries up.”
