Kvabiskhevi church

Kvabiskhevi is a three-nave basilica built of stone on a small terrace of a high rocky mountain slope, its eastern façade leaning against the rock—the face of which had been purposefully chipped off—and the three other sides overlooking the steep abyss into the Kvabiskhevi canyon. The terrace can only be accessed via a trail from the northeast leading up to the church from the Kvabiskhevi guard station of the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park.^[2]

Difficult to access, the church served in the Middle Ages as a wartime shelter for the locals, whose ruined dwellings and rock-cut shelters are found below the church. The village, at that time known as Kvabi ("a cave"), was completely depopulated shortly after the Ottoman takeover of the area in 1578—a Turkish census of 1595 listing only six permanent residents—and the church was abandoned. The modern-day village of Kvabiskhevi, southeast of the church, is the result of resettlement from the mountainous northwestern Georgian province of Racha in the 1870s.^[3]

The church measures 8 x 4 sq. m. The main nave is much larger than the lateral naves, ending in a semi-circular eastern apse with an arched window. The conch is spherical. The upper central portions of the northern and southern walls contain brackets. The lower central portion of the western wall has a doorway, internally architraved and externally arched. The main nave is separated from the other two by two arches on each side, supported by rectangular capitaled pillars. The northern nave terminates with a semi-circular nave with windows. The southern nave is divided into two chambers by a septum pierced by a low rectangular entrance. Most of the external decorations are found on the western façade, including three Bolnisi-type crosses carved in relief above the entrance door, a recurrent motif in early Christian art in Georgia.^[3][4]

The basilica contains remnants of medieval wall painting. Of note is a 12th–13th-century fresco in the northern wall of the southern nave, depicting a young man and a woman, identified by the accompanying medieval Georgian asomtavruli text as Shota and Ia, respectively. The fresco is reproduced in a repoussé work on the iron gate, handmade in 1987.^[5] Shota was not an uncommon name among the local aristocracy. One popular hypothesis identifies the man from the Kvabiskhevi fresco with the poet Shota Rustaveli, who penned the epic Knight in the Panther's Skin.^[6]