FaRiG is delighted to be offering its sponsorship and backing to seven Georgian
scholars who are coming to London in August for this year's International
Congress of Byzantine Studies. This is a prestigious five-yearly gathering in
which around 1,000 experts on all aspects of Byzantine civilisation come together
to present papers and exchange ideas. Here is some information about the
scholars we are sponsoring, and the topics on which they hope to speak at the
London conference.
Nino Kavtaria looks after the Art History and Theory section of the
Department of History at Tbilisi State University. She has been studying the
miniature paintings in some superbly illuminated manuscripts that were
produced in the 11th century by a Georgian scriptorium, at Kalipos monastery
on the Black Mountain near Antioch/Antakya in the south of present-day Turkey.
In her paper, she will be focusing on the Alaverdi Gospel, one of the greatest
products of that scriptorium. She will compare and contrast the Black Mountain
manuscripts with other illuminated texts from the Greek and Georgian worlds from
the same period.
Giorgi Tcheishvili is a senior researcher at the Insitute of History and
Ethnography of the Georgian Academy of Science. He is an editor of the Historical
Atlas of Georgia (Tbilisi, 2003) and of its forthcoming English edition. He is also the author
of 13 academic articles, and has received a research award from the British Academy.
In his paper, he will be looking at church organisation in southwestern part of the medieval
Georgian kingdom during the 9th and 10th centuries. He will explain the dynastic, geopolitical
and theological factors which led to the establishment of five new dioceses in the territory
of the Bagratid kings.
Victoria Jugeli
Victoria Jugeli is a lecturer at the Institute of Classical Philology, Byzantine
and Modern Greek Studies at Tbilisi State University. In her paper, she will be looking at a 'Catena
Bible' - in other words, a text of the Bible accompanied by a 'chain' of
related commentaries from the early Church fathers - from Gelati, the great Georgian
monastery and centre of learning founded in 1106. She will be comparing and contrasting
the commentaries in Georgian with the Greek originals (such as the works of Monk
Nicephoros Theotokis) on which they are based.
Irina Giviashvili lectures in medieval architecture at the Faculty of Art History
and Restoration of the Tbilisi State Academy of Art. She has a special interest
in the churches of the Tao-Klarjeti region, now part of northeastern Turkey,
which was one the greatest centres of Georgian culture and spirituality in the 9th
and 10th centuries. At one point this region was home to 12 important monasteries,
and it was described as the 'Georgian Sinai'. Dr Giviashvili has looked in
particular at the mysterious Zegani church, a 10th century structure which was
discovered in 1902 and is not mentioned in any medieval document. In recent years
she and her co-worker Irakli Koplatadze have presented the fruits of their research
at international conferences in Budapest and Oxford. She is looking forward to
taking part, along with Turkish, Georgian and other European scholars, in a special
session of the Byzantine Congress in London which will be devoted to the
Tao-Klarjeti region and its heritage. Among the concerns she will raise is the
risk of ancient churches being threatened by plans to build a dam in the area.
Ketevan Bezarashvili is a church historian, literary critic, linguist
and patristics specialist. She has spent many years studying Georgian translations
of the works of St Gregory of Nazianzus. He was one of the three great
fathers of the Church who emerged from Cappadocia in the fourth century and played a formative
role in the development of Christian history and theology. Dr Bezarashvili's doctoral thesis looked
at the poetry of St Gregory, as translated into Georgian - a topic on which she has also lectured at
the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. In this year's paper, she will be looking at
the definitions of 'grammar' offered both by St Gregory and by later Byzantine writers, and at
how these definitions were rendered into Georgian. These definitions, she will argue, implied
an understanding of the purpose of language, rhetoric and poetry that was conveyed to the
Georgian world by translators working at the Gelati monastic school in the 12th century.
As a philologist and church historian, Maia Matchavariani is another specialist
on Georgian versions of the works of St Gregory of Nazianzus. She has written 15 academic articles
in this subject area and presented three papers to international conferences. In her presentation to
the London congress, she will looking in particular at a work ascribed to St Gregory
in praise of St Demetrios, one of the most popular holy figures in the eastern Christian
world. This text has survived in Georgian but there is no obvious Greek original. What
Dr Matchavariani will demonstrate that the Georgian text is closely based on a
Greek document that does exist, a work by St Gregory in praise of St Cyprian, with
some stories from the life of St Demetrios added in. This is an intriguing piece of
scholarly detective work with broader implications for the study of patristic texts.
FaRiG Photos
Below are some photos of monuments and archaeological sites in Georgia.
Click on one to be taken to our photo site, or if you are a lover of Georgian culture please feel free to submit your own photographs to the site, by emailing them to FaRiG
