The Evidence Written in Stone: An Evaluation of the Relationship (or Not) of Syrian and Georgian Ecclesiastical Architecture

Anyone seeking to become acquainted with the history of Georgian Architecture will soon become aware of the fact that the field is fraught with methodological problems and has been largely static since the death of Giorgi Chubinashvili in 1973. Chubinashvili was the dominant figure in the field throughout the Soviet era and the subject is still controlled by his students, who have failed to significantly move the discipline forward in the forty-five years since his death. Whilst Chubinashvili may be credited as the founding father of the modern disciplines of art and architectural history in Georgia and is notable for his extensive publications, in common with a number of Soviet scholars his output is now widely viewed as being of variable quality. Particular instances where recent research has proved Chubinashvili’s suppositions to be wrong will be discussed later in this chapter but here it is important to highlight from the outset the fact that his limitations are rooted in three particular issues. The first is that he was handicapped by working on a largely ecclesiastical architectural tradition in a time and place where theological knowledge was unavailable and actively forbidden as an area of research, meaning that he could only study the monuments in a schematic manner that divorced form from function; this facilitated the development of a typology of ecclesiastical architecture that did not question the developing ritual needs of the