Shoreti monastery

A nuskhuri inscription, reading: "Lord, have a mercy on Nikoloz, head of the masons, Amen!" (published 1909).

The Shoreti monastery is located in a rocky ravine, some 6 km northeast of the modern village of Ota, Aspindza Municipality, and can be accessed through an off-road trail or a hiking route.[2] The ravine, known as the Aspindzis-Khevi, lies in the historical province of Samtskhe, on the conventional border with Javakheti and Trialeti.[3]

The monastery is only occasionally mentioned in written records. Its original, and more correct,[3] name is Shorota (შოროთა), which appears in the 13th–14th-century margin notes of the Vani Gospels manuscript as well as an Ottoman fiscal document dated to 1595. Prince Vakhushti, compiling his Description of the Kingdom of Georgia in 1745, erroneously refers to the monastery—abandoned by that time—as Shorapani. The French student of the Caucasian antiquities, Marie-Félicité Brosset, who visited the monastery in the snowy winter of 1849, transcribes its name as "Choloth"; his guide, the Muslim Georgian nobleman Kiamyl-Beg, of the Diasamidze, provided him with an alternative name, "Taïdj".[3][4][5] The current name Shoreti was popularized by the historian Ekvtime Taqaishvili who explored the half-ruined monastery in 1902.[3] Neglect and earthquakes brought the former monastic complex to the verge of a complete collapse. A series of conservation works and archaeological studies were conducted between 1986 and 2009, and finally, the building was systematically studied and fully rebuilt from 2015 to 2018.[2]

View from the south as of 2014.

The Shoreti monastery consists of the main church, a bell tower, scriptorium, fort with a small chapel, and rock-cut cells. The main church, set in a two-nave basilican plan, is a two-storey composite building, extensively altered, rebuilt, and enlarged in the course of history. The earliest construction phase, probably preceded by an earlier, 6th–7th-century shrine, is indicated by courses of brickwork in two crypts and refectory as well as a stone stela, with a carved stylized cross, built into a doorway under the sanctuary. The upper floor is an elongated, internally cruciform hall. The ground floor has a porch on the south. A bell tower—with nine arched, parallel-sided apertures—forms an addition to the porch, which was enlarged for this purpose in the 14th or 15th century. The south façade of this structure contains a tripartite composition, in which two arches, supported on an octagonal column, form an entrance, topped by a third arch. A small chapel and scriptorium annexed to the church on the south and west, respectively, were built in the 12th or 13th century, when the church appears to have been significantly enlarged and converted into a lavra.[6]

The church is notable for a Byzantine wall mosaic with the depiction of the Mother of God—surviving as a concentration of loose mosaic tesserae—a rare church adornment for the Georgian art, with only three other instances known at Tsromi, Gelati, and Martvili.[6][7] The church bears several medieval Georgian inscriptions. One, on the south façade, makes mention of the chief mason Nikoloz; another commemorates the catholicos Mikel.[5]