Materiality and Cosmology: Old Georgian Churches as Sacred, Sublime, and Secular Objects

Abstract

Discourses about Georgian churches have since the nineteenth century treated the material quality of'ancientness’ associated with existing churches as being among their essential defining properties. This paper first explores how different material qualisigns of churches, including oldness and qualisigns attendant on oldness, allow churches to be interpreted as secular objects, by ordering them with theatres (as expressive of'civilization'), the natural landscape (expressive of an aesthetics of the sublime) or other monuments, including texts (expressive of culture). One result of such discourses is that the contemporary Orthodox Church finds it difficult to have ‘new’ churches accepted as being churches at all. These nineteenth‐century discourses thus provide a context for the complex and contested reception of old and new Orthodox churches, as well as other religious structures, such as mountain shrines, which have a more ambiguous relation with Orthodoxy.

Keywords:

• Semiotics
• materiality
• churches
• ruins
• monuments

Acknowledgments

The research leading to this paper was funded in part by grants or fellowships from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the NEH, and SSHRC. I would like to thank Khvtiso Mamisimedishvili, Nugzar Papuashvili, Harsha Ram, Zaza Shatirishvili, and Kevin Tuite for contributing in various ways to helping me build the argument here. I would like to thank the volume editor Anne Meneley for both arranging the panel that led to this paper and for patient and productive editorial engagement throughout. All errors are my own.

Notes

1. Georgians habitually refer to Queen Tamar as ‘King Tamar’ (Tamar Mepe), perhaps to emphasize that she wielded the power of a king in spite of her feminine gender. I refer to these churches as ‘Georgian churches’ and this period as ‘Georgia's Golden Age’ as a kind of shorthand but immediately caution that this is a tendentious and essentializing formulation, assuming that the multi‐ethnic Transcaucasian empire ruled by Tamar is to be identified in essence with the modern nation state of Georgia. Tamar ruled a multiethnic and multiconfessional empire, and the churches built in her time and other times almost necessarily have multiple claimants in the contemporary period. Battles between Georgian and Armenian nationalists over national styles of church architecture and churches as national patrimony, or between Georgian Orthodox philetists (religious nationalists) and Georgian Catholics over church ownership and restoration (Papuashvili 2006), which dominate the existing literature on churches, is something I will touch on only lightly here. Contextual‐izing these churches as products of Georgia's Golden Age or the early history of Christianity in Georgia (as one reviewer has suggested) can imply that a nationalist, and in particular a philetist (religious nationalist) interpretation is ultimately the historical master narrative for understanding them. Such a viewpoint might also mistakenly suggest that a positivistic disciplinary narrative based in archaeology is the master narrative of naturalized ‘empirical fact’ forming a presupposed ‘background’ to which all these other discourses considered here play the second fiddle of culturally or historically inflected ‘ideology’ (for other critical perspectives on archaeological epistemes see Abu‐Lughod 2001, Jusdanis 2004, Shanks 2007[1992]).

2. The Georgian Orthodox church was subsumed under the Russian church under the Russian empire as part of an explicitly ‘imperial philetist’ ideology that linked the Russian empire to religious Orthodoxy. As a result, Georgian priests of the Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy were by definition agents of the Russian state, often opposed by Georgian nationalist intelligentsia. Ironically, Georgian secular nationalist claims for autocephaly of the Georgian church (in the late Tsarist period up to the socialism period and in the post‐socialist period) became themselves a form of philetism (religious nationalism), strongly influenced by the Russian model of a direct linking of church to nation‐state (Papuashvili 2006:27–8). Philetism is considered to be a heresy by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, but as a state and popular model of the relationship of religion to nation‐state it is quite common in Russian and Georgian Orthodoxy, and is officially recognized in the Concordat between the Orthodox Church and the Georgian state of 2002 (Papuashvili 2006:32–4).

3. This discussion of churches as semiotic ‘hybrids’ is influenced by Latour (1993:10–11).

4. Actually this is a simplification, in the basic formulation both axes are ‘sublime', the vertical axis representing the conquering lyric subject and horizontal axis representing the vast extent of conquered empire that requires such elevation from which to view it (Ram 2003).

5. Nat'amali, sign, trace, shadow of someone.

6. For example, the editor of Droeba, Sergi Meskhi, issued editorials against such Church‐sponsored conversion activities amongst the Ottoman Georgians, noting that the Ottoman Georgians were already feeing Russian rule for fear of such forcible conversions, and that, in any case, religion was a matter of ‘conscience’, and that economic, administrative and cultural work was preferable to religious conversion in these regions (Meskhi 1880:1).

7. The Tiflis Amateur Photographers’ society was founded in 1893, associated with the professional photographers Alexander and Vasil Roinashvili, both of whom were noted photographers of Georgian ruins and antiquities (www.photomuseum. org.ge/a_roinashvili/index_en.htm).

8. Kevin Tuite (personal communication) notes the existence of such structures that have interiors, indicating that the forbidden quality exists whether or not it is a built‐in material feature of the architecture.