Mtskheta sits where two rivers meet, the Mtkvari and the Aragvi, and it was here, in the first royal capital of Kartli, which the Romans knew as Iberia, that a haunting legend of a particular kind took root, one that precedes the Christianisation of the kingdom by some three centuries and bypasses its logic entirely, with no apostle arriving with a mission. The story, preserved in the Kartlis Tskhovreba, the medieval Georgian chronicles, begins instead with a Jewish man from this city, present at the Crucifixion, who bought Christ’s seamless tunic, the Chiton, from a Roman soldier and carried it home. When his sister Sidonia took the garment in her arms she died, for no reason the chronicle troubles to explain, and was buried where she fell with the tunic still held to her body, and a cedar grew in time from the earth above her grave.
When St Nino brought Christianity to Kartli in the early fourth century and King Mirian commissioned a church on that ground, the cedar was felled for a pillar that nothing and no one could raise until Nino prayed through the night, an angel descended, and the column settled blazing into its place. The site, and eventually the present cathedral built under Catholicos-Patriarch Melkisedek between 1010 and 1029, took its name from this: Svetitskhoveli, the Life-Giving Pillar.
Perched above the ancient capital of Mtskheta, the Church of the Holy Cross was built between approximately 586 and 605, at a moment when the kingdom it stood in had ceased to exist. In 580 the Sasanian Persian Empire had abolished the Iberian monarchy, placing the territory under direct imperial control and actively promoting Zoroastrianism in an effort to displace Christianity. Those efforts failed. Construction began around 586, in a kingdom without a king, completing only after a treaty in 591 between the emperor Maurice and Khusrau II divided the territory, Mtskheta passing to Byzantium and Tbilisi remaining under Persian control. The patrons who inscribed their names on the exterior walls saw all of this.
What followed changed the shape of Christianity permanently. The war between the two empires, which broke out in 602 and lasted 26 years, left the Sasanian state destroyed and Byzantium gravely weakened. Into that exhaustion came the Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, sweeping through western Asia and the Middle East. Jvari was completed just before any of that was foreseeable. Byzantine court titles, patricius and hypatos, appear in the dedicatory inscriptions. Sasanian and Byzantine artistic currents run together in the bas-reliefs. Whatever the patrons understood themselves to be doing, they left a building that sits at one of the hinges of Christian history.
The plan is tetraconchal, four apses radiating from a central domed bay, cut in precisely jointed dressed stone. On the east facade, portrait reliefs of the donor princes face outward. On the south, a Glorification of the Cross and an Ascension of Christ occupy the tympanum above the entrance, carved with a fluency that places this among the finest relief work surviving from the early medieval Caucasus.
Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Church of the Holy Cross, Mtskheta, c.586–605Jvari, Mtskheta, c.586–605
