Dynastic History | Gelati Monastery, Kutaisi — A Tombstone Its Founder Asked to Be Walked On

David IV founded the monastery above Kutaisi in 1106, and one purpose was plain: the dynasty wanted a burial place of its own. He did not live to see the main church finished. It was completed and consecrated in 1130, under his son Demetre I.

Beside it he set an academy. Its teaching ran to geometry, arithmetic, music, philosophy, rhetoric and astronomy, and the scholars attached to it included Ioane Petritsi, who worked on Proclus, and Arsen Ikaltoeli, whose theological compilation drew on Aristotle.

David died on 24 January 1125. The tombstone at the south gate carries a line modelled on a psalm — "This is my resting place forever: here I will dwell for I desired so" — and the accounts add that he asked to lie where everyone entering would tread on him. It is worth saying plainly that there is no clear evidence he was in fact buried beneath it.

The iron gate next to the tomb is a trophy. Its Arabic inscription dates it to 1062 and names the smith, al-Haddad Ibrahim, and Demetre I carried it off from Ganja, in 1139 by one account and 1138 by another. Much of what furnished the monastery arrived the same way: David gave it reliquaries and liturgical objects taken in war. The Georgian Chronicles, which are the dynasty's own record, say he settled some 40,000 Kipchak families in the kingdom in 1118. That is the chronicle's number, not a count.

The monastery is in use, its churches still holding services. It was inscribed as World Heritage in 1994, placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2010, and taken off it on 10 July 2017.

📸 Cover: Gelati Monastery seen across the valley, Jaba1977, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons