Dynastic History | Vardzia — Two Rulers Holding the Church Between Them

On the north wall of the main church at Vardzia, cut into a cliff above the Mtkvari, two figures stand side by side in court dress, crowned and haloed, holding a model of the church between them. They are Giorgi III and his daughter Tamar. The panel belongs to the years between his death in 1184 and her marriage in 1186, which makes it a picture painted in the middle of a succession.

Tamar was the first woman to rule Georgia in her own right, and the medieval Georgian sources give her the title mepe, the same word used for a king. Antony Eastmond's study of royal imagery in medieval Georgia reads panels of this kind as arguments rather than likenesses: dynastic groups assembled to assert a legitimate right to rule, with the rulers presented as a focus of worship. The argument here is the succession itself.

The complex around the church was begun under Giorgi III, who reigned from 1156 to 1184, and it is a rock-cut monastery of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — several storeys of chambers driven into the rock, with the church at their centre. Nothing in the record names the people who cut them. Much of the outer rock has since fallen away, so galleries that were carved as interiors now open onto the cliff face.

Georgia put Vardzia on its UNESCO tentative list in October 2007, through the Ministry of Culture, Monuments Protection and Sport, describing the murals as containing portraits of the royal family. The complex is protected as a state museum-reserve.

📸 Cover: the donor panel showing Giorgi III and Tamar in the church at Vardzia, dave massie, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons