The Southern Caucasus Regions: Heritage, Landscape and Narratives

The Southern Caucasus region (between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) encompasses Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, including territories located in present-day Iran, as well as the former Georgian and Armenian areas of eastern Turkey. The Southern Caucasus has been since early times an important area of contact or conflict between Central Asia and the Mediterranean, characterized by complex political and religious topographies, a variety of linguistic as well as material and artistic cultures. The monuments of the region cannot simply be understood as peripheral to the Greco-Roman and Persian worlds, as derivatives of Byzantine or Iranian art, or defined by the affinities between Armenian and Georgian Orthodox Christianity and Byzantium on the one hand or the conflicts and friction with various Islamic cultures and dynasties, be they Arab or Seljuk, Timurid, Safavid or Ottoman, on the other. And Northern Caucasus and Russia need to be considered, too.

The ancient, medieval and modern artefacts and monuments of the region have been created or built in dialogue with all or some of them if not also among themselves, and partly already from the 19^th century they present challenges for art history and its narratives, between claims of national identity, historiographies of all kind and more recent transcultural approaches, to mention only a few.

The research project focusing on Heritage, Landscape, Narrative is a continuation of the long-standing projects ‘Georgia in a Cross-Cultural Perspective’ and ‘Aesthetics, Art, and Architecture in the Caucasus’. It is currently working in two different directions. The first is the establishment of and participation in an international cooperation regarding the conservation, restoration and requalification of endangered heritage sites in Georgia, in particular the safeguarding of the Gelati Monastery. Since 1994 an UNESCO World Heritage Site, it has been severely damaged by water infiltration in 2019. The complex of buildings, founded by Davide IV (called David the Builder) in 1106, contains important wall paintings from the 12^th to the 17^th centuries, whereas the 12^th century apse mosaic presenting the Virgin Mary between archangels is the only monumental mosaic preserved in Georgia. From its very foundation, Gelati was the seat of an academy where theologians, philosophers and legal scholars worked, and while the chroniclers of the founder called the monastery a second Jerusalem, they defined the Academy as a new Athens, being superior in divine doctrines.

Over the last years, the KHI has been cooperating in the Gelati Rehabilitation project, led by the Georgian Orthodox Church, and since 2023 Gerhard Wolf chairs the International Advisory Board (https://gelatirehabilitation.ge/en/). This engagement is in line with the integrative and interdisciplinary approach regarding conservation science, restauration practices and art history. While in strong dialogue with the former, the joint efforts of the Georgian art historians, the participants of the KHI and international partners aim at a new approach to the artistic, religious and cultural-historical significance of Gelati, including field work, seminars and publications.

A second focus of the project is concerned with the historical relationship between landscape, monuments/artefacts and narratives. Of prime importance here are the sacred topographies and the legends of the conversion of Georgia to Christianity related to them. Case studies have been published or are in print, such as a study on the relic of the cross of St Nino. Regarding the constellation of ‘Landscape and Monument’, the project is closely collaborating with the OSCOP project, concerned with the conservation, digitization and study of collections and archives of historical photographs of Armenian sites. The aim of the co-operation projects is to take part in establishing an international research network dedicated to the art history of the southern Caucasus region beyond historical and contemporary political and religious boundaries.