Zaza Skhirtladze:
Ani and Georgia: The Evidence of the Cultural Heritage

Ani, “the city of 1001 churches,” was for centuries the crossroads where the political, economic, and confessional interests of different countries intersected. As a result, Ani developed as a unique environment in which the cultural elements of Armenia and Byzantium as well as of Seljuk Rum and Georgia were overlaid and intertwined.

The Institute of Art History and Theory of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University has completed a project which aimed to provide a reasonably comprehensive analysis of Ani-Shirak as a distinguished multi-cultural environment and, alongside its diverse cultural heritage, to study aspects related to its coexistence with Georgian political, confessional and artistic heritage. The material revealed by the project presents a holistic picture of the environment of Ani as a place where various cultural circles meet and correlate, in many respects. Furthermore, taking Ani as its focal point, the study gives a new understanding of the ethno-confessional and cultural processes taking place across the South Caucasus throughout the centuries.

The present paper presents results of implementation of the project already published in three volumes.

Zaza Skhirtladze is a Professor and the Head of the Institute of Art History and Theory, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. His main research interests are medieval art of Georgia and the Christian East, cultural interrelations in the South Caucasus, and desert monasticism. Over the last decades Zaza Skhirtladze led several international and local projects – among these History in Images: Corpus of Historical Figures in Georgian Art and most recently, the Electronic Database of Medieval Georgian Murals. Zaza Skhirtladze is a head of the Gareja Studies Centre, and the editor of the Studies in the Humanities. Proceedings of the Faculty of Humanities, Tbilisi State University.