Bana (Turkey)
Bana ( Georgian ბანა , Turkish Penek ) is the ruin of a large round church of the medieval Georgian Kingdom of Tao-Klardschetien in today's northeast Turkish province of Erzurum . The cathedral with the basic plan of a four- cone building and a circular gallery was extended around 900 after a presumed predecessor in the 7th century and was in good condition until the middle of the 19th century. In the second half of the 10th century, Bana became the center of the Tao Principality of the Bagratid dynasty . Several manuscripts copied in Bana up to the last surviving one from 1511 mention the local bishops. After the region was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 16th century, Christian religious life was probably still possible to a limited extent until the 18th century.
location
Coordinates: 40 ° 40 ′ 5 ″ N , 42 ° 16 ′ 12 ″ E
From the expressway between Erzurum in the south and Artvin in the north, a road branches off to the northeast shortly after Tortum , which leads in the valley of the river Oltu ( Oltu Çayı ) in a wide arc around the southern foothills of the Yalnızçam mountain range towards Ardahan . Bana is located in the Şenkaya district about halfway between Oltu and Göle (Georgian Kola) north of the road and on the right (northern) side of the Penek River ( Penek Çayı ). From the junction at a bridge over the river it is two kilometers to the village of Penek, from where a road leads to the ruin, which can be seen after a little over another kilometer on the left on a broad hilltop. Within a few kilometers north of Penek there were once more churches, including a small rock church from around the 11th century near the village of Soğmonkale (Salomankale) and the Deliktaş church (Deliktaş Kilise), remains of one of the original six from 1977 Apses were preserved. The Kamkız Fortress (Kamkız Kalesi) overlooks the Kömürlü Valley , which is flowed through by the Kömür Çayı , which flows into the Penek Çayı. She is probably identical to the major Georgian fortress Kalmakhi which is repeatedly mentioned in Georgian historical sources and by the end of the 16th century, the seat of Sandzak was.
The westward flowing Penek flows into the Oltu, shortly before it flows into the Çoruh , the ruins of the İşhan monastery church are in the mountains . Along the Berta Suyu , which also flows into the Çoruh in a deep gorge in the north of the Yalnızçam Mountains, lie the ruins of several Georgian monasteries in small side valleys: from west to east these are Dolisqana , Opiza , Chandsta and Tbeti just before the city of Şavşat . These and other Georgian monasteries were founded in protected and hard-to-reach retreats high up on the mountain slopes. Bana on a relatively flat hill is an exception.
history
The north-eastern region of Turkey belonged to the Georgian Empire of Iberia and temporarily to Armenia until it was conquered several times by the Muslim Umayyads in the 7th and 8th centuries . After the Umayyad governor of Azerbaijan and Armenia Marwan II (688-750) plundered through the years 736-738 with punitive expeditions, the population had largely left the region. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Georgian monks, far from the Arab emirate of Tbilisi , which exercised control over their home region, looked for remote places in Tao-Klardschetien to found monasteries. Opiza was the oldest monastery from the middle of the 8th century; from there, the monk Grigol Chandsteli and some of his students founded a number of monasteries in the area, including Bana and Yeni Rabat near the fortress Ardanuç .
Around 820 the Bagratid prince Ashot I made the fortress of Ardanuç (Georgian Artanudschi) his seat of government. After the split of the Bagratid dynasty, Artanuji became the capital of the Principality of Klardschetien and the rulers of Tao ruled in Bana. At the end of the 10th century, King Bagrat III. Tao-Klardschetien with three other principalities to the Kingdom of Georgia . From the 11th century, Georgian kings stayed regularly in Bana.
Bana was next to İşhan one of the two bishopric seats in Tao. The coronation of King Bagrat IV (ruled 1027-1072) took place in the cathedral and it was here that Bagrat married Helena Argyre († 1033), a niece of the Byzantine emperor Romanos III, in 1032 as his first wife . Argyros (ruled 1028-1034). Several rulers of Tao were buried in the church or in its vicinity, among them the Georgian King Vakhtang IV (r. 1443–1446) and his wife Sitichatun († 1445).
After the Byzantine army was defeated by the Turkish Seljuks in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 , a troubled time followed for Tao and the surrounding Georgian principalities. They experienced several raids by the Seljuks between 1074 and 1080, and in the second half of the 12th century the Seljuks conquered Tao. On the other hand, an attack by the Georgian King Giorgi III helped . (ruled 1156–1184) nothing that remained unsuccessful. Only his daughter Tamar (r. 1184-1213) was able to liberate the region for a short time. During the reign of the subsequent kings Giorgi IV. Lascha (r. 1213–1223) and David VIII. (R. 1293–1311) the looting was particularly devastating. Nevertheless, Bana managed to maintain a religious and culturally rich life until the mid-16th century when the region fell to the Ottoman Empire . In a Georgian manuscript from the 16th or 17th century, which was added as an appendix to the Dzruci-Tetra Gospel of 936 from the Schatberdi monastery and is with the signature H 1660 in Tbilisi, there is a description of the difficult life of the local Christians under Ottoman rule to read. A devout Christian had a Georgskirche built in a neighboring village and furnished it with some relics. When the Turkish regent named Baadin Beg heard about it, he had the founder arrested and locked up.
Among the Georgian scholars whose name is associated with Bana, Zakaria Baneli (Zacharias of Bana) stands out. He took part in the diplomatic negotiations between the Byzantine Emperor Basil II and the Georgian King Giorgi I in Constantinople in 1021 and 1022 . In this city he wrote a large number of manuscripts for the Georgian monastic community living there. Of the manuscripts copied in Bana, the last surviving one dates from 1511. It is the “ Typikon (collection of monastic rules) of Sabatsminda”, which means the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem.
The church was in use as a place of worship and bishopric until the middle of the 18th century. It is unlikely that it served as a mosque afterwards. In the Crimean War against Russia from 1853 to 1856 , the Ottomans expanded the church into a fortress. Remnants of a defensive wall around the hill are still visible. In 1875 the dome collapsed. After that, the church suffered further damage during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877/78. In 1881 the building was still preserved except for the dome and some damage, but in 1902 it had already fallen into disrepair. In the years in between, Russian occupation troops are likely to have removed stones, some of which were probably used to build a church in Oltu. In the spring of 1985, an earthquake caused the largest part of the only remaining east apse to collapse.
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According to the Georgian chronicler Sumbat Davitisdze from the 11th century, the Georgian King Adarnase IV (r. 888–923) had the church built. The lead builder was therefore Kwirike Baneli, who later became the first bishop of Bana. The second significant historical source is the historian and geographer Prince Wachuschti Bagrationi Batonishvili (1696–1757), who summarized: “The village of Bana above the river is now called Penek. The beautiful domed church there was built by King Adarnase and the Georgian kings are buried in it. Bana was the now-abandoned seat of a bishop whose territory included all of Tao, Oltisi (Oltu) and Narumaki (Narimani). ”Consequently, there must have been a city and a ruler's residence on the hill.
Research history
The first description from more recent times was given by the botanist Karl Heinrich Koch (1809–1879), who was on the way to the wetlands of the Kola Valley north of Göle. He saw the cathedral in 1843 during an expedition to northeastern Turkey and immediately declared it enthusiastically the second most beautiful architectural creation after Hagia Sophia . After him came the Russian ethnographer Yewgeny Weidenbaum in 1879 and the Georgian scholar Dimitri Bakradze (1826–1890) in 1881, who gave consistent descriptions of the state of the church. The Georgian archaeologist Ekvtime Takashvili undertook more detailed investigations into the existing heap of rubble in 1902. At the time, the east apse, parts of its flanking ancillary rooms and parts of the outer enclosure were still preserved. When Takashvili came a second time in 1907, other parts of the building had collapsed. As the first art historians after the Second World War, Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry carried out research trips to northeast Turkey in the 1960s. D. Guschow (1971), W. Eugène Kleinbauer (1972), Volker Eid (1980) and others published brief reports on their visits. Wachtang Djobadze's description is based on studies in 1974 and 1978.
Origin of the Georgian central building
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The earliest preserved stone church buildings of the Georgian Orthodox Church from the 4th century were simple hall churches or basilicas and did not yet have a characteristic design. In the 5th and 6th centuries, the classical phase of Georgian church architecture followed, in which domed central buildings in the west were extended by a basilica part. These combinations grew to enormous heights through a dome tambour above the chancel and still represent the overwhelming majority of church buildings today. A Georgian peculiarity were three-church basilicas with side aisles separated by partition walls.
In addition, the central building was further developed. While the side aisles in Georgia are often located within a rectangular structure, in the cross-domed churches , as they are known from Byzantine church building, the two side arms are shown in outline. One of the earliest of these cross-domed churches of the "free cross" type is the small rectangular church of Idleti from the 6th century, which measures about 6.5 meters on the outside. Functionally and structurally it corresponds to a four-cone building with four symmetrical semicircular or horseshoe-shaped apses , as it was built in Dsweli-Gawasi in the 6th century. Efforts were now made to fill the four-cone building between the apses with square side rooms to form an approximately rectangular plan. This happened for the first time in the 586 / 7-605 / 6 monastery church of Jvari on a hilltop near Mtskheta . The Sioni church in Ateni and one of the three churches of the Dsweli Shuamta monastery also belong to the same type . The Jvari Church, the Church of Zromi , with four free-standing pillars supporting the dome for the first time, and Bana are among the outstanding inventions of classic Georgian church architecture.
Influences from Syria are possible, in any case, according to the faith tradition, Georgian monks revered as the “Thirteen Syrian Fathers” returned to their homeland at the end of the 6th century. Only in literary sources is the cathedral in Antioch known as Domus Aurea , which was built between 327 and 341 in the presumed shape of an octagon . Preserved examples of central Syrian buildings are the 512 dated Bosra cathedral with four conches and St. George's Church in Izra ' , also in what is now southern Syria. The latter marks a central octagon within a rectangular floor plan.
The four-cone building with corner rooms in Bana forms the basis for a first construction phase, which probably began in the 7th century, which forms the core of the complex, which is fitted into a complete circular shape. Unconventional later expansions of the Georgian four-cone building occasionally led to six-cone buildings in the 10th century, which in the case of the Gogiuba church, which was destroyed in the 20th century, were completely symmetrical, while in others the east apse was emphasized. The first building in İşhan (Georgian: Ischchani) around 653 was also a round church with four conches. It was destroyed in the 730s and rebuilt at the end of the 9th century as a cross-domed church with an elongated west nave. The old east apse was integrated into the new building. Its row of columns, forming a semicircle, is still preserved in today's ruins. Bana and the İşhan Church, which was destroyed at an early stage, were the only two round churches in the Principality of Tao.
Round-sheathed four and six-conch churches are also known from Armenian architecture. The round church of Ləkit in the north Azerbaijani district of Qax had four conches, and the church of Saint Gregory (Surb Grigor) in Ani from the end of the 10th century was a six-conch building with a circular gallery . The church of the Redeemer (completed in 1036) with eight cones and 16 outer wall surfaces, which resulted in an almost cylindrical high structure, and the 11th-century Shepherd's Church (destroyed in 1966) with six triangular bulges on the inside and a multi-pointed outer outline came close to the round shape . The great model for Bana was built in 641-662 Cathedral of Zvartnots (Zuartnoc); a three-storey building with four pillared cone walls and a round walkway.
architecture
In the center of a three-storey rotunda vaulted by a dome with a diameter of 37.5 meters was a four-cone building, which was enclosed by a circular outer wall. In between, a 3.2 meter wide walkway led around the entire circle. The four symmetrically arranged apses were formed instead of the usual closed wall in a semicircle by rows of columns that were connected to each other by horseshoe arches and supported the apse walls above. Three of the apses had four columns each, the shape and size of which are not mentioned in the old descriptions. The apse in the east was distinguished by six columns with smaller spaces between them, which stood on a two meter high wall, to which a synthronon (semicircular priest's bench ) was probably built in the lower area . The corner areas between the circle of walls and the 6.4 meter wide cones were filled by square side rooms ( pastophoria ), which merged into semicircular apses on their east sides. These small apses were lit by a narrow central window, the adjoining rooms were accessible through doors to the conches on both sides. The inner part of the building protruded with two upper floors in the same circular shape and with further adjoining rooms in the apse corners over the outer bypass building. The inside of the outer wall around the gallery stood like the cone walls on a continuous row of arcades.
Karl Heinrich Koch, the only European researcher who had seen the dome of the church before it was destroyed in 1878, describes the external shape of the building in his travel notes published in 1846:
“From the outside, the whole building appeared to be an enormous dome, the transverse diameter of which can be almost equal to its height. [...] The building consisted of the envelope and the church with the four chapels built into the corners, but in such a way that the space within the envelope and the church formed a passable, but upwardly closed ring around the latter. [...] The wall of the ring ran up into an enormous dome, which rested on the legs of the church, and then went directly into that of the actual church. "
According to Koch, it was consequently a two-tier dome structure. A hypothetical reconstruction of the exterior view by the Russian architect Anatoly Kalgyn from 1907, on the other hand, shows a three-tier roof. The reconstruction takes on the two floor recesses sloping roofs and over the dome a conical roof . On the ground floor, round blind arches over pilasters divided the outer walls. There was a large arched window in each of the 28 wall panels, 3.85 meters wide. Such a pilaster structure of the outer walls was also common for other cathedrals in the region, such as Barhal . 1.95 meter wide doors led into the corridor in the four cardinal directions. The total height was probably over 30 meters. The interior of the cathedral must have been well lit from all sides: Indirect light came in on the ground floor through the walkway between the pillars of the conches and direct light fell down through the window openings on the upper floors.
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The outer and inner walls of the gallery were made of carefully hewn cuboids in horizontal layers and built with two layers of thin mortar joints. The filling in the middle, about a third of the wall thickness, consisted of rubble stones, pebbles and occasionally broken bricks. The careful execution of the interior walls also indicates that they were not originally intended to be plastered or painted. Obviously, at least part of the interior walls was designed at a later time, because in 1974 there were still fragments of wall paintings in the northeastern side room of the apse. Further remains of painting existed on the south sides of the pilasters in the south-west of the gallery. On some of them there were short texts in the old Georgian scripts mrglowani (mrgvlovany) and nuschuri .
At some point after the entire building was completed, all the windows on the outside and all the spaces between the pilasters on the inside of the outside wall were carefully walled up with stone blocks, as were the intercolumns of the eastern apse columns. The entrances in the east and south were reinforced by mighty fortress-like walls. The reasons for these measures are unclear; liturgical necessities cannot have been. If the reconstruction took place in the second half of the 13th century, the reason could have been the threat from the Seljuks, otherwise the walling took place in the middle of the 19th century when the cathedral was used as a fortress during the Russo-Ottoman Wars.
Building plastic
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The pillars of the east apse closed at the top with a circular wreath with an Ionic capital supported by a horseshoe-shaped arcade with a blind arch above. The sculptural design on the outer walls seems to have been economical. The resulting blind arches consisted of an upper row of protruding stones and a second, recessed row below. Both were carefully smoothed, but not ornamented except for the arches on the east side. As can be seen in photographs from 1902, there were twisted vine tendrils in the arched spandrels, which grew up out of a vase and surrounded three pomegranates arranged in a triangle and grapes to the side. According to traces of paint, the ornaments in the spandrels were painted purple.
On the arch above the west portal there were similar, but somewhat larger-area ornaments in an unusual design, in which curved leaf tendrils connected with three four-leaf rosettes . According to Wachtang Djobadze, a Sassanid stucco ornament in a ctesiphon is conceivable as the only possible example of the ornament otherwise unknown in Georgian architecture . Reduced variants of this motif can be found above a window arch on the southern transept of Dolisqana and above the portal of Haho (Chachuli). The west portal was flanked on each side by a pair of columns with Corinthian capitals. One of the pair of capitals is very similar to the capitals in front of the adjoining rooms between the conches, which consequently date from the same construction period. A uniform processing and use of the building material speaks equally for construction work carried out without interruption until completion.
The wall painting in Öşk Vank comes from the inscription from 1036. It shows the church of Bana in a realistic way, only the roof shape cannot be explored, since the upper half of the picture is missing. The column-supported porch with a tiled roof, as is still preserved on the south facade by Öşk Vank, is striking.
literature
- Wachtang Djobadze: Early Medieval Georgian Monasteries in Historic Tao, Klardjetʿi and Šavšetʿi. (Research on the history of art and Christian archeology, XVII). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 78-85, panels 106-118
- Volker Eid : East Turkey. Peoples and cultures between Taurus and Ararat . DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-1455-8 , pp. 198f
- Russudan Mepisaschwili, Wachtang Zinzadze: The Art of Ancient Georgia. Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 1977, pp. 94–97
- Annegret Plontke-Lüning: Early Christian architecture in the Caucasus. The development of Christian sacred buildings in Lazika, Iberia, Armenia, Albania and the border regions from the 4th to the 7th century (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Philosophical-Historical Class, Volume 359. Publications on Byzantium Research, Volume XIII) Verlag der Österreichische Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2007, enclosed CD-ROM: Catalog of preserved church buildings, pp. 78–83, ISBN 978-3700136828
- Thomas Alexander Sinclair: Eastern Turkey: An Architectural and Archaeological Survey. Vol. II, The Pindar Press, London 1989, pp. 25f
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Sinclair, p. 26
- ^ Sinclair, p. 25
- ↑ Djobadze, pp. 84f
- ^ Sinclair, p. 25
- ↑ Oath, p. 199
- ^ Oath, p. 198
- ↑ Djobadze, p. 78f
- ↑ Mepisaschwili, Zinzadse, pp. 62–64
- ↑ Djobadze, pp. 191f; Mepisashvili, Zinzadse, p. 148.
- ^ Ilma Reissner: Georgia. History - art - culture. Herder, Freiburg 1989, p. 145
- ^ Patrick Donabédian, Jean Michel Thierry: Armenian art. Herder, Freiburg 1988, pp. 505f, 597f
- ^ Karl Heinrich Koch : Walks in the Orient, during the years 1843 and 1844. Volume 2: Journey in the Pontic Mountains and Turkish Armenia. Weimar 1846, pp. 242–248, here p. 243f
- ^ Ulrich Bock: Armenian architecture. History and problems of their research. (25th publication by the Architecture Department of the Art History Institute of the University of Cologne) Cologne 1983, p. 11
- ↑ Djobadze, pp. 79-81
- ↑ Djobadze, pp. 79, 81-83