Zoravar

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Coordinates: 40 ° 21 '24.8 "  N , 44 ° 31' 23.2"  E

From the foot of the Ara mountain towards the southwest into the plain.

Zoravar ( Armenian Զորավոր ), other transcriptions Soravar, Sorawor , is a round church built in the second half of the 7th century with eight conches near Jeghward in the central Armenian province of Kotajk . The ruins outside the village of Zoravan (Զորավան, formerly Pokravan) are considered to be the earliest octagonal church building in Armenia.

location

Ruins of the burial chapel in the old cemetery a little above the church.

Zoravan is located at 1,488 meters above sea level on a hilly plateau around 22 kilometers north of the state capital Yerevan and 3 kilometers northeast of the small town of Jeghward on the regional road H4. From the plain of Jeghward, which is used as pastureland for cattle and sheep and as irrigated arable land, rises to the north the wide, fissured volcano Ara (Arai lehr) with a height of 2575 meters. The H4 continues north to the confluence with the expressway between Ashtarak and Aparan , circling the Ara on its eastern flank. The hills covered with grass and isolated bushes were forested in the Middle Ages. The closest remains of oak and maple forests can be found on the northern slope of the Ara and on the Tegheniats mountain range above the village of Buzhakan.

According to official statistics, there were 1566 inhabitants in Zoravan in January 2008. The area has been inhabited since pre-Christian times, but the village is mostly due to immigrants from Turkey in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before the southern outskirts of the village, a dirt road leads up to the left at a small cemetery and - keeping to the left at two junctions - reaches the church just under two kilometers from the village, which is located on the slope of a hill strewn with stones. About 100 meters further northwest on the hilltop, in an old cemetery, there is a single-nave burial chapel that once had a barrel vault covered with stone slabs. The semicircular apse and part of the roof have been preserved. Some of the tombstones and fragments of Khachkars in the area around the chapel date from early Christian times.

history

According to the historian Wartan Bardjerberdtsi in the 13th century, Prince Grigor Mamikonian had the church built. He was governor of Armenia from about 661 to 685; at a troubled time when the kingdom had already been dissolved by several Arab invasions. 640 Arab troops conquered the capital Dvin and caused a massacre of the population, in which the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church Ezr was also killed. Under constant external pressure, the aristocratic Armenian families split into supporters of the conquerors from the south and supporters of the opposing Byzantines . Individual factions formed, which changed sides several times. In 701 the Arabs formally annexed Armenia. One explanation for why small, tower-like round churches were built in the 7th century could be that they were easier to defend in the event of raids than elongated basilicas.

Architectural-historical development

West side with entrance

The oldest surviving Armenian central buildings are systems with four conches , which extend from a square room in the four cardinal directions. The central area is dominated by a tambour with a dome and a conical or pyramid roof. A distinction is made between several forms: Tambour and dome rest on four free-standing pillars as in the new construction of the Etschmiadzin Cathedral (Etschmiadzin II) at the beginning of the Armenian Tetrakonchen around 485. This type was not pursued any further except for the Bagaran Cathedral (624-631) .

A second central building type includes cross-domed churches without central pillars, which are known as domed squares with strut niches and in which the drum is supported by the four inner wall corners. These emerged in the 7th century as small tricons (Mother of God Church in Talin ) or as monocons ( Lmbatavank , Kamrawor Church of Ashtarak). In the latter, three rectangular side arms face the semicircular conche of the chancel in the east. A variant with an enlarged dome, which rests on the middle of the sides of the outer walls and thus spans the entire interior, probably appears for the first time in the St. John's Church in Mastara (mid-7th century). When these floor plans are extended by corner rooms on the side of the altar, these are usually within a straight outer wall and result in a partially encased building. A central building is completely encased if it has adjoining rooms in all four corners that are within a rectangular structure. The oldest representative of this type is Awan Cathedral , which is dated to the end of the 6th century. The monastery church of Jvari (586 / –605 / 6) stands at the starting point of Georgian architecture, corresponding to the Awan .

In addition to the dome squares with four corner niches, Josef Strzygowski also categorized the pure strut niche structures as "radial dome structures" in 1918. The origin of this third type of building is probably the Zvartnots Cathedral , which is usually dated to the middle of the 7th century. The dome of the inner structure rests on a square of belt arches spanned over four pillars . The thrust derived on the pillars catch a quatrefoil on compiled semicircular conches. Instead of solid conical walls, the Zvartnots cathedral had column arcades set up in a semicircle on three sides, which provide a lot of light inside, but at the same time make the construction unstable. For this reason, an outer wall ring was required for static protection, which formed a corridor around the central room on the ground floor. Later imitations include the cathedral of Bana (around 900) in eastern Turkey and the Gregor Church of Gagik in Ani (end of the 10th century) on the Turkish-Armenian border.

The polygonal floor plan with six or eight apses can be understood as an intended further development of the Zvartnots Cathedral . However, a chronological origin according to an increasing number of apses cannot be proven, provided that reliable dates are available at all. The radial domed churches in Armenia, which can be traced back to Syrian, North Mesopotamian and Byzantine models, feature complexes with four, six and eight conches built at the same time.

The oldest polygonal conch building in Armenia is the Zoravar church with eight conches, which forms an almost ideal circular shape that stabilizes itself without external contact. The also octagonal church of Irind (late 7th or 10th century) deviates from this clear form. There the west side is designed as a rectangular entrance room and the seven remaining conches are supplemented by two eastern side rooms. Zoravar and Irind are the two only eight-conch systems of the 7th century in Armenia. In addition, a church with six conches near the village of Aragads (Aragats, Aragac) on the Achurjan River (40 kilometers south-east of Ani on the Turkish border) has been known since 1976 , which is likely to have been built at the end of the 6th or beginning of the 7th century. The hexagonal church in the citadel of Ani, which has an inscription dated 1026, probably goes back to its model. The Gregory Church ( Surb Grigor ) of Ani (end of the 10th century) also has six conches. The Church of the Redeemer there with eight conches is dated to the year 1036. From the second half of the 10th century, central buildings with six conches were also built in Georgia. The now destroyed church of Varzahan near the northeast Turkish city of Bayburt had a symmetrical octagonal floor plan with eight inscribed conches, which can only roughly be dated to the 10th or 11th century.

Design

South side. Judging by the outstanding concrete reinforcement iron, another reconstruction was planned.

The circular outer wall around the eight semicircular cones is structured by wide triangular niches between the cones, so that an 18-sided polygon is created. The triangular niches, which are closed at the top and are also used as design elements of basilicas, are very likely of Armenian origin. The conches end with straight wall surfaces in the middle, only the wider cone on the east side is pentagonal on the outside and protrudes roughly beyond the circular line. The building is raised by a two-tier base.

The dividing walls of the cones, which protrude into the room, end at half-columns with cube-shaped capitals that support a circumferential row of arches. It forms the basic construction, from which pendentives in the corners lead to the inside round and outside dodecagonal drum. A previously existing pyramid roof covered with stone slabs can only be assumed.

The architectural jewelry is more economical than in Irind. The edges of the reel walls are highlighted by round bars. Horseshoe-shaped friezes that are decorated with various types of vine tendrils, leaf garlands with palmettes or pomegranates and geometric shapes run above the narrow arched windows in each conical wall . The throat of the protruding cornice on the main building is decorated with a wickerwork; the cornice on the drum, which had not been reconstructed, showed vine tendrils. Judging by the plaster residue, the interior walls must have been painted.

The entrance is on the west. During a restoration at the beginning of the 14th century, a now missing gawit was added there, the entrance side of which consisted of three large arcades like in Mughni . In 1947 the only remaining northern part of the building was statically secured. In the 1970s, further restoration measures took place, so that today the main building has been almost completely reconstructed. About a quarter of the wall of the drum is on the north side.

literature

  • Burchard Brentjes , Stepan Mnazakanjan, Nona Stepanjan: Art of the Middle Ages in Armenia. Union Verlag (VOB), Berlin 1981
  • Jean-Michel Thierry: Armenian Art. Herder, Freiburg / B. 1988, p. 596, ISBN 3-451-21141-6

Web links

Commons : Zoravar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ RA Kotayk Marz. armstat.am, 2012, p. 246
  2. ↑ Christina Maranci: Byzantium through Armenian Eyes: Cultural Appropriation and the Church of Zuart'noc '. In: Gesta, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2001, pp. 105-124, here p. 107
  3. ↑ Simon Payaslian: The History of Armenia. From the origins to the present . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007, p. 47
  4. ↑ Rick Ney, p. 38
  5. ↑ Jean-Michel Thierry, p. 69
  6. ^ Josef Strzygowski : The architecture of the Armenians and Europe. Volume 1. Kunstverlag Anton Schroll, Vienna 1918, p. 72 ( online at Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Jean-Michel Thierry, p. 72f
  8. ↑ Christina Maranci: Medieval Armenian Architecture. Construction of Race and Nation. (Hebrew University Armenian Studies 2) Peeters, Leuven u. a. 2001, pp. 107, 109
  9. ↑ Stepan Mnazakanjan: Architecture . In: Burchard Brentjes u. a., p. 69
  10. ↑ Jean-Michel Thierry, p. 77
  11. ^ The Hexagonal Church in the Ani Citadel. Virtual Ani
  12. ^ Patrick Donabédian: Documentation of the art places . In: Jean-Michel Thierry, pp. 502, 505, 509
  13. ↑ Armen Zarian: In the Sign of the Cross. Armenian architecture. In: Armenia. Rediscovery of an old cultural landscape . (Exhibition catalog) Museum Bochum 1995, p. 122
  14. ↑ Jean-Michel Thierry, p. 323
  15. ^ Patrick Donabédian: Documentation of the art places . In: Jean-Michel Thierry, p. 596