Gelati Monastery
Medieval monastery and academy above Kutaisi, with a domed church of golden mosaics and frescoes.
Gelati was founded in 1106 by King David IV, called the Builder, on a wooded hillside about ten kilometres north-east of Kutaisi. It was conceived as a royal burial place and as a seat of learning, and the academy attached to it drew Georgian scholars who had studied at Byzantine centres, among them the neo-Platonist philosopher Ioane Petritsi. David himself was buried at the southern gate. The monastery remained a focus of Georgian ecclesiastical and intellectual life through the medieval centuries.
The main Church of the Virgin was completed about 1130 and is a domed cross-in-square building faced in smooth ashlar. Its apse carries a mosaic of the Virgin and Child with archangels, made in the twelfth century and among the few large Byzantine-style mosaics to survive in the Caucasus; wall paintings of the twelfth to the eighteenth century cover much of the interior. The churches of St George and St Nicholas, the academy hall and a freestanding belfry stand around the precinct. Gelati was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994.
Highlights
- Twelfth-century apse mosaic of the Virgin and Child
- Church of the Virgin, finished around 1130
- Hall of the medieval Gelati Academy
- Tomb of King David the Builder at the southern gate
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