The Cave City of Vardzia

Vardzia, hewn into a cliff-face in southern Georgia, is the great monastic city of Tamar’s reign — begun under her father George III and developed under her into a monastery, fortress, and royal foundation of hundreds of chambers on many levels. Its Dormition church preserves a frescoed portrait of Tamar, painted in her lifetime or close to it, and one of the very few near-contemporary likenesses of the queen. This file examines the site, the portrait, and its meaning.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Cave-City

Vardzia is a monastic and defensive complex cut into the vertical rock of the Erusheti mountain, above the Kura (Mtkvari) river valley in the Meskheti region of southern Georgia. It is one of the great achievements of medieval Georgian architecture: an artificial cave-city of hundreds of rooms — cells, chapels, refectories, store-rooms, wine-cellars, water-conduits — arranged on many stories in the cliff, reached by concealed passages and designed to be both a working monastery and a fortress guarding the southern approaches of the kingdom (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Vardzia; Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, ch. on the Vardzia programme). Begun under George III and completed and developed under Tamar, Vardzia is the largest and most ambitious of the monastic foundations associated with her reign, and it functioned as a spiritual center, a royal foundation, and a military strongpoint at once — a combination that captures the character of the Golden Age itself (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; on Vardzia as George’s foundation completed by Tamar, Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998).

The dual character — monastery and fortress — is embedded in the tradition of the reign. The chronicle account of the Basiani campaign preserves the memory that Tamar addressed her troops before the battle “from the balcony of the church” at Vardzia, binding the site to the great victory and to the sanctified-war ideology of her kingship (the “History of Tamar” account of the Basiani campaign; see The Military Triumphs). A severe earthquake in the later thirteenth century (traditionally 1283) sheared away much of the outer face of the cliff, exposing and partly destroying the once-hidden interior and leaving Vardzia in the ruined, open state in which it survives (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the earthquake damage).

The Church of the Dormition and Its Frescoes

At the heart of Vardzia is the rock-cut Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos, whose walls carry an important frescoed programme of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries — among the principal surviving monuments of Georgian Golden-Age painting (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the Vardzia frescoes and their dating). The frescoes are of the first importance not only for the history of Georgian art but for the iconography of kingship, because among them is a portrait of Tamar.

The Portrait of Tamar

The Vardzia church preserves a fresco portrait of Queen Tamar, painted during her reign or very close to it, which is one of the few near-contemporary likenesses of the queen to survive. She is shown, together with her father George III, as royal donor-founders of the church. In Antony Eastmond’s study — the standard treatment of Tamar’s images — the Vardzia portrait is one of a small group of five surviving royal images of Tamar (with those at Betania, Bertubani in the Gareji desert, and Kintsvisi), and it is central to his argument about how a culture with no precedent for a female sovereign represented one: Tamar is depicted in the royal dress and with the royal attributes of a king, invested with the authority of the male royal office, while her idealized features acknowledge that the king is a woman (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the Vardzia portrait and the “five surviving images”; on the male-royal imaging of a female sovereign, and the description of Tamar “in royal male Byzantine dress with idealized … female facial features”).

The near-contemporaneity of the portrait is what gives it its value. Because it was painted in her lifetime or within a short span of it, the Vardzia image is evidence of how Tamar was represented and understood by her own court and church — not a later, idealized construction but a document of the reign’s own self-image. It is, in the most literal sense, the face the Golden Age gave itself: the sovereign who was called mepe, “king,” shown as king, on the wall of the monastery she completed. For the iconography of her sanctified kingship, and for the honest task of separating the historical Tamar from the folkloric one, the surviving portraits are the firmest evidence there is — physical, contemporary, and interpretable — where the written sources are panegyric (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998; see The Queen and the Legend).

[Disputed: the exact date and the precise degree of “likeness” of the Vardzia portrait are matters of art-historical judgement, not of documentary record. The image is a formal, iconographically-governed donor-portrait, not a naturalistic likeness in the modern sense; it tells us how Tamar was to be represented — as king, as pious founder — more than what she looked like. Its dating to Tamar’s reign or shortly after rests on the frescoes’ style and programme (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998). It is “near-contemporary” and precious for that; it is not a photograph.]

Vardzia as the Emblem of the Reign

Vardzia has become, in Georgian memory, one of the emblems of Tamar and of the Golden Age — a whole city carved from the living rock, a monastery that was also a fortress, guarding the frontier and housing the prayer of monks, adorned with the portrait of the sovereign who completed it. It gathers into a single site the themes of the reign: the fusion of church and crown, of prayer and war, of monastic devotion and royal magnificence. That it survives — ruined, opened by the earthquake, but standing — makes it the most tangible monument of Tamar’s age, and the place where the visitor comes closest to the historical queen: not in the hyperbole of the “Histories” but on the wall of her own church, shown as her own century chose to show her.

See Also

References

  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The Vardzia frescoes and the portrait of Tamar; the five surviving images of the queen; Tamar imaged as king in royal male dress with idealized female features; the visual problem of a female sovereign.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Vardzia as George III’s foundation completed by Tamar; its double character as monastery and fortress; the earthquake damage.)
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “History of Tamar” — the tradition of Tamar addressing the troops from the church balcony at Vardzia before Basiani, read source-critically per Methodology.