Alaverdi Monastery, a Pagan Moon Shrine and a Royal Cathedral

Alaverdi's site was not empty ground when Christianity arrived there. Before the monastery stood, the hill is remembered as a shrine to the moon, one of the pagan cult centers that Georgian Christian tradition repeatedly describes its early monks as settling upon and displacing rather than avoiding, the same pattern told of several of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers who arrived from Antioch and the wider Syriac world in the sixth century to strengthen the young Georgian church. Joseph of Alaverdi is remembered as the monk who made this hill his own, and the small community he is said to have founded there grew over five centuries into something considerably grander. What stands on the site today is chiefly the work of an eleventh century king, Kvirike III of Kakheti, who replaced the earlier church with the Cathedral of St. George, built tall enough, over fifty five meters, that only the modern Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi now stands taller among Georgia's religious buildings. Kvirike built it in the same royal building program that produced Bagrati Cathedral in Kutaisi and drew on the same architectural ambitions as Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta and Oshki in the Tao-Klarjeti region, and Alaverdi has been counted alongside those three as one of Georgian Orthodoxy's four Great Cathedrals ever since. Its frescoes were not finished in one campaign either: work begun in the eleventh century was still being added to as late as the seventeenth, and among the surviving decoration is a band of carved grapes on the altar column, a detail that ties the cathedral directly to Kakheti's identity as Georgia's wine region, since Georgian Orthodox practice has long treated winemaking itself as bound up with sacred memory. The monastery has never fully closed since; it functions today as an active community of Georgian Orthodox monks.