Davit Gareja, a Cliff of Cells Split by a Modern Border

David Garejeli belongs to the same generation of arrivals as Joseph of Alaverdi, one of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers who traveled from Mesopotamia into Georgia in the sixth century to reinforce a church still establishing itself. Where Joseph settled a hillside near Kakheti's vineyards, David chose a stretch of semi-desert cliff on what is now the border with Azerbaijan, and the community that grew from his single cell eventually filled the rock face with roughly twenty distinct monasteries and several thousand individual cells, one of the largest concentrations of cave monasticism anywhere in the Christian world. For most of its history the site's difficulty was practical, water, isolation, an unforgiving climate, rather than political. That changed in the twentieth century, when Soviet administrative reorganization under Stalin's nationalities policy redrew the internal boundary between the Georgian and Azerbaijani Soviet republics in a way that left part of the complex on the Azerbaijani side of a line that Davit Gareja had never previously had to cross. Georgia and Azerbaijan have never finished delimiting their shared border since independence, nearly five hundred kilometers of it, and Davit Gareja is one of the places where that unfinished work is felt directly: Azerbaijani border guards have periodically restricted access to sections of the complex, most visibly around Orthodox Easter, drawing protest from Georgian monks and pilgrims who find part of their own monastery suddenly closed to them. Georgia has offered a land swap as a resolution; Azerbaijan has cited Soviet-era maps supporting its claim; no settlement has been reached. What the dispute has not changed is the monastery's religious life, which continues on the Georgian side much as it has for centuries, even as the complex as a physical whole remains divided by a line its founder could not have anticipated.