A Group of Reliefs from the Village of Mramba (Republic of Abkhazia): Refinement of the Dating

Abstract

The research is dedicated to the problem of dating refinement for a group of monuments (carved limestone blocks) discovered in church ruins in the village of Mramba (Republic of Abkhazia). The author suggests to consider the reliefs from the Mramba church as a single stylistic group within the context of the art of the Abkhazian Kingdom (8th — 11th centuries). This explains the relevance of the study: previously, these monuments were not treated as a compact stylistic unity and were dated to different times. The author’s contribution to development of this topic is the dating refinement, attribution and correlation of a number of architectural monuments of Abkhazia with the art of the period of the Abkhazian Kingdom (and the General Byzantine context). Their stylistic and iconographic parallels are analyzed and revealed, which became possible only due to the researches of the last 10 years when many medieval monuments from the territory of Abkhazia had been correlated with the period under consideration. First of all, the article deals with the reliefs with zoomorphic images from the church of saint Theodor on Anacopia Mountain and the relief with a bull and a lion near the cross on Sukhum Mountain. Recent studies prove that the reliefs from Anacopia Mountain (those with zoomorphic images) may be dated to the 11th century. This conclusion comes from the fact that the bull and lion relief near the cross was made simultaneously with the inscription on it. The inscription on the relief mentions the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. Numerous stylistic analogies from geographically more remote regions of the Byzantine Empire also refer to the 10th — 11th centuries. Thus, the author concludes that the stylistic and iconographic analysis of the carved limestone blocks from the Mramba church allows to consider them as a stylistically homogenous group that may be dated to the 11th century.