The Cornerstone of the Ecumene: on the question of the medieval Church center of Zichia

Abstract

The subject of the study is the history of Christianization of the part of the Caucasian Black Sea region located in the South of Russia and the adjacent territory. Since its inception, in the 1st century AD, Christianity has formed a complex structured organization that gradually spread its influence over the territory of the Roman Empire and a number of other states. In the Western Caucasus, the presence of a church organization has been recorded since the sixth century, however, a large amount of archaeological data indicates that the first Christian communities in Southern Russia arose much earlier. Special attention is paid to the consideration of issues related to the formation and development of the Christian mission on the Black Sea coast of the Western Caucasus in the medieval period. The author examines the stages of Christianization of the autochthonous peoples of the region, paying special attention to the complex aspects of their ethnogenesis and political development, as well as the evolution of geographical representations of this territory in the consciousness of the civilized world represented by the Byzantine Empire. The importance of the problem of localization of the largest religious center – Nikopsia of Zikhi leads to the need for a thorough analysis of the available narrative sources, the conclusions of which are comprehensively included in the results of this study and are additionally illustrated in the table. The main result of this study is the identification of an obvious contradiction in approaches to the localization of Zikhian Nicopsia. Despite the fact that a fairly large number of researchers have addressed this problem, it should be noted that this problem has not yet been definitively resolved. The main premise characterizing the approach of most researchers who have addressed this topic is the idea of the uniqueness of the oikonym "Nikopsia" for the Caucasian Black Sea region. This idea gave rise to numerous versions of the localization of the famous, according to a number of medieval sources, Nicopsia of Zikhi. At the same time, most medieval literary monuments of Caucasian origin are united in the issue of localization of this, one of the oldest, Christian centers of the Western Caucasus. Nikopsia of Zikhi, which changed its name in the early tenth century, later became known as Anakopia.