Architectural details of Zarzma Monastery

Zarzma Monastery is dominated by the large main church, but also features a bell tower and a chapel attached to the north wall, a similar, single-nave chapel at the northwest corner and the remnants of two smaller churches to the south of the main church.

The main church has the typical cross-in-square floor plan. It has two entrances, a southern and a western one. There is a portal gallery in front of the southern entrance that stretches along the whole south wall, giving the church unusual, but interesting proportions.  

The dome tholobate contains twelve windows, half of them real and half of them false, as was common at the time. A tholobate is a cylindrical, upright part of a church building upon which the dome is raised. The walls of the main church are made of carved stones in different colours and are, in some places, such as above the tholobate windows, arranged in a checkerboard patter.  

The exterior decorations, again typical for 14th century churches, appears around the doors and windows with the cross as its dominant motif. And there is another interesting detail about the architecture of Zarzma Monastery Church: ifyou look at the west wall, you can clearly see that the entrance and the main window above it are not in line. While the window is exactly in the middle of the upper part of the building, the entrance is in the middle of the lower part, which is, including the gallery of the south wall, a few meters wider.  

Although some of the original building fabric of the monastery complex and especially the stylistic features of the murals inside the main church were lost during unsuccessful attempts at renovation at the beginning of the 20th century, Zarzma Monastery, in its current state, is still an important historical and architectural Georgian monument.

Picture credits: SJDC

Project “Increased regional added value in the tourism sectors of Georgia by Digital Heritage Tourism Guides” was funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) with funds of Austrian Development Cooperation.