Dynastic History | Svetitskhoveli, Mtskheta — The Master Builder Put His Name on the Wall

The court had long since moved to Tbilisi, but Mtskheta kept what mattered: the seat of the Catholicos. The cathedral standing there was built between 1010 and 1029 — one scholarly catalogue gives 1033 for the finish — and its patron was not a king but the Catholicos Melkisedek I.

The man who built it signed it. An inscription on the wall reads, in translation, "The hand of Arsukisdze, slave of God, may forgiveness be his", beside a carved forearm and a builder's bevel. The story that the hand was struck off afterwards, so that nothing finer could ever be built, is a later tale attached to the carving. The inscription records one name and asks for mercy. It records nobody who quarried, hauled or cut.

Svetitskhoveli, სვეტიცხოველი, means "the life-giving pillar", and the name comes from the church's own foundation account rather than from anything datable. What is documented is the building's job. Georgian kings were crowned in it and buried in it, their graves set before the altar, so that accession and interment happened in the same room.

The line ends in an archive rather than in the stone. The last king of Kartli-Kakheti died in 1800; in 1801 Alexander I abolished the kingdom and the heir was required to abdicate. Western Georgia was incorporated in 1804.

The cathedral is still the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church and a working place of worship. It sits inside the Historical Monuments of Mtskheta World Heritage property, which spent 2009 to 2016 on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

📸 Cover: Svetitskhoveli seen from the market street in Mtskheta, Rymfoley, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons