Church of St. Simon the Canaanite, New Athos

The Church of St. Simeon the Canaanite (Georgian: წმინდა სვიმონ კანანელის სახელობის ტაძარი) is located near the town of New Athos in Abkhazia/Georgia, dating from the 9th or 10th century.

Church of St. Simon the Canaanite, New Athos

History

The church is dedicated to St. Simon the Canaanite, who, according to the 11th-century Georgian Chronicles, preached Christianity in Abkhazia and Egrisi and died and was buried at the town of Nicopsia, to the north of Abkhazia.[1][2][3] A nearby grotto is associated by popular legends with the site of martyrdom of St. Simon.[4]

The church before the 1880s reconstruction

The design of the extant church dates to the 9th or 10th century[3] and is influenced by the Byzantine and Georgian art traditions,[5][3] but the church site seems to be two centuries older.[3] At the time when the Georgian historian Dimitri Bakradze visited it in the 1850s, the church was abandoned, but still standing except for the collapsed dome.[5] The church suffered greatly when the local landlord, Major Hasan Margani removed its blocks of stone for the construction of his own mansion.[4] Later, in the 1880s, the church was reconstructed, using blocks of white hewn stone, to its current state. The church is adorned with images of Christian symbols such as a fish, lion, and cross curved in relief.[3]

Current condition

Georgia has inscribed the church on its list of cultural heritage and treats it as part of cultural heritage in the Russian-occupied territories with no known current state of condition.[3]

References
  1. Lang, David Marshall (1976). Lives and legends of the Georgian saints. Mowbrays. p. 167.
  2. Hewitt, George (2013). A Reassessment of the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-South Ossetian Conflicts. Brill. p. 10. ISBN 9004248935.
  3. Gelenava, Irakli, ed. (2015). Cultural Heritage in Abkhazia (PDF). Tbilisi: Meridiani. pp. 58–59.
  4. Vvedensky, A.N. (1871). "Религиозные верования абхазцев [Religious beliefs of the Abkhaz]". Сборник сведений о кавказских горцах [Collection of reports about the Caucasian mountainous peoples] (in Russian). Tiflis. 5: 273–274.
  5. Anchabadze, Zurab (1959). Из истории средневековой Абхазии [From the history of medieval Abkhazia]. Sukhumi: Abkhazia State Publishing. p. 152.

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