Talk:Oshki

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Armeno-Georgian marchland of Tao

Hi everbody! It is really nice to see that there are other people who are interested in the historical monuments of north-eastern Turkey. Please keep up the good work!

However, the description of the church at Oshki is far from complete, and more photographs would be very useful to convey the exceptional beauty of this building which, sadly, is in a very bad state of preservation, and which, if nothing is done to secure it, might colapse very soon.

If you have a recent photo of the widening crack in the north-western pendentive, please publish it on this page. It would also be good to have a photo of the deesis-relief (from the octagonal pier in the south-western porch) which was destroyed in 2000. Maybe somebody has a pre-2000 photograph of the carved relief of St Nino, too? It was placed on the north side of the now missing deesis-group.

What I do not understand, is the claim that "The monastery at Osk/Oski belonged to the Armenian Chalcedonians."

The monastery church of Oshki was, as correctly stated, built between 963 and 973 by the two Bagrationi brothers Bagrat and David. They were Georgians, I believe, and all the inscriptions on the facades of the church are in the Georgian language. I can therefore not see why Oshki should have been an Armenian Chalcedonian monastery. Could somebody please correct this?

I know that one Armenian scholar (Tiran Marutian) claims that Armenian Chalcedonians used the Georgian language, and that this should be the reason why the inscriptions of Oshki are written in Georgian, but this is a non-sustainable view: Both the carved reliefs and the remaining wall paintings at Oshki, as well as the inscriptions, are Georgian in their form and content.

Tao used to be Armenian until the eight century, but in the second half of the tenth century, when the monastery of Oshki was built, is was firmly in the hands of the Georgian Bagrationi. Please stick to the facts. Armenia is extremely rich in historical monuments from the middle ages - there should be no need to appropriate more. That's only very sad.

Greetings!

(Sofie (talk) 10:52, 5 August 2009 (UTC))[reply]

Is there any non-Armenian source addressing the concerns raised by Sofie? The cited source is clearly problematic. In the period of Bagrat and David the region was already under Georgian influence. So the assertion that the church built by the Georgian princes in the 10th century belonged to the Armenians and later came under Georgian influence needs to be fortified by additional evidence or be removed. --Kober^Talk 04:58, 20 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think the contenious part in that paragraph is the word "belongs". In the source I cited, Marutyan writes that Oshk was "the primary church used by Chalcedonian Armenian community" - there is no mention of it actually belonging to them per se. Some works have been published on Chalcedonian Armenians (most notably Alexander Kazhdan and Viada Arutjunova-Fidanyan) and Marutyan lists some sources for his bibliography, most of them written in Armenian, with the exception of one work written in Russian by E. Takayashvili called The 1917 Archaeological Expedition of Southern Provinces of Georgia and published in Tbilisi in 1952. If we were to remove "belong" and replace it Marutyan's wording of the above, would that resolve the problem? --Marshal Bagramyan (talk) 04:06, 22 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]