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Thursday,
July 19,
2007, #136 (1403)
On July 15, the Ministry of Culture, Monument Protection and Sport discovered that a unique, twelfth-century inscription on a Kojori church had been destroyed. The only surviving record of the inscription, a blessing to the Georgian people by Queen Tamar, is a single photo taken in the 1980s. Officials are searching for the unauthorized restorers who, it is thought, accidentally destroyed the inscription through incompetent work on the Simon Mesvete Kojori Church. Those responsible for the shoddy reconstruction will face a fine of GEL 5000. The inscription cannot be restored. “Hurried reconstruction work can cause tragic mistakes, like the removal of this unique inscription,” said Nika Vacheishvili, deputy minister of the Culture Ministry. Neither the department nor the Patriarch’s office are sure who carried out or financed reconstruction on the Kojori Church, which reportedly began in 2001. The inscription’s destruction was discovered during regular monitoring of Georgia’s cultural monuments, a program began this year by the ministry. “It’s very difficult to supervise all the churches in the whole region, so we often have problems like this in Georgia. That’s why we’ve begun to monitor churches, which is how Nika Vacheishvili found this particular misfortune,” Natia Murachashvili of the ministry’s press center told The Messenger. Unauthorized reconstructions to cultural monuments are a punishable offense under a law passed in May. The Culture Ministry plans to push for an increase in the punishment. “We will begin investigating this particular incident in order to find out the legality of this particular reconstruction project, and will then determine the magnitude of the punishment,” a department representative said to Rustavi 2. Simon Mesvete is part of the Kojori Kabeni complex. Georgian lore holds that Queen Tamar died in the church in 1213. Another part of the complex, where the queen reputedly spent the last years of her life, was destroyed by Russian monks in 1901. As well as ruining the inscription, the reconstruction group used cement on the church, which is prohibited. Traditionally, an egg-based mixture is used. Church reconstruction is a delicate job, Murachashvili says, and independent efforts usually don’t give enough thought to the process. |
Mystery Restorers Destroy Ancient Church Inscription
