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1500 Years of Autocephaly and 21st Century
Architectural Revivalism: Holy Trinity Cathedral,
Tbilisi, Georgia

DR AYLA LEPINE
DURING POPE FRANCIS’ recent visit to Georgia this autumn, a national news
agency produced a short film of a priest and a young girl offering liturgical
music in Aramaic. As their voices soared in the full cathedral, the camera
panned upwards into the largest, newest sacred architecture in the country,
revealing its sheer height and grandeur to numerous audiences for whom the
particularities of Georgian architecture would be as unfamiliar as the
hauntingly beautiful musical traditions that characterise their Orthodox
liturgies. The Georgian Orthodox Church has been a distinctive community
within Orthodox Christianity for well over a millennium. Its autocephalous
status has in recent years comingled with its suppressed circumstances during
the USSR era. Indeed, Stalin was himself a Georgian raised in Gori.
Nationhood for this country of 4 million people has been built upon the
tripartite foundation of language, land, and religion and has often been
threatened by forces without and within. Tbilisi’s own built environment
attests to this, with little surviving prior to the modern period due to conflict
and unrest. In the Georgian patriotic tripartite formulation of national values,
‘religion’ is not the sensibility of faith, but the distinctive character of Georgian
Orthodoxy. Of late, this has created marked tension with other faiths and
denominations, as well as a profound and widespread flourishing of Georgia’s
unique Orthodoxy in recent years following the country’s most recent iteration
of independence.
On a prominent hill overlooking the river than wends its way through
the ancient city of Tbilisi, the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, better known by
its Georgian name Sameba, asserts its vast stone monumentality against the sky
(Figure 1). It is the third tallest Orthodox cathedral in the world. Begun in 1995
and completed in 2004, its rapid development and exceptionally high pricetag
– covered primarily by private donors – are indicative of a Church that has
swiftly and intensively re-emerged following suppression under the Soviets.
Historically, the religious centre of Georgia was not within its modern capital,

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