40 Collections

Kars

Kars Province is situated in the far east of modern day Turkey in the northern half of the region. It borders modern day Armenia and lies with Georgia to the north in close proximity. In antiquity and until the 20th century the area was an important region for the Armenian people who inhabited it. The most impressive relic of the Armenian peoples in the region is the ancient abandoned city of Ani. The modern provincial capital, Kars, preceded Ani as an Armenian capital. The region was bitterly contested by the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century. Kars still exhibits some signs of its Russian past in the style of some of its architecture.
This file contains some images of the Cathedral of Kars taken in May 2015. Ani, while in Kars province, is considered in its own separate collection.

Creator: Joshua Bryant
Date of Visit: 16th May 2015
Contributor: Joshua Bryant

Views of Jerusalem

This collection of photographs features views of the ancient city of Jerusalem from various viewpoints from within and outside the city. These photographs were taken from July to August 2013, October to November 2014 and July 2015.

Creator: Lucy O'Connor
Date of Visit: 1st July to 8th August 2013, 10th October to 6th November 2014, 6th to 16th July 2015
Contributor: Lucy O'Connor
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: General views

Damascus

Damascus is believed to ben the oldest continually inhabited city in the world and, as such, boasts remains from a wide span of historical periods. The material entered on this site relates to the Roman and Late Antique era and includes artefacts from the National Museum of Damascus

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Museum Exhibit
Architecture

Syria 1962

These images were taken by John Ingham on a visit to Syria in 1962 and offered to the archive to enable a comparison of how the sites may have deteriorated over the 50 years since they were taken. This record is especially valuable as several of the buildings in this collection have now been destroyed by the so-called Islamic State.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: John Ingham
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Architecture

Khevsureti

Khevsureti is located in the high Caucasus north of Tbilisi bordered to the west by the Military Highway leading to Stepantsminda and the Russian border and abutting Tusheti to the east, although the two mountain cultures can only reach each other on foot or on horseback in the summer months by crossing the Atsunta Pass. The Khevsurs are known, like the Tushes, for their pagan culture and they are renowned for their traditional handicrafts. They are famous for their beautiful hand-stitched tunics worn by both men and women in which cross motifs play a prominent part. Khevsurs are legendary in Georgia for the fact that their men wore chain mail well into the C20th and, like the Tushes, they managed to retain their traditional pagan faith well into the modern era, although it is now being supplanted by Christianity. The upper region of Khevsureti beyond the Datvisjvari (Bear-Cross) Pass is cut off from the rest of the country in the winter, although the villages south of the pass are accessible throughout the year. As with Svaneti and Tusheti, Khevsureti has its own distinctive form of defensive tower architecture and the two most complete examples of this can be seen at Shatili and Mutso, both north of the Datvisjvari pass near the border with Chechnya.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Architecture

Early Christian Archaeology in Georgia

Despite the attention paid by historians and art historians to the standing early Christian architecture still extant in Georgia, early Christian archaeology remains a relatively under-explored area in the country, with few people working on the field. This means that in many ways very little is known about the evolution of Christianity in Georgia as all the current ideas rest on art historical and textual analysis. Several recent excavations are casting new light on this period and suggest that current assumptions about the spread of early Christianity in Georgia may be flawed.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Archaeology

Archaeological and Art Historical Artefacts in Georgian Collections

This collection includes pictures of artefacts that are held in the collections of the National Museum of Georgia. All the major museums in the country come under this umbrella and so the location of each object included will specify exactly which institution holds the item in question. Obviously many objects and collections do not allow photography and the images included in this collection were all taken in contexts where permission was given to take the pictures.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Physical Object

Late Antique tokens in the British Museum

Creator: Lucy O'Connor
Contributor: Lucy O'Connor
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Museum Exhibit

Classical Archaeology in Georgia

These entries give information on Classical era sites that have been excavated in Eastern Georgia, specifically sites in and around Mtskheta, the city that was capital of the Kingdom of Kartli until it was moved to Tbilisi in the C6th CE. There is little evidence of Roman occupation in the region compared to the west of the country, but there were still Roman colonies present as far east as the territory of Mtskheta and ongoing excavations are slowly revealing more information of Roman-Kartvelian interaction in the first centuries CE.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Peter Leeming
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Archaeology

Comparative Armenian Ecclesiastical Monuments

This collection is not meant to be an exhaustive record of late antique ecclesiastical monuments in the contemporary territory of Armenia. Rather it is a personal (and as such almost certainly idiosyncratic) selection of Armenian ecclesiastical architecture that commentators have argued have been influenced by Syrian architecture or which has been linked to the development of Georgian architecture in some way. It must be underlined that these pictures were taken on a first fact-finding trip to see these buildings in reality, as opposed to reading about them and experiencing them only as floor plans or photographs. This area of research remains a new direction that the writer hopes to explore further at a future date, but any conclusions drawn in this section of the website are very much work-in-progress.

Creator: Emma Loosley
Contributor: Emma Loosley
Peter Leeming
Rights: Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons unless otherwise indicated
Type: Architecture