ABSTRACT
Early in the second half of the ninth century Serapion, a Georgian monk, set out on a journey with a miraculous, life-giving icon. He had been sent by his abbot, Mikel, to found a new monastery. He leĞ the monastery of Parekhta in the province of Tao-Klarjeti (now in north-eastern Turkey), and travelled to the neighbouring province of Samtskhe-Javakheti (now a southern region of the Republic of Georgia), where a series of miraculous events showed him the site for his new foundation: the monastery of Zarzma. The miraculous icon that he travelled with was painted with an image of the Transfiguration of Christ, and it became the central devotional object of the new monastery, which was dedicated to the Feast of the Transfiguration. The veneration of the icon is described in the Vita of Serapion Zarzmeli, wriĴen by the saint’s nephew, Basil Zarzmeli, in the early tenth century.2 The ninth-century (or possibly earlier) date for the original icon is secured by an inscription that gives the year 886 that is embossed on the silver-gilt revetment that was commissioned for the icon by a later abbot of the monastery, Pavle (Fig. 5.1). This revetment is now displayed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Tbilisi. Located in the first case in the Treasury rooms, the icon and its revetment look forward to the history of metalwork in which the Georgians so excelled, however it also looks back to pre-ninth-century (and in Byzantine terms, pre-Iconoclastic) traditions in iconography and icon veneration. Painted
1 I offer this to Leslie as part of her campaign to work out whether the ninth century was a time to be alive or dead. Thanks to Alisa Oleva, Yuri Piatnitskii, Steve Rapp and Tim Greenwood.
