Liminal spaces of memory, devotion and feasting? : porch-chapels in eleventh-century Georgia

Around the year 1000, a specific and unique type of sacred structure emerged in Georgia: the porch-chapel. Five fully developed examples are considered here: K'umurdo, Manglisi, Zemo-K'rikhi, K'atskhi, and Samtavro Monastery. Typological study finds antecedents in buildings of Late Antiquity and the early medieval buildings of Tao. A "functional reading" leads to possible connections to parallel phenomena in adjacent cultural spheres. The porchchapels, this study finds, are liminal spaces of memorial purpose that might have served for semi-secular feasts and private services as much as they served as places of legal character. They appear to have been one of the many architectural phenomena of the period closely related to the liturgical shift from Jerusalemite to Constantinopolitan liturgy.