Lecture: “The Excavations of the St. Grigoris Chapel of Amaras and the Context of Early Christian Reliquaries in Artsakh.”

On May 18, the regular seminar of the Research Group for the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Artsakh was held in the reading hall of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the NAS RA. Prof. Hamlet Petrosyan, Doctor of Historical Sciences, delivered a lecture entitled “The Excavations of the St. Grigoris Chapel of Amaras and the Context of Early Christian Reliquaries in Artsakh.”

The excavations of the St. Grigoris Chapel of Amaras, located in the Martuni region of the Republic of Artsakh, were carried out in the eastern courtyard of the present-day church, within a separate 6×5 m excavation area adjoining the exterior side of the eastern wall.

The principal aim was to verify the hypothesis according to which the current church, by means of its eastern wall, had cut through and divided the chapel into two parts, leaving its presumed eastern entrance outside the structure. The speaker noted that the excavations revealed the remains of the eastern entrance constructed of finely hewn stones, including the open-air vestibule, the bases of the monumental entrance, a wall pilaster base, as well as the staircase descending into the semi-subterranean hall. The excavations also demonstrated that the original structure of Grigoris’s tomb possessed an eastern entrance, an exceptional phenomenon in Armenian ecclesiastical architecture.

The speaker further noted that during the long-term excavations conducted at Tigranakert, a tomb with an eastern entrance was likewise uncovered within the area of the early Christian church discovered there.

During the lecture, H. Petrosyan also addressed the activities of King Vachagan and a number of related issues. During and after the seminar, attendees addressed questions to the speaker, followed by a professional discussion.