User Reviews
The town of Dmanisi is first mentioned in the 9th century as a possession of the Arab emirate of Tbilisi, though the area had been settled since the Early Bronze Age. An Orthodox Christian cathedral ('Dmanisi Sioni') was built there in the 6th century. Located on the confluence of trading routes and cultural influences, Dmanisi was of particular importance, growing into a major commercial center of medieval Georgia.
The site includes an inner castle, secular buildings, shrines and a secret tunnel. Also on this site you can see ruins and fundaments of dwellings, mosque with minaret, madrasa, bathhouses, oil house, pottery, and other workshops, wine cellars, paved roads, etc. It was a big fun for us to explore numerous semi-underground structures with holes in vaults and reservoirs for collecting rainwater with well-preserved elements of pipes and bathes.
The walls and vaults of Dmanisi Sioni three-aisled basilica, constructed from rough stones, remember a lot of rebuilds. Time has made its 13th century frescoes pale, and faces on them are almost indiscernible. In 13th century the church also was updated by narthex, which looks completely atypically for Georgian architecture, but is very similar to Armenian gavits – there is less the 15 km to the border of Armenia. And the khachkar (carved, memorial stele bearing a cross) on its frontone completes the picture. The narthex with its ornaments and manuscripts and with tombstones on the floor looks really gorgeous.
The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.