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The Church of Dormition of Lykhny is a medieval Orthodox Christian church in the village of Lykhny in Abkhazia/Georgia, built in the 10th century. Its 14th-century frescoes are influenced by the contemporary Byzantine art and adorned with more than a dozen of Georgian and Greek inscriptions.
The Lykhny church is a domed cross-in-square design, built of straight rows of well-refined ashlar stone. The small dome, with a low drum and a sloping roof, is based on four freely standing piers. The western portion of the building includes an upper gallery. The façades are simple, apertured with windows and marked with three protruding apses protruding from the east wall. There are traces of the 10th-11th-century wall painting, but the extant cycle of frescoes date to the 14th century. They are characterized by neatly colored, dynamic, and expressive paintings of somewhat elongated human figures.
The antiquities of Lykhny, then also known as Souk-Su, were first studied and published, in 1848, by the French scholar Marie-Félicité Brosset, who also copied several medieval Georgian and Greek inscriptions from the Lykhny church. Of note is the Georgian inscription, in the asomtavruli script, relating the apparition of Halley's Comet in 1066, in the reign of Bagrat IV of Georgia.
References:Built around AD 90 to entertain the legionaries stationed at the fort of Caerleon (Isca), the impressive amphitheatre was the Roman equivalent of today’s multiplex cinema. Wooden benches provided seating for up to 6,000 spectators, who would gather to watch bloodthirsty displays featuring gladiatorial combat and exotic wild animals.
Long after the Romans left, the amphitheatre took on a new life in Arthurian legend. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the somewhat imaginative 12th-century scholar, wrote in his History of the Kings of Britain that Arthur was crowned in Caerleon and that the ruined amphitheatre was actually the remains of King Arthur’s Round Table.
Today it is the most complete Roman amphitheatre in Britain.