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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:The Beckov castle stands on a steep 50 m tall rock in the village Beckov. The dominance of the rock and impression of invincibility it gaves, challenged our ancestors to make use of these assets. The result is a remarkable harmony between the natural setting and architecture.
The castle first mentioned in 1200 was originally owned by the King and later, at the end of the 13th century it fell in hands of Matúš Èák. Its owners alternated - at the end of the 14th century the family of Stibor of Stiborice bought it.
The next owners, the Bánffys who adapted the Gothic castle to the Renaissance residence, improved its fortifications preventing the Turks from conquering it at the end of the 16th century. When Bánffys died out, the castle was owned by several noble families. It fell in decay after fire in 1729.
The history of the castle is the subject of different legends. One of them narrates the origin of the name of castle derived from that of jester Becko for whom the Duke Stibor had the castle built.
Another legend has it that the lord of the castle had his servant thrown down from the rock because he protected his child from the lords favourite dog. Before his death, the servant pronounced a curse saying that they would meet in a year and days time, and indeed precisely after that time the lord was bitten by a snake and fell down to the same abyss.
The well-conserved ruins of the castle, now the National Cultural Monument, are frequently visited by tourists, above all in July when the castle festival takes place. The former Ambro curia situated below the castle now shelters the exhibition of the local history.