Khirsa Monastery

Khirsa is one of the thirteen foundations that established monastic life in Georgia in the 6th century. Its founder was Stephen of Khirsa, a member of the group known as the Assyrian Fathers who came from the Antioch region and settled here at the southern edge of the Alazani plain. His grave lies under the altar, and the monastery still keeps his feast.

The present church is largely a 16th and 17th-century rebuilding on 6th-century foundations. It is a three-nave basilica, plain and severe outside, with almost no carved ornament; the whole effect rests on proportion and on the texture of the stone. Inside, the space is narrow and tall, the piers heavy, and light comes from only a few small windows — which is why services here are lit mostly by candles even at midday.

The monastery sits inside a high enclosure wall with corner towers, and these are not decorative. Tibaani lay on the line of the Dagestani raids that plagued Kakheti for two centuries, and the community was attacked repeatedly; the monks sheltered in the towers.

Khirsa was a bishop's seat for centuries, and its bishops ranked high in the Kakhetian church. The Soviet period closed it; it reopened in the 1990s and is a working male monastery today, with a well-restored courtyard, a vineyard and a productive garden.

From the north corner of the wall the Alazani plain opens out, and on a clear day the Caucasus ridge closes the horizon. Sighnaghi is twenty minutes away, but almost nobody comes over.

The thirteen Assyrian Fathers are a hinge in Georgian church history. They arrived in the 540s and 550s, dispersed across the country and founded the monasteries that turned a recently converted kingdom into a monastic one. Khirsa, Alaverdi and Nekresi all belong to that same movement, and all three can be seen in a single day.