Astvatsankal Monastery Explained

40.4631°N 44.4436°WThe Astvatsankal Monastery is an Armenian Monastery complex in Aragatsotn Province, between the villages of Yernjatap and Hartavan. It was built in the 4th-13th centuries.

The original chapel of the church was built in the 5th or 6th century.^[1]

The main church was added to the chapel in 1244 under the commission of Prince K'urd of the Vachutian dynasty and his wife Xorisali, as known from an inscription:^[1]

A large gavit or narthex was built right after, circa 1250.^[1]

This is one of the famous examples of Armenian architecture in the 13th century adopting the use of muqarnas designs, spurred by the influence of contemporary Islamic architecture.^{[1] [2]} Examples of this can be found in the Geghard Monastery, the Gandzasar Monastery as well (all in present-day Armenia),^[3] and at the Church of St Gregory of the Illuminator in Ani.^[4] In many of these examples, muqarnas vaults are recurring features in the gavits (narthexes) of the churches, which were the locus of much innovation and experimentation in medieval Armenian architecture. These borrowings of Islamic architectural motifs may have been due to either Ilkhanid or Seljuk influences in the region, although the wide geographic spread of muqarnas usage in this period makes it difficult to pinpoint any specific influence with certainty.

The gavit collapsed in the 1988 Armenian earthquake, but has since been reconstructed.^[5]

Notes and References

1. Ghazarian . Armen . Ousterhout . Robert . A Muqarnas Drawing from Thirteenth-Century Armenia and the Use of Architectural Drawings during the Middle Ages . Muqarnas . 2001 . 18 . 145 . 10.2307/1523305 . 0732-2992 .
   (Page 145:) The original chapel at the site dates from the fifth or sixth century, to which the main church or katholikon was added on the north side. It is dated by inscription to 1244, attributed to the patronage of Prince K'urd and his wife Xorisali. A separate inscription names a master, presumably the builder, named Yovhanes. The large gavit or narthex was constructed immediately following the church, and must have been completed by ca. 1250. The interior space of the gavit is subdivided by four freestanding piers, which support several different types of ornamental vaults. Above the square central space was a complex muqarnas vault, measuring just over 5 m on each side, with a central erdik or oculus, which may have originally been covered by a colonnaded canopy.
   (Page 146:) The common nine-bayed plan of the gavit calls to mind the typical nine-bayed mosque plan that spread throughout the Islamic world from Central Asia to Spain after the Abbasid era; at the same time, the domed, nine-bayed design was common for the naos of both Byzantine and Armenian church. (...) For that reason, the thirteenth-century gavits are excellent indicators of architectural inventiveness, and with forms imitated from adjacent cultures, also indicators of cultural interaction. Other, better preserved, examples known from Geghard (before 1225), Haric' (ca. 1224), and Gandzasar (1261) were equipped with elaborated muqarnas vaults similar to the vault at Astvatsankal and perhaps executed by the same masons. The early-thirteenth-century muqarnas vault of the gavit at the Church of the Apostles at Ani also has similar geometry.
   (Pages 152-153:) Because the muqarnas was clearly invented in an Islamic milieu.....
2. Book: Maranci, Christina . The Art of Armenia: An Introduction . Oxford University Press . 2018 . 978-0-19-026901-2 . 135 . en.
3. Ghazarian . Armen . Ousterhout . Robert . 2001 . A Muqarnas Drawing from Thirteenth-Century Armenia and the Use of Architectural Drawings during the Middle Ages . Muqarnas . 18 . 146 . 10.2307/1523305 . 1523305 . 0732-2992.
4. Book: Guidetti, Mattia . https://books.google.com/books?id=gi1WDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA163 . Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100-1500 . Edinburgh University Press . 2017 . 978-1-4744-1130-1 . Blessing . Patricia . en . The ‘Islamicness’ of Some Decorative Patterns in the Church of Tigran Honents in Ani.
5. Ghazarian . Armen . Ousterhout . Robert . A Muqarnas Drawing from Thirteenth-Century Armenia and the Use of Architectural Drawings during the Middle Ages . Muqarnas . 2001 . 18 . 146 . 10.2307/1523305 . 0732-2992 . Even more unfortunately, the building in question was devastated in the 1988 Armenian earthquake, and the central vault and the north and west walls of the gavit collapsed..