Bana cathedral

Bana (Georgian: ; Armenian: , romanized: Banak; Turkish: Penek Kilisesi) is a ruined early medieval cathedral in present-day Erzurum Province, eastern Turkey, in what had formerly been a historical marchland known to Armenians as Tayk and to Georgians as Tao. It is a large tetraconch design, surrounded by a near-rotunda polygonal ambulatory and marked with a cylindrical drum. Generally believed to have been constructed in the 7th century, based on an 11th-century chronicle it was reconstructed by Adarnase IV of Iberia at some point between 881 and 923. Henceforth, it was used as a royal cathedral by the Bagrationi dynasty until the Ottoman conquest of the area in the 16th century. The former cathedral was converted into a fortress by the Ottoman army during the Crimean War. The monastery was almost completely ruined during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78.

The Bana cathedral is located on the north bank of the Penek (Irlağaç) river near the village of Penek, in the Şenkaya district of Erzurum Province. "Penek" is a Turkified typonym deriving from the original name of the area: "Banak". Banak means "army" in Armenian, while banaki means "camp" in Georgian. It possibly takes its origin from a site in the Berdats Por district of Tayk – then a hereditary Mamikonian fiefdom – where the royal army ( , Ark'uni Banak) was headquartered during the rule of the Arshakuni in the 1st century.

The dating of the Bana cathedral is a subject of scholarly debate. The Bana cathedral is mentioned in the 11th-century chronicle of Sumbat Davitis Dze, who reports that the Georgian prince Adarnase IV (r. 881–923) ordered the building of the church of Bana "by the hand" of Kwirike, who subsequently became the first bishop of Bana. While the scholars such as Ekvtime Takaishvili, Shalva Amiranashvili, and Stepan Mnatsakanian tend to interpret the passage literally, Chubinashvili, Vakhtang Beridze and Tiran Marutyan identify Adarnase as a renovator, not a builder of the church. This view, now shared by some art scholars, dates the Bana church – clearly modeled on the contemporaneous Zvartnots cathedral near Yerevan – to the mid-7th century. It was when the Chalcedonian-Armenian catholicos Nerses III, who presided over several important religious projects Zvartnots included, resided in exile in Tayk c. 653–58.

Devastated during the 8th century by the Byzantine–Arab war, the region of Tao was gradually resettled by its new masters, the Georgian Bagratids, and under their patronage a monastic revival took place. With the settlements gradually expanding from the predominantly Georgian-populated north to the predominantly Armenian populated south and south-west, the Georgian princes reconstructed a number of monasteries abandoned by Armenians and built new foundations.

From the time of Adarnase IV's reconstruction, the cathedral of Bana was one of the principal royal churches of the Bagrationi dynasty. It was used for the coronation of Bagrat IV in 1027 and his marriage to Helena, a niece of the Byzantine emperor Romanos III Argyros in 1032. In the 15th century, King Vakhtang IV (r.1442–1446) and his consort khatun were buried at Bana. It was also the seat of the Georgian Orthodox bishop of Bana, whose diocese also included the neighboring areas of Taos-Kari, Panaskerti, and Oltisi. With the Ottoman conquest of the area in the 16th century, Bana was abandoned by Christians. During the Crimean War (1853–1865), the Ottoman military converted the church into a fortress, adding the crude bulwark still visible on the south side. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, it was shelled by the Russian artillery, blasting the dome off and inflicting severe damage on the edifice. Later the Russians carted off much of masonry to build a late 19th-c

Church data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).