Khorakert Monastery, Armenia

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The main buildings of Khorakert are the main temple and the vestry which is on the same axis with it. They take up the middle of a plot extended from west to east and encircled with a stone wall. The main entranceway to the monastery is a spacious vaulted premise which has wide arched passageways decorated with half-columns and ornamental carvings.

Within the confines of the wall there have survived remnants of a refectory and two small vaulted chapels with deep apses, as well as traces of foundations of civil buildings. South of the chapels, near the wall, amidst trees, there is a wall connected with a secret passage leading to a gorge.

The main temple is the largest, highest, and the most artistically expressive building of Khorakert, the chief architectural dominant of the ensemble, to which the bulks of the other buildings were subordinated. The temple, dating tack to the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century is an outwardly rectangular and innerly cross-winged domed structure with annexes in the corners of the cross middle. As distinct from similar churches, it is lightly extended in length. The smooth walls of the longitudinal arms of the cross and their greater depth as compared with the lateral arms extend the interior still more, which brings ii close to the interiors of Armenian domed basilicas.

The vestry attached to the temple in 1257 is a rare example of a building rectangular in the plan and roofed with a system of intersecting arches spanning the entire hall. This roofing resembles a temple cupola. Just as in the latter, in the vestry the main emphasis is laid on the central section of the roofing as compared with which the perimetral sections and walls look much more ordinary. The parts of the tent roof, varying in form and arrangement, are framed with sculpturesque braces. The cornice of the transition girth to the octahedral tent-roof is additionally ornamented with two rows of quatrefoils. The same ornament decorates the abaci of the wall-attached abutments. With the main source of light being at the top of the tent-roof, all this creates not only a rich play of light and shade, but also brought this part of the structure to the foreground. This method enabled the architect of the vestry to coordinate the artistic image of the new structure with that of the temple which already existed.

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