Zvartnots Cathedral, Armenia

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The complex consisted of St. George temple or Zvartnots ("vigil forces", "celestial angels") and the palace of Catholicos Nerses Ill, known as "Builder".

ZvartnotsÂ’ architecture was supposed to impress the onlooker by its extraordinary artistic splendor. This determined the size of the temple, its layout and spatial arrangement, its structural features and its decoration which emphasized the central axis of the building and its upward sweep.

According to this reconstruction, the building consisted of three polyhedrons. the lower one being 32-hedral. and the upper one 16-hedral and crowned with a cone-shaped cupola. The central part of the interior had the shape of a tetraconch in the plan. In the joints between the apses there were mighty pylons which supported the drum of the cupola by means of spherical pendentives. Beyond the pylons there were columns arranged on the radial axis. They and the tops of the tetraconchÂ’s semicircles buttressed the arches which served as the basis for the middle polyhedron. The tetraconch was surrounded by a two-storey gallery fenced on the outer side by a circular wall with closely spaced windows and, on the inner side, by an open arcade of the apses. The altar apse was blank. The heaviness of the cupola and of the middle polyhedron was conveyed by arches and vaults of double curvature to the pylons and columns of the apses.

The plan of the palace is almost a square. The small size and skylight of most of the rooms show that they had wooden roofings of the kind used in Armenian peasant homes. The open gallery with an arcade on the northern side of the eastern part and flat roofs gave this structure of a severe composition the appearance of a southern-type building. The massive arches of the arcade resting on buttresses, cross-shaped in the plan, concealed the divisions between the premises behind it. It did not only decorate the square In front of the palace, but connected its architecture with that of the temple. The palace of Nerses III was the biggest of all the known civil structures of the 7th-century Armenia.

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