(Şeytan Kalesi) at the village
Yıldırımtepe. The name "Erusheti" was applied by the medieval Georgians to the territory in the
Kura or Mtkvari river valley around the eponymous town or fortress, north of Artani (Ardahan), between the
Arsiani Range (Yalnızçam Dağları) and
Kartsakhi Lake (Aktaş Gölü). Erusheti was contiguous with the province of
Javakheti and is considered to have been its "lower" or "western" part. According to
Cyril Toumanoff, Javakheti, together with Erusheti, was part of the
Iberian duchy of
Tsunda from the 4th or 3rd century BC. While its eastern counterpart was at times conquered by the
Artaxiads and
Arsacids of Armenia, Erusheti/West Javakheti firmly remained within the Iberian realm, eventually becoming a
Bagratid domain 780. The
Georgian historical tradition makes Erusheti, along with
Mtskheta and
Manglisi, one of the earliest church establishments in
Kartli (Iberia) following King
Mirian's conversion to Christianity in the 330s. According to the 11th-century historian
Leonti Mroveli, Erusheti was the first place which the bishop John of Kartli, returning from his mission to
Constantinople with a group of
Byzantine priests and masons, chose to build a Christian church. There, the chronicle continues, he left a treasure and the
nails of the Lord brought from Constantinople, to the disappointment of King Mirian who wanted to have the relics at his capital, Mtskheta. The church at Erusheti was further adorned by one of Mirian's successors
Mihrdat III later in the 4th century and it became a seat of the homonymous bishopric under
Vakhtang I in the 5th century. Erusheti was dispossessed of its holy relics by the Byzantine emperor
Heraclius who passed through Kartli during his
war with Iran in the 620s. After the
Ottoman Empire took over Erusheti as part of its acquisitions in southwestern Georgia in the 16th century, Christianity and the Georgian culture went in steady decline. The early 18th-century Georgian scholar
Prince Vakhushti reported that a cathedral church still stood in Erusheti, but it was no more in use. The Georgian archaeologist
Ekvtime Takaishvili, visiting Erusheti in 1902, found that only the elderly could understand the Georgian language. He identified a three-
nave basilica at the village of Oğuzyolu, near
Hanak, as the church of Erusheti, of which only a ruined
apse was found by Bruno Baumgartner in 1990. Of other monuments described by Takaishvili, the domed
tetraconch church of
St. George of Gogubani or
Gogiuba, at
Binbaşak, now stands in ruins and nothing remains of an important cruciform domed church of the Holy
Mother of God of Tsqarostavi at
Öncül. Better preserved are single-nave churches at Berki (
Börk) and Chaishi (
Kayabeyi), the latter currently being in use as a
mosque. ==Notes==