Shoana Church

Shoana Church stands on the southeastern spur of Mount Shoana, on the left bank of the Kuban River, next to the village named after Kosta Khetagurov in the Karachayevsky District of Karachay-Cherkessia. Its white walls are visible from afar from the A155 highway, the road tourists take toward Dombay. It is one of the oldest Christian churches in the North Caucasus, a monument linked to the historical Alan eparchy.

History

The church was built in the late 10th or early 11th century. According to one version, it was built by a local crew of builders that included Byzantine Greeks. The building is made of roughly worked sandstone blocks on lime mortar, with a rubble-concrete fill inside the walls; the exterior was once covered with a thin plaster coating.

In 1889–1894 a skete of the Alexander-Athos Zelenchuk Monastery was opened at the church. At that time the building was repaired: a new roof was put up, the vestibules were restored, and the interior walls were plastered. Houses for monks were built nearby — their walls survive today as ruins. During the Civil War the skete was devastated.

In 2007 residents of the village named after Kosta Khetagurov carried out unauthorized repairs to the cathedral. On 30 April 2011 unknown persons set fire to the church. Since 2018 it has been part of the Alan Christian Center in the North Caucasus. Over its long history the church has also earned an unofficial name — "a thousand-year prayer."

Architecture

Shoana Church is a domed, cross-in-square building in the mid-Byzantine style. The length of the building equals its height — 12.9 meters. The facade decoration is modest: a cornice of stone slabs, brick-tile brow mouldings on the drum of the dome, and stone brow mouldings over some of the windows.

Nearby

The church is part of the Shoana historical and architectural complex, which also includes a rock burial site and the ruins of an Alan settlement from the 10th–11th centuries. On the slope next to it stand the stone walls of the ruined skete of the Alexander-Athos Monastery — cells and outbuildings now overgrown with shrubs.

Getting there

Shoana Church lies along the route from Karachayevsk toward Dombay on the A155 highway, next to the village named after Kosta Khetagurov. A trail climbs from the road up the spur of Mount Shoana to the church.