FROM COLCHIS TO LAZICA AND KLARJETI: Nuka Church and the Christian Transformation of the Eastern Black Sea World

Nuka Church, commonly known in Georgian as Nuka-Saqdari (ნუკას საყდარი), is a small ninth-century church in the historical province of Klarjeti, today within Artvin Province in northeastern Türkiye. Its architectural scale is modest, yet its historical importance is unusually large. The monument has been drawn into debates over the location of Khandzta, the famous monastic centre associated with Gregory of Khandzta, and it belongs to the dense ecclesiastical landscape that transformed south-western Georgian Christianity during the eighth and ninth centuries. This article places Nuka-Saqdari within a longer eastern Black Sea history extending from ancient Colchis to late antique Lazica/Egrisi and then to the medieval monastic world of Klarjeti. It does not treat Colchis, Lazica/Egrisi, and Klarjeti as interchangeable political entities. Rather, it argues that they represent overlapping but distinct historical layers within a wider Christian geography shaped by the Black Sea, the Chorokhi/Çoruh corridor, Byzantine and Georgian ecclesiastical networks, and changing political frontiers. The study examines the Christianisation of Lazica, the episcopal network centred on Phasis, the sixth-century evidence of inscriptions and churches, the monastic revival led by Gregory of Khandzta, the architecture of Nuka-Saqdari, and the contested attempts of Niko Marr and later scholars to identify the monument with Khandzta or other lost sites. It concludes that Nuka is best understood not merely as a candidate for a famous monastery but as a material witness to the layered Christian history of the eastern Black Sea and southern Caucasian-Anatolian borderlands.