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The cosmopolitan Artsrunis—equally versed in Armenian, Georgian, Mongol, and Catholic cultures—adopted the newest iconographic trend, that of Western Catholic art, which at the time also represented the elite artistic language of both the Cilician Armenian royal court and the Mongol khan’s court

What could the Good Shepherd motif have meant to early Christians, if they so frequently chose it as a single or prominent image above their final resting place?

The most widespread Russian type of Hagia Sophia stems from a pious misunderstanding, depicting Hagia Sophia as “Saint Sophia” accompanied by her three daughters, Vera, Nadezhda, and Lyubov

It is equally remarkable that at least this one Byzantine church has survived more or less in its original form out of the twenty that once stood in Nicaea, and out of the many thousands across the country