Khobi Monastery

Khobi Monastery stands in the village of Nojikhevi, about 3 km north of the small town of Khobi, on the Samegrelo plain between Senaki and Zugdidi. Its full name is the Nojikhevi convent of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and a community of nuns lives here today. The main church is a domeless hall roofed with cross vaults, with two corner chapels that were later joined to the central bay. Open galleries run along the west and south sides, and the facades are decorated with finely carved stone. A bell tower built between the 14th and 17th centuries rises close by.

Inside, frescoes of the 13th and 14th centuries show the influence of late Byzantine Palaeologan painting, and a 17th-century layer adds portraits of the Dadiani family with Georgian captions. In the southern chapel, a long inscription in the old asomtavruli script records that Vameq I Dadiani brought marble columns, capitals and parts of a pulpit home from a campaign against Zichia, on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea; some pieces may be 5th-century Byzantine work. Around the church lie the ruins of a 17th-century bishop's palace and a perimeter wall restored in 2016.

Khobi first appears in a document of the Georgian Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem dated 1212 to 1222, and the art historian Vakhtang Beridze placed the present church in the second half of the 13th century. It became the family abbey and burial ground of the Dadiani, the princely rulers of Mingrelia. In the 17th century visitors described relics kept here, including a robe venerated as the Virgin's. After a pause in the Soviet period, the church returned to worship and now serves a nunnery.