Sunday’s Mass at the Oldest Standing Church in Tbilisi

I may be a heathen but I love the traditional ceremonies, rituals, art and especially the music of historic churches.

Naturally I wanted to visit the Anchiskhati Basilica of St Mary in Old Town, Tbilisi, a Greek Orthodox church, the oldest surviving church in the Georgian Capital, dating back to the 6th century.

On Sunday I went to the 9 a.m. mass there where a crowd of Georgians stood and worshipped their God and faith in the Holy Bible. There are few pews in the Georgian Orthodox churches I’ve been to, except perhaps those scattered along the walls.

People move about on the floor, lighting votive candles, paying respects to the relics and portraits of saints that are on the walls and pillars with touching, kisses, prayers and interacting with the multiple priests who repeatedly move back and forth between an enclave behind the altar and where the parishioners gathered.

The singing, I was told, would be polyphonic, meaning the choirs would include singers who manipulate their voices to produce more than one note at a time, such as at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi where I went to mass a couple of time several weeks ago to hear this phenomenal form of singing.

But while I didn’t detect the polyphonic sounds on Sunday (hardly an authoritative assertion — I am no expert), the two small all-male choirs, one on each side of the alter, intoned the solemn prayers of the faithful with magnificence throughout the two-hour mass.