Monastery of Surb Gevorg of Goms

The Monastery of Saint George of Goms (Armenian: Գոմքի Սուրբ Գևորգ վանք, "Saint George") was an Armenian monastery in the historic province of Vaspurakan, in present-day Turkey. The local Armenian peasants called it Jojglukh vank (Monastery of the Great Head) (Armenian: Ջոջգլուխ վանք). Goms, meaning "cowsheds", was the name of the nearest village to the monastery: this village is now called Kümüs by its Kurdish inhabitants, its official name is Çanakdüzü.

The monastery lied at shores of Lake Van, within a compact and almost square fortified enclosure. The masonry of the enclosure wall is not bonded into the structure of the church, implying that it is a later construction and the church was originally free-standing. There are oval shaped defensive towers at the south-east and north-east corners of the wall. The wall's masonry shows two distinct layers: the bottom three quarters was constructed using roughly shaped but regularly laid stone blocks and the top third uses larger and less regularly shaped stones.

This monastery is not mentioned in any known historical source. However historian-orientalist J. M. Thierry considers that both the design of the church and historical...