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The Church of St George (Romansh: Sogn Gieri), dating back to the High Middle Ages, belongs to the church parishes of Bonaduz and Rhäzüns. It is decorated throughout with Gothic frescoes by the Waltensburger and Rhäzüns masters. The visitor experiences the Middle Ages here in the truest sense of the word. The depictions on the choir and nave walls of the Romanesque church are a ”biblia paupera”. The pictures recount events from the Old and, above all, from the New Testament. The Waltensburger frescoes testify to a courtly culture, which is also documented by the knightly epics and Minnesang. Representations of torture in the legend of St George stand in contrast to elegant saints and courageous knights. There is no other interior throughout the Canton of Graubünden whose walls tell us so much about what was important in the Middle Ages. It is considered the richest example of a completely decorated church interior of the Middle Ages in Switzerland.__Located at a remote location on a wooded hill above the anterior Rhine. The patronage festival goes back to the local legend, which tells how St. George did missionary work in the Grisons in the middle of the 4th century. At this place he leapt over the Rhine on his horse to escape pagan persecutors. Old parish, mentioned 960; evidence of a Carolingian hall church with stilted apse and walled, open (?) entrance courtyard found during excavations when restoration took place in 1961-1963. The present-day complex consists of a Romanesque nave with a flat ceiling and a transverse rectangular Gothic choir (the choir lies perpendicular to the nave) from the early 14th century with a cross rib vault. High Gothic wall-paintings by two artists. The earlier ones in the choir and choir arch by the Waltensburg Master ca. 1350, the newer ones on the walls of the nave by a Rhäzuns master from the 2nd half of the 14th century.__Choir: the ribs painted colourfully to simulate rich profiles. Intertwined leaves between four large medallions with angels as evangelists in the sectroids. Christ’s countenance on the apex stone; Annunciation in the tree vault shields, (flanked by the fox and stork from Aesop’s Fables), Crucifixion and the Coronation of Mary; a badly damaged Adoration of the Magi, row of apostles and benefactor couple under a bold meandering frieze with the coat of arms of Rhäzüns; St. Oswald and St. Nicholas in the window embrasure; pedestal drapery._ Three image bands with iconographically interesting, intertwined scenes of the miracle and passion of St. George on the wall under the merlon frieze: on the upper right King Dadianus shows the wheel and cauldron instruments of torture to the Saint, next to it the miracle of St. George, who causes branches to grow out of the house of a poor widow; below this the widow’s crippled child is presented to St. George, on the left the capture of St. George; on the upper left Queen Alexandria is hung by her hair, whipped and then beheaded after her confession to Christianity, while St. George is put into a cauldron of boiling lead as he prays for her; in the middle band of pictures the magician Anthanasios causes a demon to rise up out of a bursting steer; in the lower band the Saint is tortured, hung and desecrated, to the right of the choir arch he is decapitated; under the legend of St. George to the left is a Virgin of Mercy with kneeling benefactor and two women under the coat of arms of Rhäzüns: John the Baptist on the right above the masonry altar block; representation of the battle with the dragon on the north wall of the nave.__Nave: three bands of single images from the 2nd half of the 14th century by the so-called Rhäzüns Master along the longer walls and on the west wall. These distinguish themselves from the true form and carefully composed art of the Waltensburg Master by their linear and improvised representation of a type of pauper's Bible. Scenes in loose order from the Old and New Testaments that are kept strictly disconnected. Further devotional images on the north wall: St. Nicholas with the three virgins above; the so-called Holiday Christ, Gregory Mass, local legend of the St. George leaping over the Rhine, Archangel Michael as weigher of the souls, the death and burial of the Mother of God below. (Kunstführer durch die Schweiz, Hg. Gesellschaft für Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte, Band 2, Bern 2005) (Art Guide Throughout Switzerland, ed. Swiss Society for Art History, Volume 2, Berne 2005)
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