The cathedral interior walls were once fully adorned with medieval frescoes, but many of them did not survive. In the 1830s, when Emperor Nicholas I was scheduled to visit Mskheta, Russian authorities razed the galleries and whitewashed timeless frescoes as part of an effort to give the cathedral a "tidier look"; in the end the Czar never even came. Today, after much careful restoration, some frescoes survive, including a 13th-century depiction of the "Beast of the Apocalypse" and figures of the Zodiac.