Abo the Arab Perfumer

Abo was an Arab of Baghdad, born about 756–765 into a Muslim family and raised in the faith of Islam, who earned his living as a muri — a maker of fine perfumes and aromatic ointments. At about seventeen or eighteen he entered the service of the exiled Kartlian prince Nerse and travelled north with him to Georgia, the journey that would bring him to Christ.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

An Arab of Baghdad

Everything the tradition knows of Abo begins from a single, near-contemporary source: the Martyrdom of Abo, written within a few years of his death by Ioane Sabanisdze, a churchman of Tbilisi who claims to have known him (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790; trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., SVS Press, 1976, pp. 115–133; on the source’s near-contemporary character see The Life as a Source). That source is unambiguous on the point that most defines Abo’s paradox: he was not a Georgian and not a Christian by birth. He was an Arab, born and raised in Baghdad, the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate founded in 762, and he was a Muslim (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; Lang, Lives and Legends, introduction to the Passion). The whole meaning of his martyrdom — an Arab and former Muslim confessing Christ under Arab rule — rests on this origin, and the Life never softens it: Abo remained, ethnically and by descent, one of the ruling people, and it is precisely as such that he chose the faith of the ruled.

His exact birth year is not recorded and can only be inferred backward from the Life’s statements about his age. [Disputed: modern reference works place Abo’s birth variously at about 756 (reasoning from an age of roughly thirty at his death in 786) or later in the 760s (so those who read the Life’s “about seventeen or eighteen” at his entry into Nerse’s service against a return to Tbilisi in 782); no source gives a calendar year of birth, and the range c. 756–765 reflects this inference rather than a documented date (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976, on the chronology; cf. the summary in reference literature, e.g. the OCA synaxarion notice, oca.org, which gives his age as seventeen at his entry into Nerse’s service).] The uncertainty is the ordinary condition of an eighth-century biography and does not touch the firm outline: a young Arab of Baghdad, in the first Abbasid generation, who would die in Georgia before he was old.

The Perfumer’s Trade

Abo’s trade is one of the vivid, concrete details that mark the Life as the work of a man reporting a real person rather than composing a type. He was, in the Georgian, a maker of perfumes and aromatic preparations — a muri or perfumer — and he was skilled at it (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; the epithet “the Perfumer” [Georgian Neṭari/“the blessed” is devotional, but the trade-name is embedded in the narrative]). Baghdad in the third quarter of the eighth century was among the great commercial cities of the world, and the perfumer’s craft — the compounding of scents, unguents, and medicinal ointments from imported aromatics — was a respected urban profession, bound up with pharmacy, with the luxury trade, and with the refined material culture of the early Abbasid court and its imitators (on the perfumer as an established Baghdadi urban trade, standard economic-history background; Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976, notes the profession as the source gives it).

The detail matters for more than color. It tells us that Abo was a young man of the city, literate enough and skilled enough to practise a specialized craft, not a soldier or a slave of the household in the crudest sense but a professional attached to a great man’s service. It also gives his sanctity its enduring epithet: he is remembered not as “Abo the soldier” or “Abo the noble” but as Abo Ṭbileli — Abo of Tbilisi — and, in the wider Orthodox synaxaria, as “the Perfumer,” the maker of sweet scents who became, in the language of the hymns, himself a fragrance offered to God (a hagiographical topos the later hymnography develops; see The Patron of Tbilisi).

Entering the Service of Prince Nerse

The hinge that carried Abo out of Baghdad and toward Christ was the fortune of a Georgian nobleman. Nerse (Nerses), a prince (erismtavari) of Kartli — the core kingdom of eastern Georgia — had fallen under suspicion and had been summoned to the caliphal court, where he was held for a period of years. [Disputed: the Life and the derived tradition place Nerse’s detention under the Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) and his release under a new caliph — i.e. al-Mahdi, from 775; the precise length of the detention (the tradition often says three years) and the exact year of release are given differently across retellings, all ultimately dependent on the single narrative of Sabanisdze (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA notice, oca.org, giving the detention under al-Mansur).] When Nerse was freed and permitted to return to his homeland, he assembled a retinue, and among those who entered his service was the young perfumer Abo, then about seventeen or eighteen (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

Abo thus came to Georgia around 775 not as a missionary’s convert but as an Arab professional in a Christian prince’s household — a member of the caliphate’s own people, travelling into a Christian society under Arab overlordship. The Life is careful to present his turning to Christ as something that grew in him over time within that household and that society, not as a sudden or coerced conversion (see Drawn to Christ in Kartli). But the sociological fact is the ground of the whole story: the man who would become the patron saint of the Georgian capital arrived there as a foreigner of the ruling nation, in the baggage-train of a Georgian prince returning from the caliph’s court.

What Is Firmly Known and What Is Inferred

It is worth marking, at the outset of the collection, the line between the firm and the inferred, because the rest of Abo’s story depends on it. Firmly attested, because it stands in a near-contemporary source written by a man of the same city: Abo was an Arab of Baghdad, a Muslim by birth, a perfumer by trade, who came to Kartli in the service of the returning prince Nerse (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; on the source’s weight see The Life as a Source). Inferred, and therefore given as ranges: his exact birth year, his precise age, and the exact chronology of Nerse’s detention and release, all of which the sources report only relatively or estimate backward from the fixed point of his death on 6 January 786 (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976; and see The Witness of 6 January 786). This is the ordinary discipline the repository applies to hagiography (METHODOLOGY §3.5); with Abo it is applied to an unusually strong source, so that the firm outline is genuinely firm and only the numbers are soft.

See Also

References

  • Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of the Holy and Blessed Martyr of Christ Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, “The Passion of St. Abo of Tiflis,” in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd rev. ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 (1st ed. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956).
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction and apparatus to the Passion of Abo.
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org (synaxarion notice; used to locate the traditional dates and the detention under al-Mansur).