The Witness of 6 January 786

On 6 January 786 — the feast of Theophany — Abo was beheaded in Tbilisi for refusing to return to Islam. His body, garments, and the blood-soaked earth were burned outside the city on the bank of the Kura, and his ashes were wrapped and cast into the river, deliberately, to prevent the Christians from gathering relics and raising a cult. The Life attests that a light like a shining star or a pillar of fire was seen over the river where his remains lay.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Beheading

The martyrdom took place on 6 January 786. This is the single most firmly fixed date in Abo’s story, because it is stated in a near-contemporary source written within a few years by a man of the same city: the Martyrdom of Abo records that Abo “died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Saracens in Kartli, in the city of Tbilisi, on 6 January 786” (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790; trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., SVS Press, 1976, pp. 115–133; the date is carried in the reference literature, e.g. the Martyrdom of Abo summary and OCA notice, oca.org). That the death fell on 6 January — the feast of Theophany (the Baptism of Christ) in the Orthodox calendar — is not lost on the tradition: Abo, baptized in the north and martyred on the day the Church celebrates the Lord’s own Baptism, is remembered as one whose martyrdom was a second baptism, in blood, on the very feast of baptism (a connection the hymnography draws; see The Patron of Tbilisi).

Having refused the repeated demand to return to Islam (see Arrest and the Demand to Recant), Abo was condemned under the apostasy law and beheaded. The Life presents him going to his death not in terror but with a settled readiness, having declared himself prepared to die for Christ (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA notice, oca.org). The manner of execution — beheading by the sword — is the ordinary form of the death penalty in this setting and is consistently attested across the tradition.

The Burning of the Body

What was done with Abo’s body after the beheading is one of the most striking and historically revealing details of the whole account, and it is preserved with vivid particularity. The executioners did not simply leave or bury the corpse. They gathered his body, his garments, and even the earth that had been soaked with his blood, placed them together, carried them outside the city, and burned them on the bank of the Kura (Mtkvari) River (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA notice, oca.org: they “tossed his body, his garments, and the earth that had been soaked with his blood into a sack, dragged it outside the city, and burned it near the Mtkvari River”). Then they took his ashes, wrapped in a skin, and cast them into the river (OCA notice, oca.org; Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

The purpose of this thorough destruction is explicit and important: it was done precisely to prevent the Christians from collecting Abo’s remains as relics and raising a cult around them. The authorities understood exactly what the death of such a confessor would mean to the Christian community, and they acted to deny it a physical focus (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; on the intention to forestall a cult, Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976, introduction). The detail is a mark of the account’s realism: it reflects a genuine understanding of the dynamics of the martyr-cult and the authorities’ deliberate effort to forestall it — an effort that, as the veneration of Abo down to the present shows, entirely failed (see The Cult and the Relics).

The place of the burning has its own long resonance. It lay on the bank of the Kura beneath the cliff on the left bank where, in later centuries, the church of Metekhi would rise; and it is there, at that site, that Abo’s veneration became fixed (see The Patron of Tbilisi; OCA notice, oca.org, on the chapel later built on the Mtkvari’s left bank).

The Lights Over the River

The Life attests that the destruction of Abo’s body did not end in darkness but in light. On the night after the burning, a luminous sign was seen over the river where the martyr’s ashes had been cast: a light like a shining star, or a pillar of fire, standing over the water and visible to those who beheld it (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA notice, oca.org: “A shining star hung over the river with its bright light reflecting in the water where the remains of the saint rested”; the fuller devotional tradition speaks of “a fiery star” or pillar of light standing over the place, flashing as bright as lightning and seen by all).

[Disputed: the miraculous lights over the Kura are a hagiographical claim, reported here as what the near-contemporary Life attests rather than certified as documented fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The luminous sign over the martyr’s remains is a recurring topos in Christian martyr-literature — the glorification of the destroyed body by a heavenly light is a standard sign of sanctity — and the collection reports it as the Life’s testimony to Abo’s holiness, noting both its specific attestation in this near-contemporary source and its conventional character within the genre. The tradition is consistent that the light stood over the river where the ashes lay; the details (a star, a pillar of fire, the number of nights) vary in the retellings (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).]

Reported soberly, the sign carries the theological meaning the Life intends: the authorities had destroyed the body and scattered the ashes precisely so that nothing of Abo should remain to be venerated — and the light over the water declared, against that intention, that the martyr was glorified by God exactly where they had tried to erase him. The very river into which he was cast to be forgotten became the site of his memory (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; and see The Cult and the Relics).

What the Day Established

The events of 6 January 786 fixed the shape of everything that followed. There would be no bodily relics of Abo, by the authorities’ design — and so his veneration would attach to the place: the bank of the Kura, the site beneath Metekhi, the memory of the light over the water (see The Cult and the Relics). There would be a martyr for the Christians of Tbilisi to remember — an Arab and a former Muslim who had chosen and confessed Christ to the death — and within a few years there would be a book to remember him by, written at the commission of the head of the Georgian Church (see A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature). The attempt to prevent a cult produced, instead, one of the enduring cults of the Georgian capital.

See Also

• Arrest and the Demand to Recant — the refusal that led to the sentence
• A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People — the sober framing of the martyrdom
• The Cult and the Relics — the veneration of the place where no body remained
• The Patron of Tbilisi — the site at Metekhi and the feast

References

• Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976.
• Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction and apparatus to the Passion of Abo (the intention to prevent a cult; the date).
• “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The burning near the Mtkvari, the ashes cast into the river, the shining star over the water, the later chapel.)