The Cult and the Relics

By the deliberate design of those who killed him, no bodily relics of St. Abo survived: his body was burned and his ashes cast into the Kura precisely to deny the Christians a focus of veneration. His cult therefore attached to the place of his martyrdom and to the memory of the light over the river, and it lives on in the liturgy and in the icons — a veneration of a place and a memory rather than of surviving remains.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Cult Without Relics, By Design

The relic-situation of St. Abo is unusual and deliberate. In the ordinary course, a martyr’s body — or fragments of it, or the very ashes — become relics, gathered by the faithful, enshrined, and venerated as the physical locus of the saint’s continuing presence and intercession. With Abo this was made impossible on purpose. The authorities burned his body, his garments, and even the blood-soaked earth, and cast the ashes into the Kura, precisely so that the Christians could collect nothing and raise no cult (see The Witness of 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; OCA notice, oca.org). The intention is explicit in the near-contemporary source, and its consequence is that Abo is a saint essentially without bodily relics — a rare condition among the great martyrs.

The irony is total and is part of the meaning of his cult. The very thoroughness of the attempt to erase Abo is what the tradition remembers, and the light seen over the river where his ashes lay is remembered precisely as God’s answer to that attempt (see The Witness of 6 January 786). The absence of relics is not a gap in Abo’s veneration but a feature of it: his cult is built around the memory of a body destroyed and a martyr glorified nonetheless.

The Veneration of the Place

With no relics to enshrine, Abo’s cult attached itself to the place of his martyrdom. The bank of the Kura beneath the Metekhi cliff, in the old city near the Abanotubani baths, became the fixed site of his veneration; a chapel was built there, and later the church of St. Abo, keeping the memory anchored to the ground of his death (see The Patron of Tbilisi; OCA notice, oca.org). This is a veneration of geography: the faithful venerate Abo where he died and where his ashes were cast, at the river that was meant to carry him into oblivion and instead became the site of his memory.

There is a theological fittingness to this. A saint venerated at the place of his witness, rather than at a portable reliquary, is a saint bound to a particular city — and Abo’s binding to Tbilisi, as its patron, is expressed exactly in this rootedness to the site by the river (see Abo in Georgian Memory). Where relics can travel and disperse a cult, the place-cult of Abo concentrates his veneration in the one city he made his own by dying there.

The Liturgical Cult

The primary vehicle of Abo’s continuing veneration is the liturgical: the annual feast on 8 January, with its proper hymnography, celebrated at the church of his name and throughout the Georgian Church (see The Patron of Tbilisi; the feast in the Georgian and wider Orthodox calendars). In the absence of relics, it is the liturgy that keeps Abo present to his people — recounting his passion, invoking his intercession, and interpreting his martyrdom through the hymns that develop his proper themes (the Arab who chose Christ, the perfumer become a fragrance to God, the martyr glorified by light). The living cult of Abo is, above all, a liturgical memory, renewed each year, carried by the same Church whose Catholicos first commissioned his Life (see A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature).

The Icons

Abo is venerated also in his icons, and the iconographic tradition renders the marks of his story. He is typically depicted as a young man — reflecting the tradition that he died young (see Abo the Arab Perfumer) — and in the manner proper to a martyr, often bearing the cross of martyrdom; representations may evoke the scene of his martyrdom by the river and the light above it, or his identity as the perfumer-martyr (on the iconography of St. Abo, the tradition of Georgian sacred art). [Disputed: the specific attributes and the age at which Abo is shown vary across icons and periods, and depend on later artistic tradition rather than on the eighth-century sources, which describe no portrait; the collection reports the iconographic tradition as later devotional art, not as evidence for Abo’s appearance.] The icon, like the feast, supplies a focus for veneration that the destroyed body cannot — a visible image where there is no physical relic.

What the Cult Rests On

Abo’s cult thus rests on a distinctive triad, each element compensating for the absence of relics: the place by the Kura, marked and made holy; the feast and its hymnography, renewing the memory each year; and the icon and the text, giving the martyr a face and a story. Together these have sustained one of the enduring cults of the Georgian capital for more than twelve centuries — a cult that exists precisely where its enemies tried hardest to prevent one. The theology of the case is the theology the repository draws from all such veneration: what the Church honors in a saint is not finally his bones but his witness, and Abo’s witness, preserved in memory, feast, image, and the near-contemporary word of Sabanisdze, needed no relics to endure (cf. the treatment of cult-without-documentation in the repository’s St. Xenia methodology; and see Legacy).

See Also

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 to the Passion of Abo (the destruction of the body to prevent a cult).
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The burning and scattering of the ashes; the chapel at the site; the feast.)