Abo in Georgian Memory

For more than twelve centuries Abo has held a fixed place in Georgian devotion and memory — patron of the capital, subject of one of the foundational works of Georgian literature, and a saint whose cult is woven into the old city of Tbilisi. This file follows his enduring presence and his modern veneration.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Presence That Never Lapsed

Unlike many saints whose cults wax and wane, or must be recovered from obscurity, Abo has held a continuous and prominent place in Georgian Christian memory from the eighth century to the present. Three things secured this permanence from the start: the near-contemporary Life of Sabanisdze, which gave the memory a fixed and authoritative literary form (see A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature); the fixing of his cult at a specific, central site in the capital, by the Kura beneath Metekhi (see The Patron of Tbilisi); and his adoption as patron of Tbilisi itself, which bound his memory to the identity of the city. A saint who is the patron of the capital, remembered in a canonical text and venerated at a famous site, does not slip from memory.

Because the Martyrdom of Abo is also one of the earliest masterpieces of Georgian literature, Abo occupies a place in Georgian cultural memory beyond the strictly religious. He is remembered not only as a saint but as the subject of a foundational national text — a figure at the intersection of the Church’s hagiography and the nation’s literary heritage (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, CSCO 601, Peeters, 2003; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., SVS Press, 1976). To study early Georgian literature is to encounter Abo; to study the sacred topography of Tbilisi is to encounter his site by the river. His memory is carried by both streams at once.

Woven Into the City

Abo’s memory is especially concentrated in the fabric of old Tbilisi. The quarter of his martyrdom — the bank of the Kura beneath the Metekhi cliff, near the Abanotubani sulphur baths that give the city its name — is among the oldest and most characteristic parts of Tbilisi, and Abo’s cult is fixed there in the church of his name (see The Patron of Tbilisi). To this day, then, Abo is not an abstract patron but a saint tied to a place a visitor can stand in: the old city, the river, the cliff, the baths. His memory has the concreteness of geography, anchored in the very origin-quarter of the capital he protects (see The Cult and the Relics).

This rootedness in place has kept Abo vivid in a way that a purely textual memory might not. The Georgian who venerates Abo does so with a site in view, in the heart of the national capital, and the story of the martyr by the river is bound up with the sense of Tbilisi as an ancient Christian city that outlasted the emirate which once ruled it (and which King David the Builder finally ended in 1122; see St. David the Builder).

Modern Veneration

Abo’s veneration continues in the Georgian Orthodox Church of the present. He is commemorated liturgically on his feast of 8 January, honored as the patron of Tbilisi, and venerated at the church of his name and throughout the Church (see The Patron of Tbilisi; OCA notice, “Martyr Abo the Perfumer,” oca.org). In the modern period — through the trials of the Soviet era, when the Georgian Church suffered severe repression, and into the revival of Georgian Orthodoxy after 1991 — the ancient saints of Georgia, Abo among them, have been focal points of the Church’s recovered life and of the reassertion of Georgia’s Christian heritage (on the modern revival of Georgian Orthodoxy, general history; and cf. the parallel modern national-religious veneration discussed for St. Ketevan of Georgia). [Disputed: the specific modern institutional details of Abo’s cult — particular church dedications, restorations, and civic observances — belong to recent local history rather than to the hagiographic sources, and the collection reports the continuity and vitality of the veneration without asserting particulars the sources do not supply.]

Abo’s veneration also extends beyond Georgia. As a martyr of the undivided pre-schism Church and a saint of the Orthodox calendar, he is commemorated across the Orthodox world — in the Russian, Greek, and other traditions and their diasporas — as the “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi” (the wider Orthodox commemoration; OCA and other synaxaria). This universal reach reflects the double character the previous file drew out: Abo is at once a Georgian national saint and a universal martyr for Christ (see An Arab Saint of Georgia).

The Shape of the Memory

What is remembered, in the end, is a coherent and moving figure: the young Arab perfumer of Baghdad who came to Georgia, found Christ, was baptized in the safe north, returned to live openly as a Christian in the Arab-ruled capital, refused to deny his Lord, was beheaded and burned and cast into the river to be forgotten — and became, against every intention of those who killed him, the patron saint of the city and one of the enduring figures of a nation’s faith and letters. That this memory is carried by a near-contemporary source of real quality means it is not a haze of legend but a genuinely known life, remembered truly (see The Life as a Source). Twelve centuries on, Abo remains what Sabanisdze made him for the Georgians of the 780s: a witness that Christ is worth more than life, and that the faith which defines a nation is open even to a stranger (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.
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003.
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction to the Passion of Abo.
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast and the wider Orthodox commemoration.)