Legacy

St. Abo’s legacy is fourfold: he is the patron of Tbilisi, the subject of one of the foundational works of Georgian literature, a witness who roots the identity of a Christian nation in faith rather than blood, and a universal martyr of the Church whose story of conversion and fidelity transcends its time and place.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Patron of a Capital

The most tangible legacy of St. Abo is his patronage of Tbilisi. Twelve centuries after his death, the Arab convert executed under the Arab emirate remains the heavenly protector of the Georgian capital, venerated at the site of his martyrdom by the Kura beneath the Metekhi cliff, in the old city near the baths that give Tbilisi its name (see The Patron of Tbilisi). That this patronage was established over and against the deliberate attempt of the authorities to prevent any cult of Abo — burning his body and scattering his ashes precisely so that nothing should remain (see The Cult and the Relics) — gives it a particular resonance: the city took as its patron the very man its rulers tried to erase. Abo’s legacy is written into the sacred topography of Tbilisi itself.

A Foundational Text of Georgian Literature

Abo’s second legacy is literary. The Martyrdom of Abo by Ioane Sabanisdze is not only the source of everything we know about the saint; it is one of the earliest dated original works of Georgian prose and a masterpiece of early Georgian hagiography (see A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., SVS Press, 1976; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, CSCO 601, Peeters, 2003). Through this text Abo became a permanent figure not only of the Church’s calendar but of the nation’s literary heritage — one of the small handful of foundational early Georgian original compositions on which the whole subsequent tradition of Georgian letters is built. His legacy is thus cultural as well as ecclesial: he helped, by being written about so well, to inaugurate a literature.

Faith Above Blood

Abo’s third legacy is the meaning his figure carries for the relationship between faith and nation. Because the patron of the Georgian capital is an Arab — a man of the ruling nation and the ruling religion who chose the faith of the ruled — his cult roots Georgian Christian identity in confession rather than ethnicity (see An Arab Saint of Georgia). This is a legacy of real theological and moral value. In a history full of the temptation to identify faith with nation and to make the saint a partisan of one people against another, Abo stands as a permanent reminder that the Church’s door is open to all peoples, and that what unites the faithful is Christ and not blood. His Arab origin, far from an awkwardness, is the heart of what he has to teach — and it is what keeps his veneration, per METHODOLOGY §4, free of ethnic or anti-Muslim polemic (see A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People).

A Universal Martyr

Abo’s fourth legacy is his place among the martyrs of the universal Church. As a saint of the undivided pre-schism Church, he is venerated not only in Georgia but across the Orthodox world — in the Russian, Greek, and other traditions and their diasporas — as the Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi (see Abo in Georgian Memory; OCA notice, oca.org). His story belongs to the wider phenomenon of the neomartyrs under Islam (see The Pattern of the Convert-Martyr), and within Orthodoxy it stands as a model of the convert’s martyrdom: a witness who freely chose Christ against every worldly incentive and sealed the choice with his blood. In this his legacy joins that of the other neomartyrs the repository treats — from the martyrs of Córdoba (see St. Laura of Córdoba) to the later Georgian neomartyr St. Ketevan of Georgia — as a testimony that the confession of Christ has, in every age, been worth dying for.

The Coherence of the Legacy

These four strands are finally one. Abo is the patron of Tbilisi because his witness so impressed his city; his witness is known because it was written down in a masterpiece; the masterpiece roots the nation’s identity in faith because its subject was a stranger who chose that faith; and the whole makes him a universal martyr because what he witnessed to — Christ above life — is the confession of the whole Church. The legacy of the Arab perfumer of Baghdad is a single thing seen from four sides: a man who loved Christ enough to die for Him, remembered truly, and honored still (see Assessment).

See Also

• Assessment — the sober evaluation of what is known and claimed
• A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature — the literary legacy
• An Arab Saint of Georgia — faith above blood
• St. Ketevan of Georgia — a fellow Georgian neomartyr

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.
• Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003.
• “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.
• METHODOLOGY.md §4, this repository.