04 — The Relics
The afterlife of the martyr’s body: the Augustinian friars who exhumed Ketevan’s remains at Shiraz and carried them out of Persia, the tradition that part went home to Georgia (Alaverdi) and part to the St. Augustine convent at Old Goa in India, and the modern sequel — the 2005 excavation at Goa and the 2013 mitochondrial-DNA study that argued a recovered bone was “probably” the queen’s. This section follows the relics from the grave at Shiraz to the laboratory, reporting the science as its own authors reported it.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
The relics of St. Ketevan have an unusually well-documented and unusually far-flung history, and one that reaches, remarkably, into twenty-first-century archaeology and genetics. The story begins with the same Augustinian missionaries who witnessed her death: they exhumed her body, kept and divided the relics, and carried them across the Safavid and Portuguese worlds. The tradition that a portion reached her son Teimuraz in Georgia, and another the Augustinian convent in Old Goa, set up the modern investigation — the search at Goa for the relic recorded in the Portuguese sources, and the DNA study of the bone found there.
The two files treat, first, the dispersal of the relics from Shiraz to Georgia and Goa (and beyond, into Europe); and second, the Goa discovery — the excavation and the 2013 DNA identification — reported carefully, with the study’s own hedged conclusion and the open questions marked [Disputed:].
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-dispersal-of-the-relics.md | The Augustinian friars, above all Fr. Ambrósio dos Anjos, who exhumed Ketevan’s body and carried the relics out of Persia; the division of the relics; the portion brought to Teimuraz and interred at Alaverdi; the portion taken to Old Goa; and the later dispersal of fragments in Europe; the modern (2017, 2021) returns to Georgia. |
| the-goa-discovery.md | The Portuguese record of a relic at the St. Augustine convent, Old Goa; the 2004–2005 excavation by the Archaeological Survey of India and Portuguese researchers; the 2013 mitochondrial-DNA study (Rai et al., 2014) finding a rare U1b haplogroup and concluding the bone is “probably” Ketevan’s; the open questions, reported [Disputed:]. |
See Also
- The Witness at Shiraz, 1624 — the death from which the relics come
- Accounts and Attestation — the Augustinians as witnesses and relic-bearers
- The Cult in Georgia — the veneration the relics anchor
References
- Flannery, John M. The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747). Leiden: Brill, 2013.
- Rai, N., et al. “Relic excavated in western India is probably of Georgian Queen Ketevan.” Mitochondrion 14, no. 1 (2014): 1–6.