The Dispersal of the Relics

The same Augustinian friars who witnessed Ketevan’s death exhumed her body at Shiraz and carried her relics out of Persia — dividing them, so the tradition holds, between Georgia, where a portion was brought to her son Teimuraz and interred at the cathedral of Alaverdi, and the Portuguese world, where the friar Ambrósio dos Anjos bore a portion to the St. Augustine convent at Old Goa. This file follows that dispersal, its documentation, and the modern returns of relics to Georgia in 2017 and 2021.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Exhumation at Shiraz

Ketevan’s body was first buried at Shiraz. Della Valle reports that her remains were laid to be interred in the convent of the Augustinians there, brought to that Christian burial through the offices of Georgian Christians in the city and of the metropolitan’s connections (Della Valle, An Account of Georgia, 1627, on the burial in the Augustinian convent at Shiraz). The Augustinian friars who had attended the queen — the tradition names two who had grown close to her and become, in effect, her confessors during the captivity — did not leave her there. Regarding her as a martyr, they exhumed her remains and preserved them as relics, in the ordinary logic of Latin as of Orthodox devotion, by which the body of one who has died confessing Christ is a treasure to be honoured and, if possible, secured (Flannery, The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond, 2013, on the Augustinians and Ketevan’s relics; the exhumation is dated in the tradition to 1627, some three years after the death).

The Journey to Georgia: Alaverdi

The Augustinians carried relics of the queen out of Persia and, by the tradition, brought a portion to Georgia and to her son. The friar Ambrósio (Ambrose) dos Anjos, a Portuguese Augustinian, is named as the one who conveyed relics to the Georgian court, presenting to King Teimuraz I — by the account — the queen’s skull and part of her arm (accounts of the Augustinian relic-transfer name Ambrósio dos Anjos as bringing the skull and an arm-relic to Teimuraz, dated to 1628; Flannery, The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians, 2013; the sabauni symposium paper “Catholic Missionaries on the Relics of the Georgian Orthodox Church”). Teimuraz received the relics of his mother with great honour and had them interred in the Alaverdi Cathedral of St. George, the ancient spiritual centre of Kakheti — where the tradition holds a portion of her relics to have rested (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on Teimuraz’s interment of the relics at Alaverdi Cathedral with great honour).

That relics of Ketevan were held to be at Alaverdi is a fixed point of the Georgian cult, binding the martyr’s veneration to the great cathedral of her own kingdom. [Disputed: the precise present whereabouts and identification of the Alaverdi relics is not straightforwardly documented across the intervening centuries of Georgia’s own turbulent history; the tradition of their interment at Alaverdi is firm, but the collection does not assert a continuous, verified chain of custody down to the present, and treats the Alaverdi relic-tradition as the received Georgian tradition rather than as an archaeologically demonstrated fact.]

The Journey to Goa

A second portion of the relics travelled in the opposite direction — eastward, into the Portuguese maritime empire. By the tradition and the Portuguese records, the Augustinian friar (again associated with Ambrósio dos Anjos) carried a relic of the queen — named in the accounts as an arm-bone, the right arm — to the great St. Augustine convent at Old Goa in India, the headquarters of the Augustinian mission in the East, where it was enshrined (the transfer of an arm-relic to the St. Augustine convent at Old Goa, c. 1627, is recorded in the Portuguese Augustinian tradition; Flannery, The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians, 2013; the Portuguese sources describing the relic’s placement in a stone urn near a chapel window are the basis of the modern search — see The Goa Discovery). It is this Goa relic that, centuries later, became the object of archaeological search and DNA analysis.

Beyond Georgia and Goa, the accounts speak of further fragments of the queen’s relics being dispersed in Europe through the Augustinian and Catholic networks — to religious houses and reliquaries in the Iberian and wider Catholic world — as was common with the relics of a celebrated martyr (the further European dispersal of Ketevan-relics is noted in the tradition of the Augustinian mission; the details are less securely documented and the collection reports the general fact of dispersal without vouching for each claimed fragment).

The Modern Returns

The relic-history of Ketevan did not close in the seventeenth century. In the twenty-first, portions have been returned, at least temporarily, to Georgia, in acts of considerable ecclesial and diplomatic significance. In September 2017, a portion of the relics — from India — was brought to Georgia: received at Tbilisi by the Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, venerated at the Holy Trinity Cathedral and then at Alaverdi for the queen’s feast, and taken through the dioceses for the veneration of the faithful, before returning after a period of some months (OrthoChristian, “Relics of martyred Queen Ketevan arrive in Georgia,” 2017, on the September 2017 transfer from India and its reception by Ilia II). Subsequently, relics recovered at Goa were formally handed over by the Indian government to Georgia — the transfer effected in 2021 (reported: the Indian External Affairs Minister’s handover of the Goa relics to Georgia in July 2021). These returns have knit the ancient dispersal into the living cult, bringing the martyr’s relics home, by stages, four centuries after they left Persia.

The Meaning of the Dispersal

The scattering of Ketevan’s relics across three continents is more than a curiosity of provenance. It is the physical trace of the same cross-cultural reality that makes her martyrdom so well attested: a Georgian Orthodox queen, killed in Safavid Persia, whose body was honoured and carried by Latin Catholic friars to India and Europe, and whose relics have in our own time been studied by Indian geneticists and returned by an Indian government to a Georgian patriarch. The relics travelled the same routes — Georgian, Persian, Latin, Indian — along which her story travelled, and their journey is, in miniature, the story of how a local martyrdom became a shared inheritance. The most striking chapter of that journey, the Goa discovery, is the subject of the next file.

See Also

• The Goa Discovery — the excavation and the DNA identification of the Goa relic
• Accounts and Attestation — the Augustinians as witnesses and relic-bearers
• The Cult in Georgia — the veneration the relics anchor, and Alaverdi
• The European Witnesses — the missionary networks that carried the relics

References

• Della Valle, Pietro. An Account of Georgia (1627). (The burial of Ketevan in the Augustinian convent at Shiraz.)
• Flannery, John M. The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747). Leiden: Brill, 2013. (The Augustinian mission; the exhumation and division of Ketevan’s relics; Ambrósio dos Anjos and the transfers to Georgia and Goa.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “Greatmartyr Ketevan, Queen of Georgia.” oca.org, commemoration of 13 September. (Teimuraz’s interment of the relics at Alaverdi Cathedral of St. George.)
• “Catholic Missionaries on the Relics of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Catholic Heritage in Georgia: Proceedings of the International Symposium (Sabauni). (The role of Ambrósio dos Anjos in locating and transferring the relics.)
• OrthoChristian. “Relics of martyred Queen Ketevan arrive in Georgia.” orthochristian.com, September 2017. (The September 2017 transfer from India; reception by Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II; veneration at Holy Trinity Cathedral and Alaverdi.)