The Cult in Georgia

Ketevan was canonized as a great martyr by the Georgian Church within a few years of her death, under Catholicos-Patriarch Zachary, who fixed her commemoration on 13 September; her relics were enshrined at the cathedral of Alaverdi in Kakheti; and she became one of the most beloved of Georgian national saints, her martyrdom depicted in icon and remembered across the country. This file sets out that cult — its establishment, its feast, its relics, and its national character.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Canonization

The veneration of Ketevan as a saint was not a slow, retrospective development but a near-immediate act of the Georgian Church. The Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia at the time, Zachary (Zakaria) — who occupied the patriarchal throne in the years around her death — numbered the martyred queen among the saints and instituted her commemoration, on the report of her confession and death brought back from Persia (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” naming Catholicos-Patriarch Zachary as declaring her among the saints and instituting the feast on 13 September). That the head of the autocephalous Georgian Church should so swiftly glorify her reflects both the clarity of the case — a Christian queen who chose death over apostasy, attested by named witnesses — and the immense national and ecclesial resonance of her sacrifice, coming as it did amid the Safavid devastation of Kakheti.

Her title in the Church is Great Martyr (in Georgian, Ketevan Tsamebuli, “Ketevan the Martyr,” or the Great Martyr Queen), placing her among the greatest rank of martyr-saints (Georgian Patriarchate and Orthodox usage; OCA, “Greatmartyr Ketevan”). The Georgian Church’s early and confident glorification of Ketevan is itself part of her significance: she is a martyr the Church recognized almost within living memory of the event, on strong contemporary testimony — a contrast, within this repository, to saints whose cults crystallized only long after and on thin evidence.

The Feast on 13 September

St. Ketevan is commemorated on 13 September (Julian), the traditional date of her martyrdom (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” commemoration of 13 September; Georgian Patriarchate calendar). The date falls, significantly, on the eve of the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September) — so that her commemoration stands at the threshold of the Church’s central annual celebration of the Cross, a fitting placement for one who took up the cross of martyrdom (on the liturgical framework, see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar). In Kakheti her feast is bound to Alaverdi and to the broader cycle of autumn commemorations there, the great cathedral being both the site of her relics and a focus of pilgrimage in this season (the Alaverdi cult and the autumn Alaverdoba festival cluster around this part of the calendar).

The Relics and Their Shrines

The material centre of the Georgian cult is Alaverdi. As set out in the previous section, a portion of Ketevan’s relics was, by the tradition, brought back from Persia by the Augustinian friar Ambrósio dos Anjos and interred by her son Teimuraz at the Alaverdi Cathedral of St. George with great honour (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on the interment at Alaverdi; see The Dispersal of the Relics). Alaverdi — one of the largest and most venerable of Georgian cathedrals, an eleventh-century foundation in the Kakhetian plain — thus became the martyr-queen’s shrine in her own kingdom, joining her memory to the ancient sacred landscape of Kakheti.

The modern relic-returns have renewed this material cult. When a portion of the relics was brought from India in September 2017, it was received by Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II and venerated at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi and then at Alaverdi for the queen’s feast, before being taken through the dioceses of Georgia for the veneration of the faithful (OrthoChristian, “Relics of martyred Queen Ketevan arrive in Georgia,” 2017). These events, drawing crowds and the presence of the patriarch, are evidence of how living the cult remains four centuries on — and of how the ancient dispersal of the relics has, in our own time, been folded back into the devotion of the Georgian Church.

A National Saint

Ketevan is venerated in Georgia not only as a martyr of the universal Church but as a national heroine — one of the figures in whom the Georgian Orthodox identity, forged in the long struggle to preserve the faith of St. Nina against surrounding empires, finds a supreme expression. Her name is common among Georgian women; churches and chapels bear her dedication; her martyrdom is a fixed subject of Georgian sacred art, depicted in icons and, in the modern period, in monumental works such as the tile panel of her martyrdom unveiled in Georgia in recent years (OrthoChristian, “Tile Panel Showing Queen Ketevan’s Martyrdom Unveiled in Georgia,” on modern monumental depiction; the martyrdom is a standard iconographic subject). In the iconography she is shown crowned, as a queen, and bearing the instruments or marks of her passion — the visual language uniting her royalty and her martyrdom in a single image.

This national dimension of the cult is a genuine strength and also the source of a genuine tension, which the collection treats honestly elsewhere: the danger that a saint so bound up with national identity may be venerated more as a symbol of the nation than as a witness to Christ (see Ketevan and Georgian Identity). But at the level of the living cult, the two are not felt as rivals: for the Georgian faithful, Ketevan’s confession of Christ and her embodiment of Georgia’s Christian endurance are one and the same, and it is as both martyr and mother of the nation that she is loved.

See Also

• Ketevan in Georgian Memory — the hymnography and the verse of Teimuraz I
• The Dispersal of the Relics — the relics at Alaverdi and the modern returns
• A National and a Universal Saint — the reach of her veneration beyond Georgia
• Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar — the feast in the liturgical year

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Greatmartyr Ketevan, Queen of Georgia.” oca.org, commemoration of 13 September. (Canonization by Catholicos-Patriarch Zachary; the feast on 13 September; the relics at Alaverdi; the title Great Martyr.)
• OrthoChristian. “Relics of martyred Queen Ketevan arrive in Georgia.” orthochristian.com, September 2017. (The 2017 relic-return; reception by Ilia II; veneration at Holy Trinity Cathedral and Alaverdi.)
• OrthoChristian. “Tile Panel Showing Queen Ketevan’s Martyrdom Unveiled in Georgia.” orthochristian.com. (Modern monumental depiction of the martyrdom.)
• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Alaverdi and the Kakhetian sacred landscape; Ketevan as national saint.)