Bodbe and the Relics: The Tomb of St. Nino

The end of Nino’s life and the shrine of her tomb. The developed Georgian Life has Nino withdraw at the close of her mission to Bodbe in Kakheti, where she dies — traditionally c. 338–340 — and where, by the same tradition, it was at her deathbed that the queens Salome of Ujarma and Perozhavra recorded her Life. King Mirian built a church over her grave; the Bodbe convent grew up around it, was a coronation site of the kings of Kakheti, suffered sack and downgrade, and was re-established after 1991 as one of Georgia’s great pilgrimage shrines. This file pins the death and the shrine to their sources and flags the uncertain dates.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

The Withdrawal to Bodbe

The developed Georgian Life gives Nino, at the end of her mission, a withdrawal that the earliest layer does not record. Having converted the king and seen the church established, Nino is said to have continued preaching into the regions of Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, and at last to have withdrawn to Bodbe, in the Bodbe gorge, where she ended her days (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004; Wardrop, “Life of St. Nino,” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V, 1900). It is at Bodbe, by the Life‘s own conceit, that she lay dying and told her story to the queens Salome of Ujarma and Perozhavra of Sivnia, who recorded it as the Life of St. Nino — the deathbed frame discussed in section 03 (see The Developed Hagiography). The withdrawal and death at Bodbe are wholly features of the developed layer; Rufinus’s account ends with the conversion and the embassy and says nothing of the captive’s death.

The Death of St. Nino

Nino’s death is traditionally placed about 338–340, but the date — like her birth (c. 296) and indeed the whole chronology of her life — is uncertain and is given here as a range. She was buried where she died, at Bodbe, and King Mirian III is said to have built a small church over her grave (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). Her tomb at Bodbe has been the center of her cult ever since.

[Disputed: St. Nino’s dates are uncertain. Her birth is variously given as c. 280, 286, or (most commonly) c. 296; her death as 321, 338, or 340, with Georgian tradition and the Bodbe shrine favoring c. 338–340 — a lifespan of roughly 40–44 years. None of these is documented from her own time; they are reckoned within the contested chronology of the Iberian conversion (see The Darkness and the Prayer).]

The Bodbe Convent and Its History

The shrine over Nino’s grave grew into the Bodbe monastery (the Convent of St. Nino), one of the most venerated sites in Georgia. Its documented history is rich. The monastery rose to prominence in the late Middle Ages and became a coronation site for the kings of Kakheti, the eastern Georgian kingdom. In 1615 it was sacked by the Persians under Shah Abbas, and was restored by King Teimuraz I of Kakheti (r. 1605–1648), who added a theological school and a manuscript depository. Under Russian rule it flourished briefly under Metropolitan John (Maqashvili), but after his death (1837) the Russian exarchate downgraded it to a parish church; a partial restoration followed from the 1860s. In 1924 the Soviet authorities closed it and turned it to secular use (a hospital). After 1991 it was re-established as a convent, restored through the 1990s and again from the 2000s, and today functions as an active nunnery and one of Georgia’s principal pilgrimage destinations, receiving great numbers of pilgrims each year (standard histories of Bodbe monastery; Georgian Orthodox Church sources). St. Nino’s tomb and relics remain at Bodbe, in the church beside the convent, the chief tangible focus of her cult.

The Spring of St. Nino

Below the Bodbe convent, in the gorge, the tradition venerates a spring of St. Nino, said to have welled up at the saint’s prayer and long resorted to by pilgrims for healing. A small baptistery and bathing place developed around it, and the descent to the spring is one of the customary devotions of pilgrims to Bodbe to this day. Like the healing myrrh of the living pillar at Svetitskhoveli (see The Living Pillar), the spring belongs to the cluster of healing-traditions that attach to the holy places of Nino’s mission; it is reported here as the Bodbe cult transmits it, a feature of the developed devotion rather than a datable event of the saint’s life.

What the Relics Anchor

The relics at Bodbe do for the cult of St. Nino what relics do throughout the Orthodox tradition: they fix the veneration of an apostle whose written biography is layered and late to a tangible place and a continuous local devotion. The Church’s confidence in glorifying Nino rests not on the recoverability of her documentary life — which, as the source-critical sections show, is thin in the earliest layer and developed in the Georgian — but on the holiness manifest in her cult and its fruits, of which the tomb at Bodbe is the centuries-old focus (see Equal-to-the-Apostles). The pilgrim who venerates the relics at Bodbe venerates not a reconstructed chronology but the saint whom the Church has received and transmitted as the enlightener of Georgia; the shrine is the living continuation of that reception.

The Three Shrines of St. Nino

The cult of St. Nino is anchored at three great holy places, each preserving a different aspect of her story:

Bodbe in Kakheti — her tomb and relics, the place of her death (this file).
Svetitskhoveli at Mtskheta — the living pillar that crowned her mission, with the Robe of Christ beneath (see The Living Pillar).
Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi — her grapevine cross (see The Cross of St. Nino).

Together these three sites map the cult of the enlightener of Georgia onto the land she converted — her grave in the east, the mother church at the old capital, the cross at the heart of the modern capital. The feasts and the devotional life that surround them are the subject of the companion file.

Bodbe in the Living Church

Re-established as a convent after the fall of Soviet power, Bodbe is today one of the most visited holy places in Georgia, a working monastery of nuns that receives a constant flow of pilgrims to the tomb of the enlightener of Georgia. On Ninooba (see Feasts and Devotion) the convent is the focus of national pilgrimage. The continuity of the site across seventeen centuries — from the small church Mirian is said to have raised over the grave, through the medieval flowering as a Kakhetian royal church, the Persian sack and the restorations, the Russian-era downgrade and the Soviet closure, to the present convent — is itself a kind of testimony to the endurance of the cult: the tomb has been venerated, with interruptions, for as long as there has been a Christian Georgia. For the pilgrim, Bodbe is where the story that began with an unnamed captive among the Iberians (see Rufinus and the Captive Woman) comes to rest: at the grave of the woman the Georgian Church venerates as Nino, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mother of the nation’s faith.

References

The Life of St. Nino, in Constantine B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography. London: Bennett & Bloom, 2004.
Wardrop, Marjory. “Life of St. Nino.” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900.
Saint Nino, Equal of the Apostles, Enlightener of Georgia. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 14.
On Bodbe Monastery (coronation site of Kakheti; 1615 sack and Teimuraz I’s restoration; 1837 downgrade; 1924 Soviet closure; post-1991 re-establishment as a convent): standard histories of Bodbe and Georgian Orthodox Church sources.