Saint Nina, Enlightener of Georgia

Almost every country in the Christian world was brought to the faith by somebody with power: an emperor, an army, a king who had made up his mind, a mission with money behind it. Georgia was brought to the faith by a young woman on her own, with no money, no protection and no standing, who lived in a gardener’s hut at the edge of the royal city and healed the people who came to her. That is why the Church calls Saint Nina equal to the apostles, and it is why a small mission in Orlando, Florida — Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, Belarusians in one room — carries her name.

Cappadocia and Jerusalem

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She was born about the year 296 in Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey — the country of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory the Theologian, and one of the most thoroughly Christian places on earth at a time when the empire was still killing Christians. Her father Zabulon was a Roman officer; her mother Sosana, by the life, was the sister of the patriarch of Jerusalem.

When Nina was twelve the family sold what it had and went to Jerusalem. There the household came apart in the way families sometimes did in that century, and deliberately: her father went into the desert to live as an ascetic and she never saw him again; her mother was ordained a deaconess and served the poor women of the city. Nina was given into the care of an old woman called Sara Niaphor, and it is from Sara, not from a school, that she learned the faith.

This is worth pausing on, because it decides everything that follows. Nina was not educated for a mission. She was a child in the care of an elderly woman who told her the life of Christ, His suffering, and the things that had happened to the relics of the Passion afterwards. One of those things lodged in her and would not leave.

The Robe of the Lord, and a country nobody had told

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Sara told her what had become of the Lord’s seamless robe — the tunic the soldiers cast lots for rather than tear (John 19:23–24). By the tradition Georgia has kept for sixteen centuries, that robe was bought at Golgotha by a Jew of Mtskheta named Elioz, who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover, and carried home to the capital of the kingdom of Iberia. His sister Sidonia took it from him, heard what had happened, and died holding it; they could not loosen her hands, and she was buried with the robe in her arms.

Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be.

John 19:23–24

So the girl in Jerusalem knew two things at once: that the robe of Christ lay in the ground in a far northern kingdom, and that the people living over it had never been told whose it was. She asked to be allowed to go and find it. Everything that is ordinarily said about missionary strategy is missing from this story; what she had was one fact she could not put down.

The cross of grapevine

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The Mother of God appeared to her — in the life it is a dream, and Nina wakes with the cross in her hands — gave her a cross made of two lengths of grapevine, and sent her to Iberia with the words that the Lord would be with her and she would be an apostle to that country. Nina bound the two pieces together with strands of her own hair.

The road in

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She went north, alone, along the roads a woman was not supposed to travel alone. Shepherds met her at Lake Paravani, on the border of Iberia, and she asked them the way to Mtskheta. She stopped a month at Urbnisi, living among the townspeople and learning to speak to them, and then went on with a crowd of them to the royal city for a pagan feast.

What she found at Mtskheta was a kingdom at the top of its confidence. On the cliff above the city stood the idols Armazi and Zaden; the king, Mirian III, was an ally of Rome and a careful politician; the little Jewish community that had kept the memory of the robe had kept it to itself. Nina had no letter from a bishop, no money, no protector, and did not speak the language well. She was given a corner in the royal garden — the gardener and his wife, who were childless, took her in — and she built a hut of brambles and began to pray.

The queen

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People came to her because she healed them. That is the whole of her method, and it is the apostles’ method: the sick came, she laid the vine cross on them and prayed, they were healed, and they asked her who her God was. Then she told them. Word of it reached the palace when Queen Nana fell ill and no physician could help her.

The queen sent for Nina; Nina sent back word that if the queen wished to be healed she should come to the hut. She came, was laid on Nina’s bed of leaves, was healed, and got up a Christian. She was baptised, and she did not hide it.

The king, and the darkness on Mount Tkhoti

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King Mirian did not follow his wife. He was angry, and by some accounts he was preparing to deal with the Christians in his household in the way emperors dealt with them. What changed him was not an argument. He was hunting on Mount Tkhoti, some way from the city, when the day went out — total darkness, in the middle of the afternoon, with his companions scattered and no way down. He called on his own gods and nothing happened. Then, in the words the chronicle gives him, he called on the God of Nina: if that God would bring him out of the dark, he would raise a cross where he stood and build Him a temple, and be obedient to Nina.

“God of Nina, illumine this night for me and guide my footsteps, and I will declare Thy Holy Name.”The prayer of King Mirian, from the Georgian chronicle

The light came back. He came down the mountain and went to find her, and in 326 the kingdom of Iberia took the Christian faith as its own — the second country in the world to do so, after Armenia and before the Roman Empire itself. Mirian sent to the Emperor Constantine for clergy, and they came: a bishop, priests, masons.

It is worth being exact about what did and did not happen. A king was converted, which in the fourth century meant the whole apparatus of the state changed sides in a season. But the conversion itself began years earlier, in a hut in a garden, with a woman nobody had heard of curing people one at a time. Historians argue about the year — 326 is the Georgian Church’s date, and some put the royal baptism as late as 337 — but nobody argues about who brought it about.

The pillar that would not go down

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The king began building at once, and built in the place Nina named: over the grave where the robe lay. Seven columns were cut for the church. Six went up. The seventh — the great one — could not be moved, by any number of men or oxen; it hung in the air, or would not leave the ground, depending on which telling you read. Nina spent the night praying beside it, and in the morning the pillar settled into its place of itself, and a fragrant myrrh flowed from its foot and healed the sick.

That is why the cathedral at Mtskheta is called Svetitskhoveli — “the Life-Giving Pillar”. The church standing there now is eleventh-century, built over the fourth-century one, built over the grave. It is where the kings of Georgia were crowned and buried for a thousand years, and it is still the centre of the Georgian Church.

Bodbe

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Nina did not stay to be honoured. When Mtskheta was Christian she went east, into the mountains of Kakheti, and preached in the villages there; the country people of that region were the last to hear. She died at Bodbe about the year 335, having asked to be buried where she lay rather than carried back to the capital in state. The king tried to move her body to Mtskheta and could not: two hundred men, the chronicle says, could not lift the bier. So she stayed at Bodbe, and Mirian built the first church over her grave.

A convent stands there now, and below the hill there is a spring that pilgrims still go down to. Bodbe is where Georgians take their children.

What is left of her

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Three things, and all three can still be visited, which is part of why the Georgian memory of her is so unusually concrete. The cross of grapevine is in Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi, in a silver case; it went to Armenia and to Russia and back over the centuries of invasion, and it was returned to Georgia in 1801. The Robe is where Sidonia was buried, under the floor of Svetitskhoveli, and has never been dug up: the Georgian Church has consistently refused to open the grave. The grave of Saint Nina is at Bodbe, under the church, with her relics in it.

There is a fourth thing, harder to point at. Georgia has been invaded by Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Timur, the Ottomans and the Russians; it has been a kingdom, a scattering of principalities, a province and a Soviet republic. Through all of it the country kept the faith it took in the fourth century, and kept it in the form a woman with no army gave it. That is the real relic.

Equal to the apostles

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The Church gives the title isapostolos — equal to the apostles — to those who did what the Twelve did: brought the faith to a people who did not have it. It is given sparingly. Six women carry it: Mary Magdalene, first at the tomb; Thekla, the first woman martyr; Apphia; the Empress Helen, who found the Cross; Olga of Kiev; and Nina of Georgia.

• She held no office. She was not a deaconess like her mother, nor a nun in any order, nor sent by any bishop.
• She had no protection. She entered a pagan kingdom alone and lived at the bottom of it, in a gardener’s garden.
• She did not argue anyone into the faith. She healed people, and when they asked why, she told them.
• She refused the reward. When the kingdom was hers to be honoured in, she went to the mountains and died in a village.

It is a shape worth noticing, because it is the opposite of how we usually imagine a country being converted, and it is the shape the Church has judged to be apostolic.

Why this parish carries her name

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Saint Nina Orthodox Mission in Orlando is a small parish of the Orthodox Church in America, in a building on Hanging Moss Road that was not built to be a church. Its people come from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Greece, Romania and America, and most of the service is in English with parts in Church Slavonic. A parish like that is a mission in the plain sense of the word: it exists where the faith is not native, among people who mostly brought it with them or found it themselves.

Her feast is 14 January by the old calendar the parish keeps — 27 January on the civil one — and it is the day the parish keeps as its own. The icon at the head of this article is the one brought out onto the analogion that morning.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Matthew 28:19

A parish named after Saint Nina is claiming something quite specific about how that is done: not by weight, not by numbers, and not by the people with standing — but by whoever is actually there, doing what they can, where they were put.