Nino

Saint Nino, also called Nina, is Equal to the Apostles and the Enlightener of Georgia. According to tradition she was a woman from Cappadocia who preached the Gospel in Iberia, the land of present-⁠day Georgia, and brought King Mirian III to the faith. The Church commemorates her on 14 January.

The sources

The oldest surviving account is by Rufinus of Aquileia, written around 403, from the report of a Georgian prince, Bacurius, whom he met in Palestine. Rufinus calls her Christiana and says she was a captive woman. Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and others wrote of her afterwards. The detailed life, with her Cappadocian origin, is later, from Georgian tradition, and contains much legend. What follows is told according to tradition, not as certain history.

Childhood and calling

According to tradition Nino was born in Cappadocia into a Greek-⁠speaking Roman family. Her father Zabulon was a commander in the Roman army, and her mother Susanna was the sister of Patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem. The family counted her a relative of the Great Martyr George. When she was twelve her parents sold their possessions, gave them to the poor and went to Jerusalem, where her father became a monk and her mother served the sick. Nino was entrusted to a devout woman, Sarah Niaphor, who raised her in the faith and told her how the Lord's robe had come to pagan Georgia.

Nino prayed earnestly to the Mother of God for leave to go there. In a vision the Most Holy Virgin told her to preach the Gospel in the land allotted to her, and gave her a cross made of grapevine. On waking, Nino bound the cross with her own hair. Patriarch Juvenal blessed her for the journey. According to some accounts she passed through Armenia, where a persecution destroyed the holy virgins Rhipsime and Gaiane with their companions; Nino alone hid and escaped.

Preaching in Iberia

Nino reached the kingdom of Kartli through the mountains of Javakheti. She stayed a month at Urbnisi among the Jewish community to learn the customs of the place, and quickly learned Georgian. She then came to Mtskheta, the capital. Her preaching was accompanied by healings. She healed Queen Nana, who became a Christian. Several people in the city followed her, among them Salome of Ujarma.

King Mirian was a pagan and would not accept the new faith. One day, while he was hunting, darkness suddenly fell. According to the story, when his prayers to his own gods went unanswered, he called on "the God of Nino" and the light returned. Mirian vowed to raise a cross and a house of prayer and was baptized, the first Christian king of Iberia. Georgian tradition dates this decision to 326. In the same account Rufinus says the king sent an embassy to the emperor Constantine, who sent priests. The royal family and then the people of Mtskheta were baptized at the meeting of the Aragvi and the Mtkvari. Crosses were raised where the idols had stood, and later churches, among them Svetitskhoveli.

Her end and veneration

Nino went on preaching in the mountains of eastern Georgia and ended her life at Bodbe in Kakheti. At her own wish she was buried there, and King Mirian began a church over her grave. The year of her death is uncertain, tradition giving 335 or 338. Her tomb can still be seen at the Bodbe monastery, a place of pilgrimage. Her grapevine cross is kept, according to tradition, in Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi and has become the sign of Georgian Christianity. Nino is the most common girl's name in Georgia. The Church commemorates her on 14 January, and the Church of Georgia also on 19 May, in memory of her arrival in the country.