“I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.” —In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin
Who is this woman?
Cloaked all in black. Thin. Silent. Her pale brow pressed to cold stone. She stands with her back turned, as if punished, in a corner.
The tiny ninth-century church throbs around her. Nuns chanting atonal hymns. Children squirming among forests of legs. Grown-ups fidgeting, drowsily peeking at phones. (Georgian Orthodox ritual goes on for hours.) I leave and walk outside, into the bright garden around the historic Bodbe Monastery. I return. The woman hasn’t moved. She must be young and strong! Is she praying? Sunk in a trance? How long will she stay there? All day? A week? For eternity? A plump nun lumbers through the packed congregants, gripping a plastic bag of muffins—the hosts. I turn my head back to the corner: She is gone. I slip out the church door. I look this way. I look that way. The pious human statue appears to have vanished. But at my feet: a simple white slab, a 1,600-year-old grave.
Was this her? St. Nino?
St. Nino’s simple gravestone at the Bodbe Monastery.
Paul Salopek
Who is St. Nino?
A Christian slave. Born around 296 A.D. possibly somewhere in modern-day Turkey. By her mid-20s she appeared in wild and woolly Georgia: the utter end of the classical world. She prayed night and day. Her fame as a faith healer reached the royal house of Iberia—as eastern Georgia was then known. Soon, even queen Nana showed up at the captive’s hut, fevered, carried on a bower. Nino healed her too. Within a few years, the whole kingdom converted to the cross.
Nino was a walker, a climber. All the apostles in the Caucasus were. They limped over the high, snowy passes of barbarian Eurasia from other worlds—from distant Jerusalem, from the Mediterranean, from faraway Constantinople. The reception was never warm.
St. Gregory the Illuminator, from Cappadocia, got tossed into a pit for his troubles. He moldered there for 12 or 14 years until he too cured a pagan sovereign, Tiridates III, of the curse of lycanthropy. (The king habitually turned, werewolf-like, into a wild boar.) This blessed miracle earned royal favor. Tiridates declared Armenia the world’s first Christian nation, in 300 A.D., decades before Rome. Gregory died happy in a dank hermit’s cave.
St. Andrew of Galilee marched into the region even earlier. He walked all the way to frozen Kiev during the first century A.D. Returning to civilized Greece, he was tortured, crucified upside-down by the Roman governor of Archaia, a Nero lackey. The saint’s well-traveled foot bone is venerated under glass in the cathedral at Mtskheta, Georgia.
St. Nino, by comparison, almost coasted.
She got around: A shrine to St. Nino, the walking missionary of the Caucasus, at Mtskheta, Georgia.
Paul Salopek
She was merely chattel. So writes the oldest and probably truest of her biographers. Later church fathers likely padded her resume. They made her the daughter of a Jerusalem patriarch or a Roman princess. Some claimed she barely escaped an anti-Christian massacre by leaping into a rose bush. But Nino needs no theatrics of martyrdom. She was patient, unshakeable, shrewd. She toppled the Persian rain idols through the back door of all temples, all palaces (the women’s entrance). She knew her branding. In Georgia, home to the world’s oldest wine culture, she carried a cross of grape vines lashed with her own hair.
Without realizing it, I blundered into Georgia along the same route trod by St. Nino: over the Caucasus range and onto the wind-scythed highlands of Lake Paravani.
Snow smothered all progress. A gale blew my head off. My feet were two wooden clubs. For a while, I didn’t think I would make it. At midnight, my guides rapped on a village door. The monk who opened it blinked into the howling dark, bearded, cassocked, eyes startled wide. Behind him, two other Georgian monks stared up from a chess game. On a wall hung the droopy-armed cross of St. Nino.
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