Religion and History in Georgia

Georgia converted in the fourth century through Nino, a woman from Cappadocia whose preaching and healing brought King Mirian and Queen Nana of Kartli to Christianity, and whose cross of grapevine bound with her own hair remains the emblem of the Georgian church. The country's golden age under David the Builder and Queen Tamar in the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced the monastic complexes at Gelati and the cave monasteries of David Gareja and Vardzia, and the church became the keeper of the Georgian language and script through the centuries of Persian, Ottoman and Russian domination that followed. That role is why Georgian identity and Orthodoxy are so tightly bound. The Russian empire abolished Georgian autocephaly in 1811 and placed the church under the Holy Synod, replacing Georgian liturgy with Slavonic in many parishes; autocephaly was declared again in 1917 and recognised by Moscow only in 1943.

Under Soviet rule the number of functioning churches fell to a few dozen. The recovery after 1989 was rapid and was led by Patriarch Ilia II, who has consistently polled as the most trusted figure in the country, and who from 2008 began personally baptising every third and subsequent child born to Orthodox families, a practice credited with a measurable rise in the birth rate.