Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, the Robe, the Column and the Kings

Svetitskhoveli's name, meaning the living pillar, comes from a legend layered on top of an already old relic tradition. Georgian accounts hold that a Jewish resident of Mtskheta named Elias travelled to Jerusalem and was present at the crucifixion, where he acquired the robe of Christ and carried it home; his sister Sidonia, embracing the robe on his return, is said to have been overcome and died holding it, so that she was buried with it still in her arms. A cedar tree that later grew from her grave was cut down to build the earliest church on the site, and one of its resulting columns was said to have risen into the air and hovered before settling into place on its own, the miraculous living pillar the cathedral is named for. The building standing today is considerably later than either legend: constructed between 1010 and 1029 under King George I by the architect Arsukisdze, whose name is carved into the building itself, it replaced a sequence of earlier churches going back to the fourth century, when Georgia's conversion to Christianity is traditionally dated. What makes Svetitskhoveli's religious authority distinct from a relic shrine alone is its dual civic role: Georgian monarchs were both crowned and buried there for centuries, making the cathedral as much a seat of the kingdom's political legitimacy as of its religious life, a combination that helps explain why it has remained, into the present day, the traditional seat of the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia and the most visited religious site in the country.