Which Mountain, Really? A Question Tradition Settled but Geography Complicates

Tradition has named Mount Tabor as the site of the Transfiguration since at least the fourth century, and a church has stood on its summit commemorating the event for much of Christian history, but the Gospel narratives themselves do not name the mountain, and some modern biblical scholars have pointed out that the episode immediately preceding it in the text is set near Caesarea Philippi, close to Mount Hermon, a considerably higher and more remote peak, leading a minority of scholars to argue that the original setting intended by the Gospel writers may have been Hermon rather than Tabor, a possibility the strength of the ancient and continuous Tabor tradition has never seriously displaced in actual church practice.

Whatever the original geography, the blessing of grapes and first fruits attached to the feast has particular resonance in historic wine-producing Orthodox regions, most notably Georgia, whose winemaking tradition is among the oldest continuously practised in the world and where the Transfiguration falls squarely within the grape harvest season, giving the church's blessing of the year's fruit a direct and practically timed connection to the agricultural calendar of a wine-producing culture in a way the feast's more abstract theological content, the uncreated light and the hesychast controversy, does not on its own suggest.