Bodbe Monastery
Hilltop convent above the Alazani valley holding the tomb of Saint Nino, who converted Georgia.
Bodbe stands on a cypress-lined ridge two kilometres south of Signagi, looking out over the Alazani valley towards the Caucasus. Georgian tradition holds that Saint Nino, the Cappadocian woman credited with converting the kingdom of Kartli to Christianity, withdrew to the Bodbe gorge and died here in the 330s, and that King Mirian III founded a church over her grave. The surviving building is a three-nave basilica with three projecting apses, put up between the ninth and eleventh centuries and much altered since; the tomb lies in a small chapel on its south side.
The monastery was a centre of learning in the late Middle Ages and the place where Kakhetian kings were crowned. A three-storey bell tower was added between 1862 and 1885, and the wall paintings were repainted in the nineteenth century. Closed in 1924 and used as a hospital during the Soviet period, it reopened as a convent in 1991 and has since been restored, with a large new cathedral built beside the old church. A path below leads to a spring chapel dedicated to Saint Nino.
Highlights
- Tomb of Saint Nino in a chapel beside the medieval basilica
- Three-storey bell tower of 1862-1885 above the cypress avenue
- Views over the Alazani valley to the Greater Caucasus
- Spring chapel of Saint Nino reached by a path below the convent
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