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Saint Nino, Enlightener of GeorgiaEarly 4th century CE (tradition)

Saint Nino and the cross of vines

Georgia's best-loved sacred story begins with a dream: the Virgin Mary gives a young woman a cross made of grapevine and sends her to Kartli.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

In the Georgian Life of Saint Nino, the young Nino longs to go to Kartli, in what is now Georgia, where tradition held that the robe of Christ had been taken. While she prays about it, the Virgin Mary appears to her in a dream and tells her to go and preach there, promising to protect her.

The Virgin gives her a cross made of grapevine branches as a shield. When Nino wakes, she is holding the cross in her hands. She binds it with strands of her own hair and sets out.

Where the story comes from

Nino is honoured as the woman who brought Christianity to Kartli in the fourth century, and the grapevine cross, with its drooping arms, became a national symbol of Georgia. A cross associated with her is kept at Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi.

The earliest account of a captive woman converting the Iberian royal family, by the Latin historian Rufinus around 402 CE, does not mention the dream or the cross. Those details come from the later Georgian lives of Nino, which exist in several medieval versions that differ from one another.

How it has been read

History

Rufinus heard his version from a Georgian prince in Palestine, only a few generations after the events. The Georgian Life, in the form translated by Marjory and Oliver Wardrop in 1900, is a much later and richer hagiography. The dream is part of how Georgians came to tell their own conversion, not an independent record.

Scripture

A dream in which a holy figure gives a sign and a mission belongs to a long Christian pattern, from Joseph in Matthew's gospel to the saints' lives. Waking with the gift still in her hands marks this one as more than a dream in the telling: the object proves the vision.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. Has a dream ever felt like permission to do something you already longed for?
  2. What object would you want to wake up holding after a dream?
  3. Where in your life do you feel called, and what makes you hesitate?

Symbols in this dream

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Anonymous (Georgian hagiography) (1900). Life of St. Nino, in Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, vol. V, part I, translated by Marjory Wardrop and J. O. Wardrop. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    public domain

    • Cited at: Life of St. Nino (reference not yet checked)

    English translation of the Georgian Life of Nino; the Georgian texts are medieval.

  2. Rufinus of Aquileia (1997). The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, Books 10 and 11, translated by Philip R. Amidon. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    first published c. 402 CE

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: Book 10, ch. 11 (reference not yet checked)