Nana of Iberia

The burials of King Mirian and Queen Nana at Samtavro church

Nana (Georgian: ნანა) was a Queen Consort of Caucasian Iberia (modern Georgia) as the second wife of Mirian III in the 4th century. She is regarded as saint by the Georgian Orthodox Church for her role in conversion of the Iberians to Christianity.^[1][2]

According to the Georgian chronicles, Nana was "from Greek territory, from Pontus, the daughter of Oligotos”^[3] whom Mirian married after his first wife died (in 292 according to Cyril Toumanoff). Pontus here may refer to the Bosporan Kingdom, then a client state of the Roman Empire. Toumanoff has assumed that the name of Nana's father might have been a Georgian corruption of "Olympius" or "Olympus", a Bosporan dynast whose son Aurelius Valerius Sogus Olympianus, a Roman governor of Theodosia, is known from a Greek inscription of AD 306 dedicated to "the Most High God" on the occasion of the building of the Jewish "prayer house".^[4] There has also been an attempt to identify Nana as a younger daughter of Theothorses, a Bosporan king.^[5]

The medieval Georgian sources relate that Nana had been a staunch pagan and despised Christian preaching until she was miraculously cured of a terrible disease, and subsequently converted, by a Cappadocian Christian missionary, Nino. The Roman historian Tyrannius Rufinus, writing half a century after the Iberian conversion on the basis of the oral account of Bacurius the Iberian, also mentions an unnamed queen of the Iberians who was cured by a woman, a Christian captiva.^[6] Through Nino’s ministry, King Mirian soon also was baptized and, c. 337, Christianity became a state religion of Iberia. Nana outlived her husband by two years, dying in 363 (per Toumanoff). She was eventually canonized by the Georgian church. The royal saints are said to have been buried at the Samtavro convent in Mtskheta, where their tombs are still shown.^[2]

References

1. ^ Lang, David Marshall (1956), Lives and legends of the Georgian saints, pp. 13-39. London: Allen & Unwin
2. ^ ^{a b} Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria (2006), "The Feast of the Robe of our Lord, the Myrrh-streaming and Life-giving Pillar, Equals-to-the-Apostles King Mirian and Queen Nana, and Saints Sidonia and Abiatar (4th century)", in The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Pravoslavie.Ru. Retrieved on April 17, 2009.
3. ^ Thomson, Robert W. (1996), Rewriting Caucasian History, p. 112. Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198263732
4. ^ Toumanoff, Cyril (1969), Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia. Traditio 25: p. 23.
5. ^ (French) Settipani, Christian (2006), Continuité des élites à Byzance durante les siècles obscurs. Les princes caucasiens et l'Empire du VIe au IXe siècle, p. 406. De Boccard, ISBN 2701802261
6. ^ Amidon, Philip R. (1997), The church history of Rufinus of Aquileia, books 10 and 11, p. 48. Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195110315