Bodbe: St Nino's tomb, the convent among the cypresses and the spring below

In the year 326, give or take, a woman called Nino, come from Cappadocia with a cross made of vine twigs bound with her own hair, healed Queen Nana of Iberia and converted King Mirian, and with him Georgia, which has been Christian ever since. At the end of her life she withdrew to Kakheti, to a spot on the hillside above the Alazani valley, and there she died around 340; the king had a church built over the tomb. That is Bodbe, and that is why every Georgian comes here at least once: it is the tomb of the woman who made them what they are. It is 2 km from Sighnaghi, among cypresses, and you can hear the silence.

What there is

The basilica is small, three-naved, from the 9th to 11th centuries, much altered in the 17th and 19th, with frescoes from the latter period; Nino's tomb is in a chapel to the right of the altar, under a canopy, and people queue to kneel for a moment. The three-storey bell tower dates from 1862 to 1885, the Russian period, when Bodbe was a bishop's seat. Beside it, large and new, the cathedral of St George and St Nino, consecrated in 2015, in pale stone, with the space and light the basilica lacks. And all around, the convent: since 1991 nuns have lived here who tend the gardens, the roses, the cypresses, the gravel paths, and who sell honey, candles and herbs; in Soviet times the monastery was a hospital, and what you see now has been raised from nothing in thirty years.

The spring

From the car park a path goes down through the forest, 3 km and half an hour, to St Nino's spring: a small chapel, a fountain and an enclosed immersion bath where people, in long shirts lent on the spot, go into the icy water three times and come out with the face of someone who has done something. Some drive down by another track. Walking back up is the hard part of the visit, but the forest and the valley repay it.

How to fit it in

From Sighnaghi, 2 km: half an hour uphill on foot, or five minutes by taxi. The logical plan is Bodbe in the morning, when there are fewer people and the nuns sing the liturgy, the spring afterwards and Sighnaghi for the rest of the day; from Tbilisi it is 110 km, two hours. Free entry; women with heads covered and skirts, lent at the entrance, and silence within the grounds. On Saturdays there are weddings and on 27 January, Nino's feast, it fills up.

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