The election of Shio III as Patriarch of Georgia has already triggered predictable reactions across parts of the Western press and among ecclesiastical commentators abroad. The words arrive almost automatically now: “pro-Russian,” “Moscow influence,” “Orthodox nationalism,” “reactionary Church,” “Kyrill’s orbit.” The tone is familiar, often anxious, sometimes accusatory, and not entirely without reason in the present atmosphere created by the war in Ukraine and the brutal fracture now running through the Orthodox world.

Yet much of this commentary says less about Georgia than about the lenses through which Georgia is being viewed.

To understand the Georgian Church merely as a territory contested between Moscow and Constantinople is to misunderstand one of the oldest Christian organisms still alive on earth.

Georgia is not an ecclesiastical invention of modern geopolitics. It is not a recent national Church seeking identity through ideology. It is one of the earliest autonomous patriarchates of Christianity, formed through mountains, invasions, liturgical memory, monastic endurance, and an almost improbable continuity of language and script. Christianity entered Iberia long before many peoples now issuing theological judgments upon it had themselves become Christianized.

And unlike many other ancient Eastern Churches, Georgia evolved without a parallel Catholic counterpart permanently standing beside it. This gave Georgian Christianity a unique historical psychology: more internally cohesive, more isolated, sometimes more defensive, but also profoundly organic.

Georgian Christianity itself was born not through imperial conquest but through the strange gentleness associated with Saint Nino, the woman who evangelized Iberia carrying a cross woven from vine branches and bound with her own hair. In Georgian memory, she is not merely an evangelizer but almost a maternal figure of the nation itself: fragile in appearance, immovable in endurance. Her cross was not made of iron, nor carried by armies. It emerged from vineyard, earth, hair, prayer, and presence. Something of this paradox still inhabits Georgian Christianity today – a civilization repeatedly wounded by stronger empires yet refusing disappearance.

The late Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II understood this instinctively. Whatever criticisms could be directed at him, he embodied continuity on a civilizational scale. For many Georgians, he was less a modern church administrator than a surviving elder from another historical rhythm altogether. His death therefore marks not merely a succession crisis but the end of an era in which a single figure symbolized stability amid Soviet collapse, civil war, economic ruin, territorial fragmentation, Westernization, Russian pressure, and cultural disorientation.

Shio III inherits not a throne, but a fault line.

This memory also explains why many Georgians react painfully when foreigners reduce the Church to a simple extension of Russian influence.........

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