Shio of Mgvime

Saint Shio of Mgvime, known in Georgian as Shio Mgvimeli, that is Shio of the Cave, was a sixth-century monk and hermit numbered among the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers. Those Fathers were Syrian or Mesopotamian ascetics who, according to the tradition of the Georgian Church, came into the kingdom of Iberia (Kartli) to deepen the Christian faith and to establish a durable monastic culture. Iberia had been officially Christian since the fourth century, after the preaching associated with Saint Nino, but organized monasticism on a Syrian model is credited in large part to this group. The principal source for Shio’s life is a medieval Georgian vita. It presents him as a native of Antioch, born of a pious Christian family of standing, who from youth inclined to the monastic life and became a disciple of Saint John of Zedazeni (Ioane Zedazneli). No independent early source records a verifiable year of birth or of death. Tradition locates his work in the middle decades of the sixth century, in the reign of a king of Iberia whom the lives commonly name Parsman.

The same tradition states that John of Zedazeni and twelve disciples, Shio among them, travelled from Syria to Georgia and were received in the old capital region of Mtskheta. After a period of common life on Mount Zedazeni, the disciples dispersed to different parts of the country, each to found a monastery or a hermitage. Shio withdrew to a remote limestone gorge some distance west of Mtskheta, on the left bank of the river Mtkvari (Kura). The place took the name Mgvime, the cave. There he occupied a natural cave and lived as an anchorite, in fasting, vigil, and prayer. The vita, in a manner typical of Syrian desert hagiography, attributes to him the expulsion of a serpent or dragon from the cave, the taming of wild animals, and miraculous provision of food, sometimes by a dove. A nobleman named Evagre (Evagrius) is remembered as his first disciple. Other brothers gathered, and the hermitage became a lavra, the monastery of Shio-Mgvime, which in later centuries ranked among the foremost monastic houses of Georgia.

The rule of life that formed around Shio mixed the solitude of the hermit with a coenobitic core, a pattern well known in Syrian and Palestinian monasticism. He is honoured as a founder and ascetic teacher, not as a bishop, catholicos, or patriarch. Kings and nobles of Iberia are said to have visited him and to have granted lands and gifts to the emerging community. The earliest church on the site, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, is linked by tradition to the sixth-century foundation, though the masonry now visible is largely medieval and later. In his last years Shio is described as remaining enclosed in the cave that had been his cell, receiving the Eucharist through a narrow opening. He died in that cave and was buried in it. His tomb and relics at Shio-Mgvime Monastery became a centre of pilgrimage and of local cult.

The Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates Saint Shio on 9 May and also remembers him together with the other Assyrian Fathers, including on the Thursday of Cheesefare Week. He was never Bishop of Rome, nor did he occupy a patriarchal or catholicosal throne. The vita depicts him as a monk from his entry into religion; no historically reliable evidence records a wife or children. Canonization, in the Eastern sense, consisted in the reception of his feast and office by the Georgian Church, not in a named papal or later patriarchal decree of beatification. Critical historians note that the surviving lives of the Thirteen Fathers were composed or recast centuries after the sixth century and that they combine memory of a genuine Syrian-inspired monastic influx with conventional miracle stories. Even so, the existence of an early and important monastery at Shio-Mgvime and the long continuity of Shio’s cult are not in serious doubt. He remains one of the most widely venerated monastic saints of Georgia, and the monastery that bears his name still stands in the gorge where he is believed to have lived and died.