Venerable Father Arsenius, Bishop of Ninotsminda (+1082)

Saint Arsenius of Ninotsminda was an eleventh-century churchman, translator, man of letters and one of the finest calligraphers. He was tonsured a monk in Jerusalem, and afterwards “a man of high virtue and a worker of the commandments of Christ” was invited to Georgia and consecrated bishop of Ninotsminda.

Saint Arsenius “for God’s sake left the episcopate and came before David the Kuropalates”. David, the lord of Tao, “received Arsenius as befitted his holiness and sent him to Otkhta Eklesia”. At that time the monk John Grdzelisdze was living at Otkhta Eklesia. Arsenius and John became great friends: “These our blessed fathers, John and Arsenius, had great love for one another and laboured there a long time in that good labour of monasticism”; but at Otkhta Eklesia they did not feel withdrawn enough from the life of the world — “a life of stillness was not to be had” — and so they resolved to go away “to a foreign land”. “They went to the parts of Pontus” and settled there in one of the monasteries. John and Euthymius of the Holy Mountain, who were then labouring in the newly founded Georgian monastery on Athos, learned that they were there and invited the fathers to join them. The next year Arsenius and John came to Athos and stood by Euthymius, on whom the whole weight of the abbacy had fallen after his father’s death. They “were a great help to the holy father… Euthymius in translating the holy writings, and became zealous imitators of his holy virtues, and in their old age copied many books of the Church with their own hands”, the biographer of George the Athonite tells us.

Saint Arsenius died on the mountain of Athos. He was buried “outside the monastery, in a church of the holy Symeon the Stylite”. When George the Athonite was elected abbot of the Iviron monastery, he moved the remains of Saint Arsenius to a special martyrium of the great church, beside Saint Euthymius the Athonite.