Bedia

Bedia is a village of the Black Sea lowlands of western Georgia, where wet forest runs down from the Caucasus toward the coast. Its name belongs to the cathedral founded here at the end of the tenth century and consecrated in 999 by Bagrat III, the first king of the united Georgian kingdom, who made it a bishopric and was buried here with his mother Gurandukht.

The present church, a domed cross-in-square building of cut sandstone, was largely rebuilt between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. A gate tower carries an inscription naming Giorgi Dadiani, from the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century the metropolitan Anton Zhuanisdze built the bishop's palace and gathered a library where old manuscripts were repaired and theological works translated. Services stopped in the seventeenth century, and the church stood forgotten under creepers for generations afterward.