Bishops and archbishops of Bolnisi  Bolnisi is a city in the country of Georgia, the capital of Bolnisi district, which has long been the seat of either a bishop or an archbishop. Bolnisi has been a center of Georgian Christianity since early Christian times, being the site of an early and important monastery. The Bolnisi Cathedral was built in 478–493 under the rule of Vakhtang I of Iberia and is the source of the Bolnisi cross, which came to be a national symbol of Georgia. In 2009, the Bishop of Bolnisi was summoned to Tbilisi and advised to see to it that the large number of crosses which had been erected around Muslim areas of Bolnisi as a provocation were removed, which he was partly but not entirely successful in doing.