Ekvtime Takaishvili

Ekvtime Takaishvili was born on 5 January 1863 in the village of Likhauri in Guria, then part of the Kutais Governorate of the Russian Empire. He came from a Georgian noble family and received a classical education at the gymnasium in Kutaisi before studying at the Faculty of History and Philology of Saint Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1887. Upon his return to Georgia he taught history, Latin, and related subjects at gymnasiums in Tbilisi. He was closely associated with the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, which promoted education in the Georgian language and the study of the country’s past. Parallel to his teaching he began the historical and archaeological researches that would occupy him for the rest of his life, publishing on medieval Georgian chronicles, church architecture, and inscriptions.

By the early twentieth century Takaishvili had become one of the central figures in Georgian historical scholarship. He organized and took part in archaeological expeditions, worked to catalogue manuscripts and museum holdings, and issued numerous studies that remain reference points in the field. In 1918 he was among the founders of Tbilisi State University, the first modern university in the Caucasus, and served there as a professor of history. He was also active in politics as a member of the National Democratic Party. In 1919 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which had declared independence the previous year, and he participated in the republic’s efforts to build national institutions in education and culture.

Those efforts were cut short by the invasion of the Red Army in February 1921. Takaishvili left Georgia with the government of the republic, carrying a large collection of national treasures that had been evacuated from churches, monasteries, and museums. The collection included medieval icons, manuscripts, liturgical silver, and other objects of exceptional artistic and religious importance. He settled in France, living mainly in Paris and remaining in contact with the Georgian émigré community, including the government-in-exile associated with Leuville-sur-Orge. For more than two decades he lived in poverty, repeatedly refusing to sell or divide the treasures, which he treated as a sacred trust belonging to the Georgian people rather than as his personal property. His wife died during the years of exile.

In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, Takaishvili succeeded in having the collection returned to Georgia. He himself was allowed to return to Tbilisi only in 1952, already an old man. He died in Tbilisi on 21 February 1953. In 2002 the Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church, under Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, canonized him, recognizing both his scholarly service to the nation’s memory and his long, self-denying guardianship of its sacred objects in exile. He is venerated as a saint of the Georgian Church, sometimes called Ekvtime the Man of God, and commemorated on 3 January.