Ilia Chavchavadze

Prince Ilia Chavchavadze was born in 1837 at Kvareli in Kakheti, a historic eastern province of Georgia then incorporated into the Russian Empire, to a family of the Georgian princely nobility. He was educated in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and in 1857 entered the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg University. He left the university in 1861 without completing a degree, during a period of student unrest, and returned to Georgia. There he became a leading figure among the Tergdaleulebi, the generation of Georgian intellectuals who had studied in Russia beyond the Terek and who sought to renew national life by means of language, literature, education, and lawful public institutions rather than by armed revolt. From the 1860s until his death he combined writing, editing, banking, and local and imperial politics in the service of that programme.

His prose and verse examined the moral and social condition of Georgia under imperial rule, the worth of the peasantry, and the danger that the Georgian language and historical memory might be lost. Among the works most often cited are the novella Is He a Human Being? (1863), the narrative poem The Hermit, and the story known in English as Otaraant Widow or The Widow of the Otaraant Family. He also wrote travel sketches, publicistic letters, and a large body of journalism. In the 1860s he was associated with the periodical Sakartvelos Moambe. From 1877 he edited the newspaper Iveria, which for many years was the principal organ of moderate Georgian national opinion. In that press he argued for Georgian-language schooling, for economic measures that would keep land in Georgian hands, and for the restoration of the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church, which the Russian state had abolished in the early nineteenth century when it subordinated the Georgian church to the Holy Synod in Saint Petersburg.

Chavchavadze’s public work went well beyond literature. In 1879 he was among the founders of the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, which opened schools and libraries and promoted education in Georgian. He was a central figure in the Tiflis Nobility Land Bank, created to help Georgian nobles retain their estates. He took part in the municipal life of Tiflis and, in 1906, was chosen by the Georgian nobility as their representative in the State Council of the Russian Empire. His politics were those of a liberal nationalist: hostile to Russification and to the erasure of Georgian ecclesiastical independence, yet also wary of revolutionary socialism and of methods that he believed would destroy the legal and cultural fabric he was trying to rebuild. In 1863 he married Princess Olga Guramishvili. The marriage was close and lasting; the couple had no children and lived much of the time at Saguramo, near Mtskheta.

On 30 August 1907 by the Julian calendar then in civil use in the empire (12 September 1907 Gregorian), while travelling from Tbilisi toward Saguramo, he was ambushed and shot near the village of Tsitsamuri. Olga was wounded. A servant travelling with them was also killed. Several men were later arrested and convicted, but the question of who ordered the murder has never been settled to the satisfaction of historians; late imperial police, radical political groups, and private enmity have all been proposed. He was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi, the cemetery of Georgian writers and public figures. Already in his lifetime he was widely spoken of as the uncrowned king or father of the Georgian nation; after 1907 that title became a fixture of national memory.

In 1987 the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized him as Saint Ilia the Righteous (Ilia Martali), honouring him as a martyr and as a defender of the church, the language, and the people of Georgia. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 20 July (Julian), corresponding to 2 August in the Gregorian calendar. In modern Georgia his name is attached to streets, a university, and the national currency, and he remains the emblematic lay saint of the nineteenth-century national revival.