Skhi-Arkhimandrit Gavriil

Schema-Archimandrite Gabriel (born Goderdzi Urgebadze) was a Georgian Orthodox monk and fool-for-Christ of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, later glorified as a saint. He was born in 1929 in Tbilisi, then capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. His father, Vasili Urgebadze, was killed while Gabriel was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Varvara, whose Christian faith shaped the household. In an officially atheist state that discouraged and often punished public religion, the boy showed an early and intense attraction to the Church. He is remembered as having built a small chapel-like structure in childhood and as seeking out clergy and monastics, already combining piety with unconventional behavior.

After military service in the Soviet army he entered monastic life, receiving the tonsure with the name Gabriel and being ordained deacon and priest. He served in churches and monastic houses in Georgia under continued official atheism. On 1 May 1965, during a May Day demonstration in Tbilisi, he set fire to a large portrait of Lenin and denounced the cult of Communist leaders as idolatry. He was seized, beaten, interrogated, and confined to a psychiatric hospital, a frequent Soviet method of neutralizing religious dissent. After his release he lived as a fool-for-Christ, an Eastern Christian ascetic path in which poverty, eccentricity, and startling gestures conceal holiness and serve as teaching.

In later decades he resided at Samtavro Monastery in Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Iberia and one of Georgia’s oldest Christian centers. He occupied a modest tower-like cell in the courtyard. Although Samtavro was a women’s monastery, church authorities allowed him to remain. He became a spiritual father to many visitors, known for giving away food, clothing, and money, for sharp and sometimes paradoxical counsel, and for a reputation for clairvoyance and healing. He was raised to schema-archimandrite, the rank of one who has taken the great schema, the most rigorous grade of Orthodox monastic profession.

He died in 1995 and was buried beside the church at Samtavro. The grave at once became a place of pilgrimage. On 20 December 2012 the Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church glorified him as Saint Gabriel, Confessor and Fool-for-Christ. In February 2014 his relics were uncovered and described as incorrupt; they were enshrined at Samtavro, which remains a major pilgrimage site. His principal feast is 2 November, the day of his repose. He is among the best-known Georgian saints of the twentieth century, venerated in Georgia and throughout the Orthodox world.