01 — Georgia in the Nineteenth Century

The world into which Ilia Chavchavadze was born and against which his life’s work was a response: the Russian annexation of the Georgian kingdoms, the abolition of the Georgian Church’s ancient autocephaly in 1811, and the russification of school, seminary, and public life.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

This section sets the stage. Everything Ilia did — the journals, the Society for Literacy, the bank, the defense of the Georgian language and the Georgian Church — was framed by a single fact: that by the time of his birth in 1837 the independent Georgian kingdoms had been absorbed into the Russian Empire, their monarchy abolished, and their Church stripped of the self-governing (autocephalous) status it had held since the early Middle Ages.

The two files:

  • The Annexation and the Abolition of Autocephaly — the annexation of Kartli-Kakheti (1801) and the western kingdoms, the end of the Bagrationi monarchy, and the 1811 suppression of the Georgian catholicate and its replacement by a Russian exarchate.
  • Russification and the Georgian Predicament — the pressures on language, seminary, and public life under the exarchate and the imperial administration, and the cultural crisis to which the tergdaleulebi generation, and Ilia above all, would respond.

Files

File Description
the-annexation-and-the-abolition-of-autocephaly.md Russian annexation from 1801; the end of the monarchy; the 1811 abolition of Georgian autocephaly and the exarchate
russification-and-the-georgian-predicament.md Russification of language and Church; the cultural predicament of nineteenth-century Georgia

See Also