The Annexation and the Abolition of Autocephaly

The imperial and ecclesial world into which Ilia Chavchavadze was born: the Russian annexation of the Georgian kingdoms from 1801, the abolition of the thousand-year Bagrationi monarchy, and — the wound at the center of everything Ilia would later do — the suppression of the Georgian Church’s ancient autocephaly in 1811 and its replacement by a Russian exarchate.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The End of the Kingdoms

Ilia Chavchavadze was born in 1837, a generation and a half after the political order of his people had been dismantled. For centuries the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti had survived between the Ottoman and Persian empires as a Christian kingdom under the ancient Bagrationi dynasty, whose kings traced their line into the deep medieval past and beyond it into legend. In 1783, by the Treaty of Georgievsk, King Erekle II placed Kartli-Kakheti under the protection of Orthodox Russia, hoping for a Christian shield against Persia; the protection proved hollow when, in 1795, the Persian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan sacked Tbilisi and devastated the kingdom (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, on Georgievsk and the sack of 1795).

Within a few years the protectorate became annexation. In 1801, following the death of the last king, George XII, the Russian Empire abolished the Kartli-Kakheti monarchy and incorporated the kingdom directly into the empire — an act carried out by imperial decree rather than by any Georgian assembly (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Lang, A Modern History of Georgia, 1962, on the annexation of 1801). Over the following decades the western Georgian principalities — Imereti, Mingrelia, Guria, Abkhazia — were absorbed in turn, so that by the 1860s the whole of the Georgian lands lay under a Russian viceroyalty administered from Tbilisi (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, chs. 4–5). The Bagrationi dynasty, the oldest reigning house in the Christian world, ceased to rule; its members were pensioned, exiled, or absorbed into the Russian nobility. For a people whose historical memory was bound up with its sacred kingship — the kingship of a David the Builder or a Tamar — the loss of the throne was not merely a political fact but the collapse of a whole order (see St. David the Builder; St. Tamar of Georgia).

The Church Before the Annexation

The Georgian Church that the empire inherited in 1801 was one of the oldest national churches in Christendom. Georgia had received the faith through the preaching of St. Nina in the fourth century, and the Christian kingdom of Iberia had been established in the reign of King Mirian (see St. Nina of Georgia). The Church of Kartli had become autocephalous — self-governing, electing its own primate — in the early Middle Ages, and its head bore the title Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia (Grdzelidze et al., eds., Georgia, in standard reference; Church of Georgia, OrthodoxWiki, on the antiquity of the catholicate; Britannica, “Georgian Orthodox church”). For fifteen centuries the Church had been the guardian of the Georgian language, the maker of the Georgian alphabet’s literary culture, and the memory of the nation across every foreign domination. Its autocephaly was not an administrative detail but the ecclesial form of Georgian Christian identity.

The Abolition of Autocephaly, 1811

The gravest consequence of the annexation for the Church followed within a decade. In 1811 the Russian imperial authorities abolished the autocephaly of the Georgian Church, deposing the last Catholicos-Patriarch, Anton II, and placing the Georgian Church under the direct rule of the Most Holy Governing Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg. In place of the catholicate the Russians installed an exarch — at first a Georgian, then, from 1817, a succession of Russian bishops who did not know the Georgian language (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Lang, A Modern History of Georgia, 1962; Georgian Orthodox Church, Wikipedia, on the 1811 abolition and the exarchate). [Disputed: the precise date within 1811 is variously given; the common scholarly and church statement is that the autocephaly was formally abolished in 1811, with the exarchate established the same year and the first Russian exarch, Theophylact (Rusanov), appointed in 1817 (Suny, 1994; Georgian Orthodox Church, Wikipedia). Devotional sources sometimes give the specific day “18 July 1811”; this collection reports the year as firm and treats the exact day as attested only in later summaries.]

The administrative consequences were severe and are well documented. The roughly thirty Georgian dioceses were consolidated into far fewer — commonly given as reduced to a handful; the Church’s landed wealth was secularized into imperial hands; and, most woundingly for a Church whose liturgy was its language, Georgian began to be displaced by Church Slavonic and Russian in worship and by Russian in the seminaries (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Lang, A Modern History of Georgia, 1962). What the empire had done to the monarchy in 1801 it did to the Church in 1811: it dissolved a self-governing Georgian institution into a Russian one, and set the Georgian language on the defensive within its own sanctuary.

The Wound That Framed a Life

This is the world Ilia was born into, and the 1811 abolition is the single fact that most illuminates his later work. When, half a century on, Ilia labored to defend the Georgian language, to fund Georgian schools, and — near the end of his life — to argue publicly for the restoration of the Church’s autocephaly, he was not inventing a grievance but responding to a living amputation (see The Defense of Autocephaly). The Georgian national movement of the nineteenth century, of which Ilia became the central figure, took shape precisely as the effort of a people who had lost both crown and catholicate to keep from losing, in addition, their language, their literature, and their faith (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; see Russification and the Georgian Predicament).

It is worth stating plainly, and from within the Church, what the abolition was and was not. From the Orthodox standpoint the autocephaly of an ancient apostolic Church is not a nationalist convenience but a canonical reality with deep roots; its unilateral suppression by an imperial power, however Orthodox that power, was an act of the state upon the Church, and the Georgian Church’s long struggle to recover its self-government — a struggle that finally succeeded when autocephaly was restored in March 1917 — is understood by that Church as the righting of a wrong (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Georgian Orthodox Church, Wikipedia, on the 1917 restoration). That Ilia did not live to see the restoration — he was killed in 1907, ten years before it — is part of why his Church, seventy years later still, would remember his advocacy as service to her (see The Act and the Rationale).

References

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The annexation of 1801; the western principalities; the 1811 abolition of autocephaly and the exarchate; the reduction of dioceses; the 1917 restoration.)
Lang, David Marshall. A Modern History of Georgia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. (The annexation and the ecclesiastical settlement under the empire.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Georgievsk 1783; the sack of Tbilisi 1795; the imperial period.)
Georgian Orthodox Church. Wikipedia. (The 1811 abolition of autocephaly; the exarchate; the suppression of Georgian in seminary and liturgy; the 1917 restoration — used to locate dates, cross-checked against Suny and Lang.)
Church of Georgia. OrthodoxWiki. (The antiquity of the catholicate and the title Catholicos-Patriarch.)
“Georgian Orthodox church.” Encyclopædia Britannica. (The autocephalous status and its history.)