Father of the Nation

Ilia Chavchavadze’s standing as the founder of modern Georgia: the endurance of the institutions and ideas he built, his role as patron-spirit of the independence of 1918 and again of 1991, and his place — as “father of the fatherland,” mamamtavari — in the national imagination he did more than any other to create.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Meaning of the Title

Of all the honorifics attached to Ilia Chavchavadze — “the uncrowned king of Georgia,” “father of the fatherland” (Mamamtavari), the Georgian Pater Patriae — none is mere flattery, because in a literal, institutional sense Ilia fathered the framework of the modern Georgian nation (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on “father of the nation” / Pater Patriae). A people that had lost its crown in 1801 and its catholicate in 1811 was given, by Ilia and his generation, the substitutes a nation needs to survive without a state: a standardized modern literary language, a national press, a system of Georgian schools, a bank to protect the land, a body of literature in which to recognize itself, and a public leadership to hold it together (see The National Work). When Georgians call him the father of the nation, they mean that the modern nation was, to an unusual degree, one man’s deliberate construction.

The Endurance of the Institutions and Ideas

Ilia’s institutions outlived him and shaped what came after. The Society for the Spreading of Literacy had, by the time of his death, built a network of Georgian schools and a literate national public; the modern literary language he had fought for was by then secure; the national consciousness he had cultivated was strong enough to sustain a bid for statehood (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). When Georgia declared independence in 1918, in the collapse of the Russian Empire, it did so as a nation Ilia had largely made — and the restoration of the Church’s autocephaly he had championed had come the year before, in 1917 (see The Defense of Autocephaly). The first Georgian republic was short-lived, extinguished by Soviet conquest in 1921; but the national identity beneath it, which Ilia had done so much to forge, survived seventy years of Soviet rule (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, chs. 5–9).

Ideas endure differently from institutions, and Ilia’s ideas endured most tenaciously of all. His vision of the nation constituted by language, homeland, and faith became the deep grammar of Georgian national feeling, available to be taken up again whenever the nation reasserted itself (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see The Ideas and the Triad). The triad ena, mamuli, sartsmunoeba became the watchword of the late-Soviet national movement under Gamsakhurdia and Kostava, and Ilia its patron-spirit; the “Ilia Chavchavadze Society” of 1987 was a vehicle of the drive to the independence finally regained in 1991 (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see The Reception and the Debate). At both of modern Georgia’s births — 1918 and 1991 — Ilia stood as the presiding ancestral figure.

Ilia in the National Imagination

The measure of Ilia’s place in the national imagination is everywhere in Georgia. He is on the currency and in the squares; streets, a university, and institutions bear his name; his home at Saguramo and the site of his death at Tsitsamuri are places of pilgrimage; his works are the core of the national literary canon and the school curriculum (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). This secular national veneration — the “cultural sainthood” of Tsipuria’s analysis — long predates and now coexists with his religious veneration as St. Ilia the Righteous, and the two have become, in Georgian feeling, nearly inseparable (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see Saint and Symbol). The collection has been careful throughout to keep the secular symbol and the ecclesial saint analytically distinct (see Saint and Symbol); but it also records the plain fact that, for most Georgians, Ilia is one figure — the father who gave them their nation and their name for themselves, whom their Church has now numbered among the saints.

A Sober Assessment

A sober assessment holds two things together. Ilia was, by any measure, one of the most consequential figures of modern Georgian history — arguably the most consequential — and his greatness is not in dispute among historians of any persuasion (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010). At the same time, the collection resists the hagiographic temptation to make him flawless or to read his whole secular career as straightforwardly holy. He was a nineteenth-century liberal nobleman with the limits of his class and age; his nationalism, benign and inclusive in his own hands, could be and was later turned to harder uses; his personal devotion, as distinct from his public defense of the faith, is honestly under-documented (see Personal Faith and the Thin Record; The Reception and the Debate). The father of the nation is a real and towering figure without needing to be idealized — and the saint his Church venerates is honored best by the truth about the man, not by its embellishment.

References

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Ilia as founder of modern Georgia; the endurance of his institutions and ideas; 1918 and 1991; the national veneration.)
Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The “father of the nation”; the cultural sainthood; Ilia and the national movement; the fusion of secular and religious veneration.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Ilia’s place in the national literary canon.)
Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (“Father of the nation” / Pater Patriae; his presence in Georgian public memory — used to locate facts, cross-checked against Suny and Tsipuria.)