Vakhtang in Georgian Memory

Vakhtang’s place in the memory of his nation: the founder of the capital and national hero, the wolf-headed king who rides in bronze above the Metekhi rock over Tbilisi, and the interplay of saint, historical king, and national symbol that has kept his cult alive. This file follows Vakhtang from the fifth century into the enduring national and religious memory of Georgia.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Founder in the National Imagination

No Georgian king before David the Builder and Queen Tamar holds a larger place in the national imagination than Vakhtang Gorgasali, and his hold rests above all on one thing: he is the founder of Tbilisi, the capital that has been Georgia’s heart for fifteen centuries (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; see The Founding of the Capital). To found the enduring capital is to be woven into the identity of a nation in a way that mere conquest never achieves; every later age of Georgian history has been lived in the city Vakhtang founded, and the memory of the founder has been renewed with the city itself. Alongside this stands his image as the defender of Christian Iberia against the Zoroastrian empire — the wolf-headed champion who held off Persia in the fifth century — which made him, for a nation that would spend much of its history defending its faith against powerful neighbors, an archetype of Christian and national resistance (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

The epic tradition examined earlier is itself the primary monument of this memory (see The King and the Epic). The Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali, magnifying the king into a world-conquering hero, is Georgian national memory at work — the tradition’s way of declaring Vakhtang its greatest early king and God’s champion for the Georgian faith (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003). The legend and the memory are one: the epic “Gorgasali” is the form Vakhtang took in the imagination of his nation.

The King in Bronze

The most visible expression of that memory is the great equestrian statue of Vakhtang Gorgasali that stands on the Metekhi rock above the Kura, in the heart of old Tbilisi, the wolf-headed king in armor gazing out over the city he founded (the Metekhi equestrian monument of Vakhtang is a well-known landmark of modern Tbilisi; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The statue, beside the ancient church-site of Metekhi, binds the two strands of his memory into a single image: the founder-king above his capital, and the Christian sovereign beside the church. It is the founder made visible — a permanent civic assertion that Tbilisi is Vakhtang’s city and that the nation traces its capital, and much of its identity, to him.

His name marks the country in other ways: the Order of Vakhtang Gorgasali is among Georgia’s military and state honors, and his figure recurs in the national iconography of Georgia as founder and defender (the Order of Vakhtang Gorgasali is a Georgian state decoration; the king is a standard figure of national commemoration). As with David the Builder, whose name is likewise borne by a state order and whose memory saturates modern Georgian national feeling, Vakhtang has become a symbol in which the medieval saint and the modern nation meet (see St. David the Builder; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

Saint, King, and Symbol

The interest — and the difficulty — of Vakhtang’s place in Georgian memory is that three figures are present in it at once, and the collection has tried throughout to keep them distinct. There is the saint, venerated by the Church as a holy king and martyr, whose cult is grounded in the historical core of a life given to the defense of the faith (see A Warrior King as Saint). There is the historical king, the fifth-century Chosroid sovereign whom source-criticism can soberly reconstruct (see The King and the Epic). And there is the national symbol, the founder of the capital and archetype of Christian resistance, magnified by epic and renewed by every later age of national feeling (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

These three are not in conflict, but they are not identical, and modern national feeling can blur them — reading the epic hero as documented history, or enlisting the saint as a symbol of the nation in ways that owe more to modern politics than to the fifth century (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the modern nationalization of the medieval Georgian past). The collection’s discipline is to hold the three in their proper relation: to honor the saint as the Church venerates him, to reconstruct the king as the sources allow, and to recognize the national symbol as a real and interesting fact of Georgian memory without mistaking it for either the saint or the historical king (see Assessment).

A Memory Renewed

Vakhtang’s memory has proved remarkably durable because it is anchored in a living city and a living Church. So long as Tbilisi is Georgia’s capital, the founder is remembered; so long as the Georgian Church keeps his feast on 30 November, the saint is venerated; and so long as Georgia tells the story of its resistance to empires, the wolf-headed defender of the fifth century has his place in it (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). He stands at the head of a national and religious memory that runs down through David the Builder and Queen Tamar to the modern nation — the founder of the capital, the defender of the faith, the first of the great Georgian warrior-kings the Church would venerate as saints (see Legacy). In Georgian memory, more than in the fragmentary record, Vakhtang Gorgasali has never ceased to be a founder.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Vakhtang as founder of Tbilisi; the national memory; the Metekhi monument’s setting.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The modern nationalization of the medieval Georgian past.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The epic Vakhtang as national memory.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, CSCO 601, 2003. (The Life as national tradition.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The saint in Georgian veneration.)