Sandro Akhmeteli

Director of the Rustaveli Theatre, shot in 1937

1886–1937

Sandro Akhmeteli (1886-1937) ran the Rustaveli Theatre from 1926 to 1935, and he is still called the strongest of Georgian directors. As early as 1915 he said the Georgian theatre had to be destroyed and made anew: hotter, more temperamental, more emotional.

His Lamara after Grigol Robakidze won a prize at the Moscow theatre olympiad in 1930 and made his name beyond Georgia. But experiment sat badly with Bolshevik doctrine: in 1927, under pressure from Beria, Akhmeteli disbanded his own group Duruji.

In 1937 he was arrested on a fabricated charge of espionage. About two hundred days of torture, and execution on the twenty-seventh of June 1937. His name was returned to the history of Georgian theatre later.