Ekvtime Takaishvili

Historian, archaeologist, «man of God»

1863–1953

Ekvtime Takaishvili (1863–1953) was a historian and archaeologist, one of the nine professors who founded Tbilisi University in 1918. He gathered and studied the monuments of Georgian antiquity.

After the Soviet invasion of 1921 the Georgian government went into exile in France, and Takaishvili took out and safeguarded the nation's treasures: manuscripts, icons, gold. He kept them in Paris bank depositories for more than two decades, in poverty, losing his wife.

In 1945 the treasures returned home together with their keeper. In 2002 the Georgian Church canonised Takaishvili as the «Man of God».