Ekvtime Takaishvili

Saint Ekvtime Takaishvili, called the Man of God, was a Georgian historian, archaeologist and benefactor who saved the cultural treasure of his nation in times of persecution. He fell asleep in 1953, and the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized him in 2002 as Euthymius the Man of God. His memory is kept on 3 January in the Georgian Church.

He was born in 1862 in the village of Likhauri in Guria, to the nobleman Svimon Takaishvili. Orphaned early, he was raised in the houses of relatives. He finished the Kutaisi gymnasium with a silver medal and in 1887 graduated from the University of Saint Petersburg. From 1887 to 1917 he taught the history of Georgia at leading schools in Tbilisi and took part in wide scholarly and educational work. From 1907 to 1921 he chaired the Society of History and Ethnography of Georgia. In 1907 to 1910 he organised archaeological expeditions to the historic Georgian region of Tao-⁠Klarjeti, now in Turkey. He wrote many works on the history and archaeology of Georgia and the Caucasus, which are still valuable today, and was the first editor of many old Georgian texts.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he also entered public life. In May 1918 he signed Georgia's Declaration of Independence, helped found Tbilisi State University, and was elected deputy chairman of the Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, serving from 1919 to 1921. When the Red Army ended Georgia's independence in 1921 he lost his posts and went into exile in France with the government. He took with him the Georgian national treasury, many precious pieces of Georgian material culture, filling 39 large crates. They were shipped to Marseille and then to Paris, into a bank depository. Although the government in exile was officially the owner, it was in fact he who watched over the whole collection. In the early 1930s he won a lawsuit against Salome Obolenskaya, daughter of the last prince of Mingrelia, who claimed part of the treasury. Despite offers from several European museums and severe hardship, he never sold a single piece. He guarded the collection until 1933, when the League of Nations recognised the Soviet Union, the Georgian embassy in Paris was closed, and the treasury passed into the hands of the French state.

In 1935 he urged the French government to return the collections to Georgia, but only in November 1944 did he manage to draw the Soviet ambassador's attention to their fate. The good relations between Stalin and General de Gaulle helped bring the treasury back to Georgia. Takaishvili spent his last years in Tbilisi under house arrest and died of a heart attack on 21 February 1953. He was first buried at the Didube Pantheon, and in 2002 his remains were moved to the Mtatsminda Pantheon. The Second Gymnasium of Tbilisi bears his name, there is a museum of him in the capital and another in his native village, where each 16 January the day of Ekvtime is observed. In 2013 he was posthumously made a National Hero of Georgia.