Ioane Maisuradze

Venerable Ioane Maisuradze was an archimandrite and Georgian monk, born at Tskhinvali around 1882, with the lay name Vasil. From childhood he was skilled at all kinds of tasks and, at about twelve, helped zealously the abbot of Bethany monastery, the hieromonk Spyridon, who in 1894 to 1896 had restored the place with great difficulty. Inclined to monastic life from his youth, he went in 1903 to the Holy Mountain of Athos, to the skete of Saint John the Theologian, where he was soon tonsured a monk and stood out by his simplicity and service to the brethren. He returned to Georgia as a hieromonk.

In the 1920s he became abbot of Bethany monastery. In 1921 only two monks remained in the monastery when two armed Chekists came and told the monks that they were summoned to Tbilisi. On the road the monks were shot; Father Ioane stayed alive as if by a miracle, the bullet passing through his chest, and he was nursed by the nuns of a neighbouring monastery. He returned to Bethany and never left it again. In 1924 the monk Giorgi Mkheidze came there. In the years of communist persecution the two kept Bethany a monastic place: officially they were "guardians of an architectural monument" and the monastery was regarded as inactive, but in the church icons hung, lamps burned, and services, processions, baptisms and weddings were held.

Father Ioane fell asleep in the Lord in 1957 and was buried at Bethany. He is commemorated, together with Father Giorgi, on 8 September (new style; 21 September on the Julian calendar of Georgia).