John Chimchimeli the Philosopher

Saint John Chimchimeli the Philosopher was a great translator, philosopher and defender of the Georgian Christian faith. Little information about his life has been preserved. He was educated in present-⁠day Bulgaria, at the literary school of the renowned Georgian monastery of Petritsoni (now Bachkovo).

One historian writes that in his eulogy on the death of Saint Demetre the King, John the Philosopher of Chimchimeli brilliantly describes the glory, honor and heroism of that holy man's life. He translated many exegetical works, among them two commentaries on Ecclesiastes, one by Metrophanes of Smyrna (metropolitan from 857 to 880, whose commentary survives only in Georgian) and the other by Olympiodorus of Alexandria (a deacon of the sixth century), as well as "An Explanation of the Gospel According to Saint Mark" and "An Explanation of the Gospel According to Saint Luke," both by Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria. His works are fundamental to the canon of Georgian theological literature.

In his Pilgrimage, the eighteenth-⁠century Archbishop Timote Gabashvili mentions John of Chimchimeli among the holy fathers painted in the frescoes of the Holy Cross Monastery in Jerusalem. In the second half of the nineteenth century the historian Mose Janashvili wrote that John of Chimchimeli directed a literary school in the village of Gremi in Kakheti, where students were taught philosophy and theology as well as Greek, Syriac and Arabic. He is commemorated on 10 February (new style; 23 February on the old calendar).