New Martyrs of Georgia of 1924

The New Martyrs of Georgia of 1924 are Metropolitan Nazar of Kutaisi and Gaenati and the clergy killed with him: the archpriests Germanus Jajanidze and Hierotheus Nikoladze, the priest Simon Mchedlidze and the protodeacon Bessarion Kukhianidze. They are commemorated on 14 August, old style (27 August, new style).

Nazar (in the world Ioseb Lezhava) was born in 1872 in Didi Jikhaishi, in Imereti, into a priestly family. He studied at the church school in Kutaisi and in 1892 finished the Tbilisi seminary. He was ordained deacon, then priest, on 22 February 1893. After his wife and both daughters died, he became a monk in 1904. He was a teacher, then hegumen, and in 1911 abbot of the desert of Saint John the Baptist. On 1 December 1911 he was consecrated bishop and named Metropolitan of Kutaisi. As a hierarch he lived through hard times: he stood at the centre of the struggle for the autocephaly of the Church of Georgia, proclaimed on 12 March 1917 at Mtskheta, in Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. After the Soviet occupation, churches and monasteries lost their lands; Gelati Monastery was closed in 1923. The treasure of the cathedrals of Sioni and Svetitskhoveli, brought to Kutaisi in 1921, was hidden under the metropolitan's house; discovered, it led to Nazar's arrest. Asked for whom he had kept it, he answered: "For the Church and for the Georgian people." He was sentenced to death, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and in April 1924 he was released under an amnesty. He returned to his diocese, where he was not allowed into his residence and lived with his brother's family.

In 1924 an uprising broke out; on 27 August Nazar went with his clergy to consecrate the church at Rodinauli. By night, at Simoneti, Chekists fell upon them, bound them, beat them with rifle butts and took them to Kutaisi. Without trial, a "special troika" shot them in the Safichkhia forest: Metropolitan Nazar and four clergy. In 1994 an enlarged church assembly, with the blessing of Patriarch Ilia II, decided that, together with Metropolitan Nazar, every Orthodox Christian killed by unbelievers for the Church and the people should be canonized, called "new martyrs".