Grigol Peradze - Life and Works

Life and Works

Grigol Peradze was born in the village of Bakurtsikhe, in the Gurjaani district of the Kakheti region, in Eastern Georgia. His father, Romanoz Peradze, was a priest.

In 1918 Peradze graduated from the Tbilisi Theological Seminary, and afterwards studied at the Tbilisi State University until 1921.

On February 25, 1921, Georgia was occupied by Soviet Russia. Grigol Peradze went into exile in Germany in November the same year.

In 1926 he graduated from the University of Bonn (Germany). In 1927 he received a PhD degree in History (the title of his PhD thesis was "History of the Georgian Monasticism from its creation until 1064").

From 1927 - 1932 Peradze was an Associate Professor at the University of Bonn. From 1933 - 1942 he was a Professor of Patrology at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of Warsaw University, in Poland.

In 1931, Grigol Peradze was ordained a priest in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of London; in 1934, he received the rank of Archimandrite. In 1931, he founded a Georgian St. Nino Orthodox church in Paris. In the same year he began to publish a Georgian scientific journal titled "Jvari Vazisa" ("Cross of Vine").

In the 1930s, Peradze discovered numerous important written manuscripts of Georgian Christian culture in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Austria (Georgian manuscripts of the Typicon of the Georgian Petritsoni Monastery (Bachkovo, Bulgaria), the so-called Tischendorf manuscripts of the Apagae of the Monastery of the Holy Cross at the University Library in the University of Leipzig, Germany, etc.).

The invasion of Poland by German troops in 1939 made Peradze's position precarious. For him being in solidarity with Jews in peril went without saying; and he helped wherever he could. Nor did he hesitate to visit the imprisoned Polish Metropolitan Dionysios. These activities were viewed with growing suspicion by the Nazi occupiers and Peradze's fruitful ecclesiastic and scientific activities were brought to an end in 1942 when, on May 4, he was arrested by the German Gestapo. On December 6, 1942, Grigol Peradze was killed in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) when he took the blame for the murder of a German officer to spare his fellow prisoners, or, according to another report, when he entered a gas-chamber in the place of a Jewish prisoner who had a large family.

Main fields of scientific activity of Grigol Peradze were: the history of the Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church, source studies of the history of Georgia and the Georgian Church, Patrology, history of Georgian literature, Rustvelology (Shota Rustaveli was a great Georgian poet of the 12th century), etc.

Grigol Peradze was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church in September 1995. The Feast Day for St. Priest Martyr Grigol is December 6 (or November 23 in the old style).