Nazarius of Kutaisi and Companions
The Holy New Martyrs Nazarius, Metropolitan of Kutaisi-Gaenati, and those who suffered with him in Georgia
New Martyr · Bishop · Priest · Deacon · b. 1872, at Didi Jikhaishi in Imereti — d. 1924, in the Sapichkhia forest near Kutaisi
Commemorated 14 August — Shot in the Sapichkhia forest with four clergy and a layman, 1924
Nazarius (Lezhava), Metropolitan of Kutaisi-Gaenati, was shot with four of his clergy and a layman in the Sapichkhia forest outside Kutaisi in 1924, on the night following his consecration of a village church. His crime, in the eyes of the Soviet power, was that he had hidden the treasures of the cathedrals of Sioni and Svetitskhoveli under the porch of his own residence when the Red Army entered Georgia in 1921, and that when the court demanded to know for whom he had hidden them he answered: "For the Church and the Georgian people." With him died the priests Herman Jajanidze, Hierotheos Nikoladze and Simon Mchedlidze, the archdeacon Besarion Kukhianidze, and a layman. The Georgian Church glorified them in 1994, and in the same act proclaimed all who had died for the faith and for the freedom of their country under the totalitarian regime to be the New Martyrs of the Georgian Church.
Origins and early life
The future metropolitan was born Joseph Lezhava in 1872 in the village of Didi Jikhaishi, in the province of Imereti in western Georgia. His family belonged to a long line of clergy — in Georgia, as in Russia, the priesthood was frequently hereditary — and he was formed in the Church from his earliest years.
He was educated at the Kutaisi Theological School and in 1892 graduated with distinction from the Seminary of Tbilisi, the institution that trained almost the whole of the Georgian clergy of his generation under the Russian exarchate. He entered the service of the Church at once, first as a deacon and, from 9 February 1893, as a priest.
His was thus a married clergyman's career, and it ended in a series of bereavements: in 1904, after the death of his wife and then of his two daughters, he was tonsured a monk with the name Nazarius. Widowhood is the ordinary Orthodox road from the parish priesthood to the episcopate, but the account of these particular deaths gives that transition its weight.
Metropolitan of Kutaisi
The Georgian Church restored her autocephaly in 1917, after a century and a decade of subjection to the Russian Holy Synod. On 4 November 1918 Nazarius was enthroned Metropolitan of Kutaisi, the second see of the country and the centre of Imereti, with the historic monastery of Gelati (Gaenati) in his jurisdiction and his residence on the grounds of the Bagrati Cathedral, the eleventh-century coronation church of the kings of Georgia.
He had barely five years. In February 1921 the Red Army invaded the independent Georgian republic and abolished it. The years 1922–1923 were the worst of the assault on the Church: the accounts record twelve hundred churches destroyed, the confiscation of church property, the burning of rare manuscripts — an incalculable loss in a country whose manuscript tradition reaches back to the fifth century — and the systematic persecution of the clergy, with a particular ferocity toward those identified with Georgian national feeling.
The treasures of Sioni and Svetitskhoveli
On 10 February 1921, as the Red Army advanced, the treasures of the two greatest churches of Georgia — the Sioni Cathedral of Tbilisi and Svetitskhoveli at Mtskheta, the burial church of the kings and the shrine of the Robe of the Lord — were carried west to Kutaisi for safekeeping. Patriarch Leonid blessed that four boxes of holy objects should be buried under the porch of Metropolitan Nazarius's residence in the precinct of the Bagrati Cathedral.
When the Bolsheviks had secured their hold on the country they discovered the hiding place and arrested the metropolitan, charging him with agitation against the government and with concealing the property of the Church — which, by the decrees of the period, had become the property of the state. In court he was asked for whom he had hidden the treasure. His answer, which is the sentence by which he is remembered, was: "For the Church and the Georgian people."
The court passed the supreme penalty, death by shooting; the sentence was then rescinded, and instead the hierarch was imprisoned and his personal possessions confiscated. In April 1924, after two years in prison, he received an amnesty and was released. He returned to a diocese in ruins. He was not permitted to live in his own residence, which had been turned into a storehouse, and lodged with his brother.
The martyrdom at Sapichkhia
On 14 August 1924 a delegation from the village of Simoneti came to the metropolitan and asked him to consecrate their church. He went with his retinue and performed the consecration.
That night a party of Chekists broke into the house where the metropolitan and his companions were staying, bound and beat them, and dragged them to the village soviet. Without investigation or trial, a Troika — the extraordinary three-man tribunal of the period, which needed neither evidence nor defence — condemned to death Metropolitan Nazarius and five others:
- the priest Herman Jajanidze
- the priest Hierotheos Nikoladze
- the priest Simon Mchedlidze
- the archdeacon Besarion Kukhianidze
- a layman, whom the received English notice names Axalmotsameni
They were taken into the Sapichkhia forest near Kutaisi and shot.
Glorification
In 1994, with the blessing of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, the full Ecclesiastical Council of the Georgian Orthodox Church resolved unanimously to canonise Metropolitan Nazarius and the clergy who died with him. In the same act the Council canonised all the Orthodox Christians who had perished under the totalitarian regime for the faith and for the independence of their homeland, proclaiming them the New Martyrs of the Georgian Church. The Sapichkhia group thus stands both as a named company with its own memory and as the representative head of a far larger and mostly anonymous number.
Feast and commemoration
The martyrs are commemorated on August 14 (church date; New Calendar civil August 14, Old Calendar civil August 27) — the day of the arrest, the last day of the Dormition fast and the Forefeast of the Dormition. The commemoration belongs to the Georgian Orthodox Church and is carried in American usage through the Orthodox Church in America's calendar; it is not in the received Greek or Slavic menaia. Metropolitan Nazarius is venerated at Kutaisi, at the Bagrati Cathedral whose precinct was both his residence and the hiding place of the treasures he died for, and at the site in the Sapichkhia forest; he is commemorated also in the general synaxis of the New Martyrs of Georgia.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
The Church of Georgia offereth thee her new martyrs, O Christ: the hierarch Nazarius with the priests and the deacon and the faithful layman who suffered with him, who kept the holy things entrusted to them and would not yield them up, and who went to the wood of Sapichkhia as to a bridal chamber. By their prayers, O God, preserve thy people and thy sanctuary.
Iconography
The martyrs are painted in the manner developed for the new martyrs of the Soviet period: the metropolitan at the centre in mantle, omophorion and white klobuk, holding the Gospel or a cross, the four clergy ranged beside him in phelonion and sticharion, each with the martyr's cross, and the layman at the edge in ordinary dress; the forest of Sapichkhia is indicated behind them, and in narrative versions the four buried boxes or the Bagrati Cathedral appear at the metropolitan's feet. Georgian icons of the new martyrs commonly set the whole company against the outline of a Georgian church.
No storable image has been secured. All known icons of these martyrs are modern works by living or recently deceased iconographers, painted after the glorification of 1994, and are their authors' copyright; photographs of them uploaded to image sites do not free the underlying paintings, and none has been stored.
Disputed questions
- The layman's name. The English notice in circulation gives the sixth victim as "a layman, Axalmotsameni." The word akhalmotsameni (ახალმოწამენი) is not a Georgian surname but the Georgian for "new martyrs"; the reading is almost certainly a transcription artefact, in which a descriptive phrase from the Georgian source has been taken for a personal name. This entry therefore records that a layman suffered with the clergy but does not assert a name for him. Flagged for correction against a Georgian-language source in Pass 2.
- The date. The consecration at Simoneti and the arrest fall on 14 August; the shooting followed that night, and some accounts accordingly give the martyrdom as the fifteenth. The commemoration is kept on August 14.
- The rescinded sentence. The first death sentence, passed at the trial over the cathedral treasures and then annulled, is recorded in the sources without explanation of the annulment; the metropolitan served two years and was amnestied, and was killed four months later without any judicial process at all.