Ekvtime Takaishvili
Ekvtime
Takaishvili (January
3, 1863 - February 21, 1953) was a Georgian historian, archaeologist
and public benefactor.
Born
in the village of Likhauri in the western Georgian province of Guria (then part of Imperial Russia) to a local nobleman Svimon Takaishvili, he
graduated from St. Petersburg
University in
1887. From 1887 to 1917, he lectured on the history of Georgia at various
prestigious schools in Tbilisi, including the Tbilisi Gymnasium for
Nobility. During these years, he was actively involved in extensive scholarly
activities and chaired, from 1907 to 1921, the Society of History and
Ethnography of Georgia. Between 1907 and 1910, he organized a series of
archaeological expeditions to the historic Georgian region of Tao-Klarjeti (now part of Turkey).
Georgian National Treasury
In
1918, he was among the founders and professors of the Tbilisi State University (TSU). He lost his tenure
both in the parliament and at the TSU in 1921, when the Bolshevik Russia's 11th Red Army put an end to Georgia's
independence. He followed the Georgian government in their French exile, taking the Georgian
national treasury – numerous precious pieces of Georgian material culture - with him to Europe.
The
treasury contained into 39 immense boxes, were shipped to Marseille and placed in a bank depository. Subsequently
this precious cargo was transferred to one of the banks in Paris. Although the treasury was
officially the property of the Georgian government-in-exile, it was actually
Ekvtime Takaishvili who supervised this huge collection. In the early 1930s,
Takaishvili won a lawsuit against Salome Obolenskaya (1878-1961), daughter of
the last Mingrelian prince Nikoloz
Dadiani,
who also laid claim to a part of the treasury taken from the former Dadiani
Palace in
Zugdidi, Georgia. Despite numerous attempts by
various European museums to purchase
portions of this treasury, and extreme economic hardship, Takaishvili never
sold a single piece of the priceless collection to live on and guarded it until
1933, when the League of Nations recognized the Soviet Union; the Georgian embassy in Paris was abolished
and transformed into the "Georgian Office". The treasury passed into
the possession of the French state. In 1935, Takaishvili urged the French
government to hand the collections to Georgia, but it was not until the end of
the World War II when was he able, in November 1944, to
attract the attention of the Soviet ambassador A. Bogomolov to the fate of the
Georgian treasury. Joseph Stalin's good relations with General Charles de Gaulle enabled Takaishvili to bring the treasury
back to Georgia. However, Takaishvili had to spend his long unhappy days in
Tbilisi under house arrest, seemingly considered to be too old to be
imprisoned.
He
was an author of numerous scholarly works on the history and archaeology of
Georgia and the Caucasus which are of special value even today. In
Tbilisi, Tbilisi Second Gymnasium has been named after him. He has been
canonized by the Georgian
Orthodox Church.
