Brothers in Faith?: A Family History of Religious and National (Dis)loyalties in the Georgian Exarchate (1880-1917)

• In Event: Religion, Nation and Empire in the Caucasus

Abstract

What was the relationship between Orthodox faith and national loyalty amongst the Orthodox clergy of the Georgian Exarchate? This paper examines the relationship between the Orthodox church hierarchy, the Russian state bureaucracy, and the ethnically Georgian clergy of the Exarchate. Through a combination of official documents and extensive personal correspondence from the Karbelashvili family (key figures in the autocephalist movement after 1905), I seek to reconstruct the complex and entangled loyalties of ordinary Georgian clergy in order to understand how, why and when devout Orthodox priests became "radical" revolutionary activists.

Author

• Rebecca Anne Mitchell, Middlebury College