Tarkhnishvili Mikheil

Mikheil (Mikel) Tarkhnishvili (b. January 12, 1897, Akhaltsikhe – d. October 15, 1958, Rome), Georgian philologist. He studied the historical issues of ancient Georgian and Byzantine literature, the Georgian Church and ecclesiastical writings. He had to live and work outside his homeland. In 1913–1917, he studied at the Georgian Catholic monastic school in Constantinople (Istanbul), from 1917 to 1919 – at the Ettal Abbey, Benedictine monastery in Germany. In 1919, he returned to Georgia for a short period, but in the same year he left for Istanbul again and never returned. In 1924, he went to Austria and completed a course of philological and philosophical education at the Society of the Holy Word of Saint Gabriel. He started working in Rome in 1931. On August 6, 1931, he was ordained a priest in the Greek abbey of Grottaferrata. In 1930–1933, he studied at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, after which he defended his dissertation and received the scientific degree of Doctor. From 1935, he lived in France, Belgium and Germany. In 1943, he settled in Rome.

Tarkhnishvili identified, studied and published Georgian material preserved in foreign libraries. Based on Georgian manuscripts preserved in the libraries of the University of Graz and the Vatican, he published Georgian editions of Zhamis Tsirva (liturgy) with a Latin translation (1950), Grigol Bakuriani’s Typikon of the Georgian Petritsoni Monastery (1954), The Great Lectionary of the Church of Jerusalem (1959), and the German translation of Volume I of K. Kekelidze’s History of Ancient Georgian Writing together with J. Aßfalg. Based on this translation, History of Georgian Ecclesiastical Literature was written (1955). In the same year, he published Georgian inscriptions discovered in the Theban Necropolis in Egypt, and compiled a Georgian-French dictionary. Tarkhnishvili actively collaborated with authoritative European magazines, especially the magazine “Bedi Kartlisa”, and provided materials about Georgia to European encyclopedias.

 

Literary work: წერილები, წგ. 1. ქარ­თუ­ლი ეკლესიის ისტორია, თბ., 1994.

Literature: ბედი ქართლისა, ტ. 4–5, პარიზი, 1958; ტ. 6–7, პარიზი, 1959.