Ambrosius of Georgia - Catholicos Patriarch of All Georgia

Catholicos Patriarch of All Georgia

The Soviet invasion of Georgia from February to March 1921 brought a short-lived independent Democratic Republic of Georgia to an end. Soon the Catholicos Patriarch Leonid died of cholera, and, on October 14, 1921, Ambrosius was elected as his successor.

Under the newly established Bolshevik regime, the Church was deprived of juridical status, and churches and monasteries began to be closed. The clergy was persecuted and the property of the churches and monasteries confiscated.

On February 7, 1922, Ambrosius addressed a memorandum to the Genoa Conference, in which he described the conditions under which Georgia was living since the Red Army invasion, protested in the name of the people of Georgia, deprived of their rights, against the Soviet occupation and demanded the intervention of civilized humanity to oppose the atrocities of the Bolshevik regime. In February 1923, Ambrosius and all members of the Patriarchal Council were arrested and put into prison by the Bolsheviks. In March 1924, the Soviet authorities staged a humiliating public trial. Besides sending an appeal to the Genoa Conference, Ambrosi was also accused of concealing of the historic treasures of the Church in order to preserve them from passing into the hands of the Soviet state. All the clerics arrested along with the Patriarch, showed their solidarity with Ambrosius, who assumed the entire responsibility for his acts, which he declared to have been in conformity with his obligations and with the tradition of the Church of Georgia. His concluding words were: "My soul belongs to God, my heart to my country; you, my executioners, do what you will with my body." Ambrosi was expected to be sentenced to death, but the Communists did not dare to execute him and condemned him to eight years imprisonment while his property was confiscated.

Shortly afterwards, the 1924 August Uprising broke out in several regions of Georgia against the Soviet Union and lasted for three weeks. Approximately 3,000 died in fighting, more than 12,000 were executed and 20,000 deported to Siberia. A number of clerics were also purged, Archbishop Nazari of Kutatisi and Gaenati being among those who were shot without a trial.

The extent of the Red Terror in Georgia and a public outcry caused by it forced the Soviets to relatively moderate their pressure on Georgia’s society in the following years. In early March 1925 the Chairman of the All-Union Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin, visited Georgia and called for the amnesty of the participants of the August 1924 insurrection, and for the suspension of religious persecutions. In 1926, Ambrosi and several other clerics were released from prisons. He did not live much longer, however, and died on March 29, 1927, in Tbilisi.

Ambrosius is also a known as a prolific historian of church and researcher of primary Georgian sources. He authored a number of articles published in Russian and Georgian press, and discovered a hitherto unknown version of the medieval Georgian chronicle, Moktsevay Kartlisay (“The Conversion of Georgia”) (the so-called Chelishi codex).

In 1995, the Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized Ambrosius as the Holy Archpriest Ambrosius the Confessor and set March 16 (29, N.S.) as the day of his commemoration.