Monthly seminar: Religious and Cultural Situation in Post Soviet Georgia.

Eka Tchkoidze, Ilia State University, Georgia

19 April 2018

14:15–16:00

Seminar room E225, 2nd floor in Minerva, Kaivokatu 12.

The Soviet Union was officially established in 1922. A few months earlier Democratic Republic of Georgia was conquered by the Bolshevik Government of Russia. Consequently, Georgia was one of the first republic-members of the Union. The Soviet Union had a very strong apparatus of political ideology. It occupied every field of culture, science, education. Political institutions were deeply “ideologized”. The atheism was soviet ideology’s one of the most important elements. Statistical data in this regard i

s extremely deplorable: lots of bishops, priests, monks and nuns were punished, executed or exiled. After the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) one of the biggest problem was a gap caused by the “vanish”of the Soviet ideology. For many republics (including Georgia) religion and religious practice became a very effective tool for establishment of new ethnic identities. Thus, since the 1990s and especially in the 2000s, the Georgian Orthodox Church became a very influential and rich institution even from political point of view.

In the current lecture a special emphasis will be given to the soviet ideology and atheism as its important part. The following topics will be presented as well: a brief history of Georgian Orthodox Church; statistics since the 1990s (ecclesiastical peripheries, monasteries, churches), a new political framework for regulations f Church-State relationships; a short description of other religions in Georgia (Islam, Judaism) and other confessions of Christianity (Catholics, Monophysite Armenians, Baptists, Evangelists). Lecture will also analyze how Christian tradition has influenced everyday life and modern culture in Georgia and how Russia uses Orthodoxy as a political and ideological tool against Georgia.

Picture: Ceiling of the Sioni Cathedral, a Georgian Orthodox cathedral in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA