Georgian Revival — Tao-Klarjeti and Athos

After the Arab conquests reduced the old Georgian kingdoms to a handful of mountain principalities, the rebuilding of Georgian Christian life happened in the highland province of Tao-Klarjeti, where a monk named Grigol founded the monastery of Khandzta around 782 and, over a very long life, seeded a whole district with monasteries. What makes him unusual for a figure of this period is that we can hear about him from inside. A Georgian monk called Giorgi Merchule wrote his life in 951, and it contains the famous sentence defining Georgia itself as the land where the liturgy is celebrated in the Georgian tongue. The movement also went abroad. Georgian monks were in Palestine, on Sinai and near Antioch, and between 980 and 983 they founded Iviron on Mount Athos, which became a translation house moving books between Greek and Georgian in both directions — one of them, a Georgian retelling of a story ultimately of Indian origin, passed into Greek as Barlaam and Josaphat and from there into most of the languages of Europe.