Page 52 - Buy Russia - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine April 2017

52 I Eurasia bne April 2017
Priests and poison in Georgia
Carmen Valache in Lund
Priests and poison may sound like a page taken out of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", but it was recently an actual occurrence in the small Caucasus country of Georgia.
On February 10, a high-ranking Geor- gian Orthodox priest was apprehended at the international airport in Tbilisi as he was preparing to visit the head of the Georgian church, Patriarch Ilia II. The patriarch was undergoing medi- cal treatment in Germany. The priest was found to be carrying cyanide.
The story came as a shock to the deeply devout Georgians, for whom Ilia II has served as a role model since he took over the leadership of the Orthodox Church in 1977. "This was a treacher- ous attack on the church. An act against our country has been prevented," Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili railed in a statement made shortly after the arrest.
Days later, Deacon Giorgi Mamaladze – the poison-laden prelate – was charged with conspiracy to murder. Several days after that, it surfaced that the target of
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the attack was not the patriarch himself, but rather someone else in his circle.
The incident was a reminder of how
the Georgian church is just as riven with divisions as the rest of society. For while it has been tremendously successful
Tbilisi-based Institute for Political Stud- ies, told bne IntelliNews in an interview.
The role of the church in the fledgling Georgian democracy has prompted many controversies over the years. Following decades of secular Soviet rule, during
“This was a treacherous attack on the church”
at playing political parties against one another in order to push its agenda over the course of the last two decades, the Georgian Orthodox Church is as fragile as any of the parties that it has outlived; its power resting in the charismatic and ageing patriarch, whose health has been a source of concern in recent years.
"As the patriarch's health worsens, I expect there to be some power struggles within the church. This will undoubt- edly affect the church's popularity, because a lot of that stems from people's respect for the patriach himself," Gia Tarkhan-Mouravi, co-director of the
which religion was officially permit-
ted but de facto severely restricted, the church blossomed together with the young Georgian democracy in the early 1990s.
Under Ilia II, the Georgian Orthodox Church successfully tapped into its ancient history (the Georgian King- dom of Kartli declared Orthodoxy its state religion in the fourth century) to associate itself with the reawakened Georgian nationalism of the 1990s in the popular consciousness. Over the following decades, the church turned into a symbol of stability in a fre- quently volatile political environment;