Alexander Orbeliani

Who was Alexander Orbeliani?

Count Alexander Orbeliani was a Georgian Romanticist poet, playwright, journalist and historian, of the noble House of Orbeliani.

Alexander Orbeliani was born in Tiflis, then under Imperial Russian rule, to Prince Vakhtang Orbeliani and Princess Tekle, a beloved daughter of the penultimate Georgian king Erekle II. In 1817, he joined the Russian military service. However, together with his mother and his brother Vakhtang, he led a failed coup attempt against Russian rule in 1832. The conspirators planned to invite the Russian officials in the Caucasus to a grand ball where they would be given the choice of death or surrender. After the collapse of this plot, Orbeliani was arrested and exiled to Orenburg whence he would not be able to return until 1840. The abortive uprising and relatively mild punishment that followed forced many conspirators to see the independent past as irremediably lost and to reconcile themselves with the Russian autocracy, transforming their laments for the lost past and the fall of the native dynasty into Romanticist poetry.