Robert Pierpont Blake and the Origins of Georgian Studies in the US

Author : Stephen F. Jones 

Introduction

Knowledge about Georgia came late to the United States.  European travelers, merchants, and missionaries had a much earlier acquaintance with Georgia and the Caucasus. The Black Sea and the silk roads had long attracted Europe’s trading empires and evangelizing missionaries, most notably from the Vatican. Arcangelo Lamberti and Don Christoforo de Castelli were examples of Catholic missionaries who turned into observant students of Georgian culture and customs in the 17^th century.  But it wasn’t until the mid-19^th century when the French scholar, Marie-Félicité Brosset, published the Histoire de la Géorgie depuis l'antiquité jusqu'au XIX siècle, that we can talk about the emergence of Georgian studies in Europe.[1] Brosset’s Histoire, published in St Petersburg in 1858, was a pioneering study of Georgia which covered over two millennia and planted the seeds of Georgian studies in Western scholarship.

In Russia, scholarly interest in the Caucasus was pioneered by Johannes Anton Güldenstädt (1745-81) and Jacob Reineggs (1744-93). By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Russian Geographical Society and the Faculty of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg University were mapping the demographic, linguistic and religious complexity of the newly acquired colonies in the empire’s south.  Much of the groundwork for Russia’s “orientalists” was provided by Georgian scholars like Dimitri Bakradze (1826-1890), Davit Chubinashvili (1814-1891), Platon Ioseliani (1810-1875) and Ekvtime Taqaishvili (1863-1953), who published numerous works on Georgian ethnography and archeology.  Georgian intellectuals’ own interest in their culture and identity exploded in the 1860s, inspired by the activities of Georgian writers and journalists who opposed Russia’s cultural hegemony in Caucasia. Known as the tergdaleulis, these Georgian intellectuals, looking at European models of national cultural revival in the Balkans and Central Europe, promoted Georgian cultural institutions at home, including most importantly, Georgian schools.

Americans Discover Georgia

A small number of American adventurers and missionaries traveled to Georgia in the 19^th century. Most famous among early American travelers were Joel Poinsett (1779-1851), later US secretary of war, William Sherman (1820-1891) a renowned Union General in the American Civil War, and George Kennan (1845-1924) who arrived in the 1870s and became one of the first American ethnographers of Caucasia.[2] But the US government had little interest in the Caucasus region until the discovery of oil. This led to the establishment of the first US consulate in Batumi in 1886.  World War One underlined Caucasia’s geopolitical importance. In 1919 at the Paris Peace conference, the US was one of the “big four” deciding the fate of nations. But despite recognition of Caucasia’s geographical significance for trade and as a buffer between the Turkish National Independence Movement under Mustafa Kemal on the one hand, and the Bolsheviks on the other, US diplomatic interest in Caucasia was minimal. Georgia’s absence from the American scholarly imagination was in part due to the lack of a Georgian Diaspora in the US (the Armenian Diaspora by contrast, had a powerful lobby), and by the dearth of any significant collections of Georgian materials in US libraries and archives, which made scholarship difficult.

Robert Blake (Gregorysilva, 2018 -Wikipedia)

Robert Pierpont Blake (1886-1950) was one of the first American voices calling for a deeper study of Georgia. I was reminded of Blake’s importance to Georgian Studies in the US when in 2025, the Houghton Library at Harvard acquired the first complete printed Georgian Bible (Bakar’s Bible) published in Moscow in 1743. Among the inscriptions on the leaves of the bible, which tell us who its past owners were (including writers Ilia and Nino Nakashidze), is the inked note of Robert Blake dated July 29, 1920, explaining the bible was on loan to the Harvard College library from his own private collection.  Fortunately, the bible found its way back to Harvard in 2025.

Blake was a brilliant Byzantinist, classicist and Armenologist, as well as a Kartvelologist.[3] He started his career at the Department of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University where he studied from 1910-12 and again between 1914-1918. The highly controversial Georgian philologist Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1864-1934) was his mentor and teacher; Giorgi Chubinashvili, Akaki Shanidze and Ivane Javakkhishvili, were fellow students.  Blake was a polyglot and like Marr, could read at least 13 languages (though he claimed he could only speak four fluently). He was a specialist in the Christian Orient, but his focus on Georgian historical manuscripts was unique in the US in the first half of the 20^th century. Blake catalogued, translated, and photographed hundreds of Georgian religious writings which had been neglected for centuries. He traveled beyond Georgia’s borders to the former Georgian monasteries and scriptoria in Jerusalem, the Sinai desert, and on Mount Athos, and played a vital role in recovering, preserving and publishing Georgian texts that in many cases were the only versions in existence, unavailable in other languages of the Christian Orient. Blake’s own exegeses on Georgian religious texts, and his published catalogues (which contain detailed records of medieval Georgian texts in Georgia and the Near East), represent the beginning of Georgian studies in the US.[4]

Blake’s lectures and articles show an exceptional knowledge of the monastic communities in the Christian East, and the role Georgians played in the multiethnic and multidenominational monasteries in Palestine and elsewhere in the early Middle Ages. His work on the pilgrimages of Georgian monks in the Middle Ages, on the participation of Georgian scribes in the Great Lavra of St. Saba (Mar Saba) in Palestine and his studies of the Athonites and the Tao-Klarjeti school (such as Grigol Khandzteli and hymnographer Mikel Modrekili) are a fascinating chronicle of the growth and development of the Georgian language which blossoms in the great Georgian philosophical academies in Gelati and Iqalto in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.

Blake received his PhD at Harvard in 1916 (Studies in the Religious Policy of Constantine [the Great] and his Successors), and a Magister degree in Japhetic Antiquities at Petrograd University in 1918.  In May 1918 - the same month the Democratic Republic of Georgia declared its independence - Blake left Petrograd on an official mission for the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The mission stated he was to study “the monuments of Georgian ecclesiastic literature in the book-depositories of Tiflis and in the monasteries of Georgia." [5] At 32, amid civil war and revolution, Blake travelled through the lawless territories of Daghestan and North Ossetia to Vladikavkaz, then crossed into Georgia by way of the Ardon gorge to Tskhinvali. He wrote about his adventure in an Atlantic Monthly piece, called “Ten Days in Ossetia,” which describes his obligatory drinking of arakhi as well as his perilous journey through mountain passes.[6]

Tiflis

Blake worked in Tiflis from July 1918 to May 1920, the capital of the newly independent Democratic Republic.  It was a time of intense creative and intellectual activity in Georgia. Tbilisi University was established in January 1918 (something his Georgian mentor Niko Marr opposed). The university quickly recruited Blake’s former Georgian colleagues from Petrograd. The new professors at the university were able to explore Georgia’s historical, linguistic and cultural roots without the heavy hand of the imperial censor. Giorgi Chubinashvili, Kornely Kekelidze, Akaki Shanidze and Ivane Javakhishvili, whom Blake knew from his student days in St Petersburg, later became the giants in a Georgian-led scholarly revival that flourished from 1918 into the Soviet period.

Blake focused on Tiflis’s three major manuscript collections belonging to the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians (founded in 1879), the Society for Ethnography and History (founded in1906) - led by Ekvtime Taqaishvili, who was Blake’s host in Tiflis - and the Tiflis Museum of the Clergy of Kartl-Kakheti.  His posthumously published “memoirs,” In search of Byzantium: A Biography,[7] a compilation of Blake’s articles and travel notes put together by his son Igor, describes all three collections. They were located on the top floor of the new university building (formerly a Gymnasium for the children of the nobility) in Vake, on the outskirts of Tiflis. Blake devoted himself to copying, annotating, photographing and translating the materials. It was an extraordinary achievement for a young scholar just out of graduate school. In a lecture at the Bodleian Library in 1921, Blake describes the collections and catalogues in detail. He recalled expeditions to monasteries and churches in Gelati, Martvili, and Mestia to catalogue manuscripts in churches and museums outside the capital.  According to his Georgian colleagues, Blake’s catalogues were groundbreaking. Kornely Kekelidze described Blake’s catalogue of the Library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem as “priceless” for anyone interested in the history of the Georgian language.[8]

After his arrival in Georgia, Blake was quickly drawn into the world of the republic’s new urban elites. He mixed with scholarly clerics like Father Kalistrate (also a collector of manuscripts), who presided over Blake’s marriage to Nadezhda Nikolaevna Kryzhanovskaia in January 1920 in Kashveti church. Kalistrate was elected the Georgian church’s Catholicos Patriarch (Callistratus) in 1932. Blake also attended the dazzling performances of Georgian and Russian modernist poets and writers (among them Paolo Iashvili, Titian Tabidze, Grigol Robakhidze, and Igor Terent’iev). He participated in expeditions with Georgian ethnographers, historians and architects to Gori, Khevsureti and Svaneti. In October 1918, Blake started teaching English at the Polytechnical Institute (where subjects were mostly taught in Russan). He was appointed an associate professor at Tbilisi State University in September 1919. He taught Greek and lectured on Byzantine History (in Georgian).

Blake was recruited as a resource on Georgian politics by the military staff of the British 27^th Salonika Division, which was stationed in Transcaucasia after the German defeat in November 1918. He reported on Georgia’s political parties and issues in Georgia’s domestic politics. Blake was not as precise or as thoughtful about contemporary Georgian politics as he was about medieval manuscripts. He often misspelled names.  He was unsympathetic to the ruling Social Democrats and politically was aligned with his imperial peers who staffed the European and American foreign and diplomatic missions in Georgia between 1918-21.  His posthumous “memoir” contains some derisive asides about the character of Georgians and Armenians.  Wilber Post – a member of the US State Department in Tiflis – interviewed Blake in December 1918. Post concluded after listening to him that Georgian socialism was “bordering on Bolshevism,” pursued “distasteful” land reform policies, and was aggressive toward its neighbors.[9]  Blake also worked with Princess Elizabet Orbeliani on Georgian Messenger, an English language newspaper deigned for British troops. 

Yet in 1919, Blake showed support for the struggling Transcaucasian states and sent letters to the Presidents of six US universities urging they follow the example of the German government which in 1918 had proposed scholarships for 300 Georgian students in German universities. It was an early example of the use of “soft power.” Blake wrote to President Benjamin Wheeler of the University of California (the University of California at Berkeley was Blake’s alma mater):

the position gained by the United States during the war…is one of
commanding importance, not only from a political but, also from a
moral point of view …[The] eyes of the peoples in the Nearer East are
turned to America…. They await help from the United States, not only
economic and materiel, but, moral and scientific as well.[10]

Unfortunately, that help did not come and the US, unlike its European Allies, refused to recognize independent Georgia, de facto or de jure.

In August 1919, Oliver Wardrop, appointed British Chief Commissioner for Transcaucasia, arrived in Tiflis. He met several times with Blake and invited him to deliver lectures on Georgian history at Oxford University.  Wardrop, an advocate of Western support for the beleaguered Georgian republic, founded the (Marjory) Wardrop collection in Oxford after his sister Marjory died in 1909. He was a dedicated collector of Georgian books and manuscripts and established one of the richest collections of Georgian materials in Europe outside of Russia and Georgia.[11]

Blake returned to an instructor’s position at Harvard in the summer of 1920. In 1921 he took up Wardrop’s invitation and traveled to the UK to deliver six lectures on Georgian history, geography, literature and language at Oxford University. The lecture on Georgian Patristic Literature: Its Sources, Resources, and Possibilities was a detailed review of Georgian manuscript holdings around the world. Russia, he noted, had by far the richest collection, located in the Imperial Public Library and Asiatic Museum in St. Petersburg/Petrograd.

Back Home

After his return to the US in the summer of 1920, Blake quickly made a name for himself as a Kartvelologist and historian of the Near East. He and his wife photographed thousands of pages from Georgian manuscripts in the Georgian collections (his wife was in Georgia from August 1921 to August 1922, during the early months of the Red Army occupation). Altogether, she and Blake between them produced over 5000 prints of Georgian manuscripts and documents. Blake was appointed Director of the Widener Library at Harvard in 1928 and in 1930 became a full professor of History at the university.  He continued to write to Georgian colleagues, exchanging notes, books, and family news.  He corresponded with Ivane Javakhishvili until 1935 (Javakhishvili was condemned in 1936 for his anti-Marxist views of history and died in 1940). Javakhishvili sent Blake copies of his masterpieces, Kartveli eris istoria, and Kartuli simartlis istoria for the Harvard library collection.[12]

Blake was among the first American scholars in the 1930s to insist that the US government, as well as the US scholarly world, focus on the languages and cultures of the East. But for Georgian scholars, Blake holds a special place. His legacy as a Kartvelologist is evident not only in his published works on Georgian religion and literature but in his systematic catalogues of Georgian ecclesiastical literature. Before Blake’s tenure as Widener Library Director, the Houghton Library at Harvard had acquired a precious collection of Georgian ecclesiastical texts including two important Georgian illuminated manuscripts – the Menaion in Georgian from the 11^th century (currently located at Dumbarton Oaks, in Georgetown, DC) and the Gospels from the 12^th century. The Houghton also has two 1629 volumes printed by the Vatican for Catholic missions in Georgia – a Georgian alphabet and bilingual prayer book, as well as a Georgian-Italian dictionary.  As Widener Library Director, Blake helped create one of the richest collections of Georgian materials in the US at Harvard University, including copies of the Georgian texts he and his wife photographed between 1919-1922.

Death and Legacy

Robert Blake died in 1950 at the age of 64.  In the months leading up to his death he was working on the Old Georgian Version of the Prophets from the Jerusalem and Athos collections. He played a foundational role in the promotion and development of Georgian Studies in the US. He highlighted the Georgian role in the preservation and development of ecclesiastical literature in the Christian Orient. His scholarly work stimulated Georgian studies in the US at a time when Soviet Georgia was isolated from Western scholarship.  In 2022, a Program on Georgian Studies was started at Harvard University – it is a fitting legacy for Robert Blake’s pioneering work on Georgian history and literature.

Professor Stephen Jones

Founder of the Program on Georgian Studies, Davis Center, Harvard University

Professor of Modern Georgian History, Ilia State University, Georgia