Museum of Georgian
Literature
• We were invited to the Giorgi Leonidze State of Museum of Literature by our Georgian language teacher Ia Ghadua.
We went to the museum on special occasion, it was the week of Galaktion Tabidze, few days earlier was celebrated his
birthday. We were informed about his life, his values and importances, we’ve got to hear special and specific
information about Galaktion, that can’t be found in any book or internet sources. We were told that he lived in
chqvishi(Vani Municipality) where he lived in old style of house (oda), which once was burnt, however the house
remained, because it had interesting structure, you could have taken its parts and put in another place, he’s father was
clergyman, near their house in church, his cousin Tician Tabidze lived near their house, he ended prestigious school
while Galaktion attended simple school where he didn’t pay for studying from which he got scholarship and went to
Tbilisi to study in a prestigious university, once he tried to commit suicide because he couldn’t pass language exam,
there was tendency in old times for children to deal with their problems by committing suicide, luckily people saved
Galaktion and he survived. He wrote a poem that gained audience, people thought it was about Meri Eristavi
Shervashidze, first he got furious, however then it got so trending that he even wrote a poem when he addressed Meri.
He got married with Olga Okuchava and he was protective of her, he always told her to care for herself. We read poems
of great importance. We had a chance to see how he could express himself not only with poems, but with sketches, how
he drew his face on other peoples pictures. This great poem enriched Georgian literature, his poems have impact on
modern Georgian literature. We even saw pictures of his funeral. Except getting informed about Galaktion we had
pleasure to see valuable books that are part of our history and culture such as old bible and the knight in the panther’s
skin that is from 1712, there were 1000 of this book made, however we only have 18 of them now and one of them was
shown to us. With this visit in this museum we learned many specific things about a man who we should be proud of
not only about him, about our history and culture too.