Dimitri Gruzinsky


Dimitri was a Georgian prince of the House of Bagrationi, the youngest son of Prince Iulon of Georgia and his wife, Princess Salome née Amilakhvari.

Family

Dimitri was born in the former royal house of Georgia already after the Russian annexation of his country. His father, Iulon, was a son of Heraclius II, the penultimate king of Kartli and Kakheti and a pretender to the throne of Georgia. In 1805, Iulon and his family, with the exception of Dimitri's rebellious elder brother Leon, were deported by the Russian authorities to Tula. Later, they were allowed to settle in St. Petersburg, the imperial capital.

Political activity

In the 1820s, Dimitri and his cousin Prince Okropir, son of George XII of Georgia, became principal leaders of Georgian royalists, respectively, in St. Petersburg and Moscow. They held gatherings of Georgian students and officers in the Russian cities and tried to convince them that Georgia should be independent under the Bagrationi dynasty. In 1826, Dimitri helped found a secret society, which conceived the idea of an anti-Russian insurrection of Georgia. The most active center of the conspirators, based in the Georgian capital of Tiflis—in which Dimitri's elder sister Tamar, Maid of Honor to the empress, played a role—was betrayed by one of its numbers, Prince Iase Palavandishvili, in 1832. The plot collapsed and Dimitri was deprived of his title of tsarevich and sent in exile to Smolensk. Afterwards, he grudgingly entered the Russian civil service, attaining to a minor rank of Collegiate Registrar. On 6 May 1833, he was recognized by the Russian crown in the princely title of knyaz Gruzinsky. He died unmarried, without issue, in 1845 in St. Petersburg and was interred at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

Ancestry