They simply applied their usual policy of making every one a Russian who came in their power. So at one stroke the Georgian nation and the Georgian Church were wiped out. What all the barbarians who had attacked the land unceasingly for nine hundred years—Tartars, Kurds, Persians, and Turks—had not succeeded in doing, that the Czar did with one Ukaze. All Georgians were declared members of the Russian Church; the Katholikos of Tiflis disappeared, and his place was taken by an Exarch of the Province of Georgia, who is simply a Russian bishop under the Holy Synod. Throughout the land the Russian Liturgy alone is allowed, just as at Petersburg and Moscow. The Georgian language is forbidden to be taught in schools under the direst penalties. The Georgian Uniates had to flee into more tolerant Turkey, or were forced into the Russian schism. Quite lately, in 1904, when the storm they had brought upon themselves frightened the Russian Government into some unwilling pretence of tolerance, the Georgians hoped that they, too, might at last receive better treatment. So they presented a petition to the Czar in which, with the most piteous protestations of loyalty towards the tyrant who persecutes them, they implored him to allow them again their own Church and their own language.[1] And equally, of course, no notice has been taken of their petition. Meanwhile the only remnant of the old Georgian Church remains in the few Uniates abroad in Constantinople. It is not the Pope who destroys ancient Churches.[2]
7. The Church of Carlovitz (1765).
Next in order of time come the Orthodox Serbs in Hungary. We have not yet mentioned three mediæval Churches that have long ceased to exist, those of Achrida for the Bulgars, of Ipek for the Serbs, and of Tirnovo for the Roumans. All were recognized as extra-patriarchal, and so held the same position as
- ↑ For the text of this petition see the E. d'Or. viii. pp. 177–178.
- ↑ For all this see Kaulen: Iberien in the Kirchenlexikon (1889), vi. p. 559, seq., and Nilles: Aus Iberien oder Georgien in the Innsbrucker Zeitschrift f. Kath. Theol., 1903, p. 652, seq. See also O. Wardrop: The Kingdom of Georgia.
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