Shio Batmanishvili


Shio Batmanishvili was a Georgian Greek Catholic priest and a martyr during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Biography

Batmanishvili was born in 1885 in Akhaltsikhe, in the Tbilisi administration of the Russian Empire. He studied at the Seminary of Constantinople and later theology in Rome, being ordained a priest in 1912. He initially exercised his ministry at Kutaisi and Akhaltsikhe, and from 1922 he was superior of the Servites of the Immaculate Conception monastery in Constantinople.
In 1925 Batmanishvili was received by Pope Pius XI, along with a group of Eastern Catholic priests, and was appointed Apostolic Administrator for the Georgian Catholics of the Byzantine rite.
On 16 October 1927 Batmanishvili was arrested in Tbilisi and on 16 January 1928 he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor without the possibility of amnesty, under Articles 58-6 and 58-12 of the penal code of the RSFSR, and was sent to the field of Solovki, where he arrived on February 12.
In July 1932 he was accused of anti-Soviet agitation, holding liturgies and religious rituals, and transmitting information abroad on the situation of Catholics in the USSR. As a result he was isolated from the rest of the prisoners. In May 1935 Batmanishvili was transferred to work on the Kirov railway, and in June 1936 he returned to Solovki. On 14 October 1937 he was sentenced to death by the Directorate of the NKVD and executed on November 1 of that year in Medvezhegorsk.

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