Who was the ancestor of Dimitri Amilakvari – the iconic figure of the French foreign legion?

Abstract

The biography of Dimitri (“Bazorka”) Giorgi Amilakhvari (1906-1942), the commander of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion, who died in the Battle of El Alamein during the World War II North Africa campaign, contains a number of unspecified facts. In September 2020, the French publishing house (Lemme Edit), which publishes historical literature on famous military and political figures, issued the book “Dimitri Amilakhvari - The Fighting Prince”. It was the first book in France to honor the memory of Lieutenant Colonel Dimitri Amilakhvari. The author of the book cites information about the noble house of Zedginidze-Amilakhvari. According to this information Ivane Amilakhvari (1829-1905), general of the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army, who distinguished himself in the Russo-Ottoman and Caucasus wars, is named as the ancestor of Dimitri Amilakhvari. Dimitri Amilakhvari is mentioned as Ivane Amilakhvari’s grandson on the website of the French Ministry of Armed Forces.
The issue of Dimitri Amilakhvari’s ancestors has not been specially studied in Georgian research literature. The scholars either do not address this issue at all or refer to him as the grandson of Ivane Amilakhvari. There are also a variety of Internet resources, family tree and genealogy archives which under the influence of multilingual online encyclopedia (mostly the Russian Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia), represents Dimitri Amilakhvari as a descendant of Ivane Amilakhvari, the famous general of the Imperial Russian Army. Finally, the book of the French historian Nicolas Ross “Between Hitler and Stalin: White and Soviet Russians in Europe during World War II”, reprinted in February 2021 in France, in which Dimitri Amilakhvari is considered as the representative of the Russian White Emigration.

In fact, who was Dimitri Amilakhvari’s father – Giorgi son of Ivane Amilakhvari or Giorgi son of Otar Amilakhvari? Is it a coincidence that the name of Ivane (Niko) Amilakhvari is connected with the other branch of the noble house of the Amilakhvari? And what is the significance of establishing this fact? Through the documentary sources, genealogical lists of the Amilakhvari family, and information of genealogiy websites in the article is established that the ancestor of Dimiti Amilakhvari was not Ivane Amilakhvari, general of the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army, but Otar Amilakhvari, descendant of another branch of this princely family.