CELEBRITIES from Georgia

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Georgian Celebrities of all time. This list of famous Georgian Celebrities is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Keke Geladze (1858 - 1937)

With an HPI of 62.08, Keke Geladze is the most famous Georgian Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 26 different languages on wikipedia.

Ekaterine "Keke" Giorgis asuli Geladze (1856/1858 – 4 June 1937) was the mother of Joseph Stalin. Born into a family of peasants outside of Gori, in modern Georgia, she married Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and had three sons; only the youngest, Ioseb, lived. Besarion left the family, leaving Geladze to raise her son. Deeply religious, she wanted Ioseb to become a priest, working as a seamstress in Gori to pay for his education. Geladze remained in Gori when Ioseb moved to the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, and stayed there until his rise to power in the Soviet Union as Joseph Stalin. In her old age Geladze lived in Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia; while Stalin wrote to her, he rarely visited, with the last visit in 1935. She died in 1937, and was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi.

2. Besarion Jughashvili (1850 - 1909)

With an HPI of 61.31, Besarion Jughashvili is the 2nd most famous Georgian Celebrity.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Besarion Ivanes dze Jughashvili (c. 1850 – 25 August 1909) was the father of Joseph Stalin. Born into a peasant family of serfs in Didi Lilo in Georgia, he moved to Tbilisi at a young age to be a shoemaker, working in a factory. He was invited to set up his own shop in Gori, where he met and married Ekaterine Geladze, with whom he had three sons; only the youngest, Ioseb, lived. Once known as a "clever and proud" man, Jughashvili's shop failed and he developed a serious drinking problem, wherefore he left his family and moved back to Tbilisi in 1884, working in a factory again. He had little contact with either his wife or son after that point, and little is known of his life from then on, except that he died in 1909 of cirrhosis.