Alexander von Zagareli

Alexander von Zagareli (Aleksandre Tsagareli) is a Georgian linguist and orientalist who was born on 9 December 1844 in the town of Kaspi, Georgia, and died on 12 November 1929 in Tbilisi. He taught Georgian and Armenian philology at Saint Petersburg University for nearly half a century and pioneered the scientific study of Kartvelian languages.

He continued his higher education in Saint Petersburg, as well as in Germany and Austria, at the universities of Tübingen, Vienna and Munich. In 1872, he started teaching at the Department of Armenian and Georgian Literature at the University of Saint-Peterburg, and in 1886 he became a professor at the same department. He gave lectures on Georgian language, history and manuscripts at the Faculty of Oriental Languages.

His studies and last years

His research spanned a wide range of areas, from linguistics to literary history, from Georgian inscriptions to historical documents. He also published on Georgian literature, history and archaeology. Nikolay Marr, who would later become one of the controversial figures of Soviet linguistics, was his student and took his teacher's place at the podium in Petersburg.

After the revolution, he returned to Georgia and worked at Tbilisi State University in the early 1920s and spent the rest of his life there. During the Tsarist period, he was honored with the Order of St. Stanislav. After his death, he was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi.