The death of Catholicos Ambrosius and its impact on the fate of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Zygmunt Mostowski’s opinion
The death of Catholicos Ambrosius and its impact on the fate of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Zygmunt Mostowski’s opinion

Summary/Abstract: The article presents a report written by the Polish diplomat Zygmunt Mostowski on the death of Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ambrosius and its consequences for the future of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Ambrosius died in March 1927, when Mostowski was the head of the Polish consulate in Tbilisi (1926–1931). The report, prepared for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is kept in the archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. Mostowski focused mainly on the infiltration of the Georgian Orthodox Church by the Soviet special services; he warned against a possibility of conversion to Catholicism of several of the Georgian Church hierarchs (including few bishops), as well as of a large part of Georgian intellectuals. But the Polish diplomat’s predictions did not come true and there were only some individual cases of conversion.The presented document evidences the fact that in the 1920s the Polish diplomacy was interested in processes occurring within the Georgian Orthodox Church. In a large part it resulted from perceiving the Soviet Union as a major threat to the security of the Polish state. And for this reason Polish diplomats paid special attention to those factors that could block the increasing influence of the communist power in individual republics of the Soviet Union. And the Georgian Orthodox Church was regarded as one of such factors, opposing the central authorities in Moscow.

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