Old Believers Another group of religious dissenters that was exiled to Georgia in the 19th century is the Starovery, or Old Believers, a group formed in the mid 17th century in opposition to the ecclesiastical reforms of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Nikon. Old Believers consider themselves to be the true practitioners of Orthodoxy and preserve the pre-Nikonian rituals, such as the two-fingered signing of the cross. Also called Old Ritualists (Staroobryadtsy), very little is known about the history of this group in Georgia, although they settled in the Caucasus in quite significant numbers. Unfortunately, very little historical information exists to assist the tracing of Old Believer settlements. The Russian census of 1897 included statistics on confessional belonging, and listed over 16,000 persons in Tiflisskaya Gubernia and around 250 persons in Kutaisskaya Gubernia (Western Georgia) in the category “Old Believers” – but this category also included Dukhobors and Molokans. There are no data as to the breakdown into separate confessional sub-group of sectarians, but there must have been at least a few thousand Old Believers in the second part of the 19th century.
Presumably, Old Believer communities were strongly affected by the secularization of the Soviet regime, and by the end of the 1980s, Old Belivers had almost fully disappeared from the country. Today, only one village partly inhabited by Old Believers still exists, the village of Grigoleti near Poti on the Black Sea coast. Roughly 50 descendants of what historically used to be an Old Believers community currently live there. A few Old Believers also live in Tbilisi. However, most members of this community have assimilated into Georgian society or have left for Russia in recent years.
Source ::
http://molonlabe70.blogspot.com/search/label/Old%20Believers
