Georges Charachidzé was born into the Georgian émigré community of
Paris. His father David Sharashidze (French: Charachidzé; 1886–1935) was a journalist and a member of the
Constituent Assembly of Georgia before being forced to leave his homeland following the
Soviet takeover of Georgia in 1921. Sentenced to death by the Soviet government, Charachidzé had moved to Paris, where he had married a young French teacher, who gave birth to Georges Charachidzé in 1930.[1][2]
Career
Georges Charachidzé grew up speaking both Georgian and French. In 1953, he obtained the supervision of
Georges Dumézil, a leading French scholar of the Caucasus, for his doctoral thesis, which was published, in 1968, as his first book Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne ("The religious system of pagan Georgia"). In 1965, he accompanied Dumézil to
Turkey for a field-work study of the Caucasian communities, descending from the 19th-century
refugees of the Russian conquest wars in the Caucasus. While in Turkey, he assisted Dumézil in the reconstruction of the vanishing
Ubykh language and in recording its last living speaker,
Tevfik Esenç,[1] who died in 1992.
Some of the most important works by Charachidzé are:
Charachidzé, G. 1960. Travail et mort dans la montagne géorgienne. L’Ethnographie 54: 45-62.
Charachidzé, Georges. 1968. Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne: analyse structurale d’une civilisation. Paris: Maspero.
Charachidzé, Georges. 1971. Introduction à l’étude de la féodalité géorgienne: le Code de Georges le Brillant. Paris: Librairie Droz.
Charachidzé, Georges. 1979. L’aigle en clé d’eau: un exemple d’inversion conservante. La fonction symbolique. Michel Izard & Pierre Smith, eds. Paris: Gallimard, pp 83–104.
Charachidzé, G. 1981. "Géorgie. La religion et les mythes des Géorgiens de la montagne." Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. (ed. Yves Bonnefoy). Vol 1, pp 451–459. Paris: Flammarion.
Charachidzé, G. 1981. "Arménie. La religion et les mythes." Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. (ed. Yves Bonnefoy). Vol 1, pp 67–69. Paris: Flammarion.
Charachidzé, G.. 1981. "Caucase du Nord." Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des so-ciétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. (ed. Y. Bonnefoy). Vol 1, pp 129–132. Flammarion.
Charachidzé, G. 1981. "Les Ossètes." Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. (ed. Y. Bonnefoy). Vol 2, pp 215–218. Paris: Flammarion.
Charachidzé, G. 1986. Prométhée ou le Caucase. Paris: Flammarion.
Charachidzé, G. 1987. La mémoire indo-européenne du Caucase. Paris: Hachette.