Manana Orbeliani

Princess Manana became widowed in 1830 and moved to live with the family of his brother-in-law, Major Prince Luarsab Orbeliani, until the latter's death and friction with her sister-in-law, Ana Orbeliani, in 1835. Early in the 1830s, the Orbeliani house was the principal venue of gatherings of the disaffected Georgian nobles and intellectuals, eventually leading to a conspiracy against the Imperial Russian rule in 1832. After the plot collapsed and its numbers were rounded up, Manana Orbeliani wrote to Baron Rosen, the Russian commander-in-chief of the Caucasus, and admitted to being cognizant of the evolving coup, but denied her involvement in organizing it. She was spared arrest or exile, but was placed under a police surveillance for several years.^[2]

In the 1840s and 1850s, Manana Orbeliani hosted a salon in Tiflis, which attracted Georgians from the leading literary and political circles as well as foreign guests, earning from the journalist Iona Meunargia a moniker of "the Madame Récamier of ours".^[2] She was on friendly terms with the family of Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, a liberal Russian viceroy. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy described Manana, whom he met in Tiflis,^[3] in his Hadji Murat as "a tall, plump, forty-five-year-old beauty of oriental stamp".^[4] It was in her salon that major cultural undertakings of the 1850s, such as founding the leading Georgian literary magazine Tsiskari ("Dawn") and a professional theatre troupe was conceived and agreed upon.^[5] Manana Orbeliani died at the age of 62 in 1870 and was buried next to her late husband at the church of the Holy Trinity in Kumisi.^[2]