On March 8, 1819, Georgia produced the first newspaper under the name Newspaper of Georgia, which was also the first newspaper printed in the Caucasus. It was released on Fridays, once a week. Newspaper of Georgia changed its name to Georgian Newspaper in 1820. It is unknown who the editor, article writers, translator, and other staff members in the editorial office are. All that is known is that Alexei Ermolov, the ruler of the Caucasus, was linked to the establishment of the Georgian newspaper.
The oral distribution of information about a certain event or publication by specific individuals, known as “announcement”, was developed at that time in numerous countries around the world. This exact “announcement” came before the first Georgian newspaper was published. The message, which represented an odd program, was disseminated throughout Georgia and Tbilisi. According to the text of the Georgian Newspaper’s “Announcement,” the following things would be published in Georgian starting on March 1, 1819:
- Notifications of officials’ awards.
- Rules and directives from the local leader.
- News from Georgia and its surrounding nations.
- Global news and advancements. The locals might find the following excerpts from the Russian press interesting.
Therefore, official notices and decrees that directly affected Georgians were published in the departmental newspaper together with other items. The publication’s officially stated objectives were to serve Georgians’ interests and introduce educated peoples’ habits to the local populace. Important historical events were actually either not covered in the magazine at all or were covered with an interpretation that suited the empire’s objectives. For instance, the journal focused on the Caucasian War, where the Russian army served as a peacekeeper, and the North Caucasians striving for independence, rather than covering the uprisings in the Imereti and Guria districts in 1819–1820.
The editorial staff of the daily Iveria made an effort to locate and gather the Georgian daily, which had become a bibliographical rarity, in the latter half of the 1800s. Sofio Dodashvili contributed one issue of the Georgian Newspaper of March 1819 to the Society for the Promotion of Literacy among Georgians, for which the editorial team of Iveria expressed gratitude in issue #156 of 1887. According to a story in Iveria’s 1890 issue #144, Ivane Babalov, a chancellery official, discovered the 1821 Georgian Newspaper amid old documents.
The majority of the Georgian Newspaper’s issues have reached us thanks to the hard work of the editorial staff of Iveria and individual residents. As a result, we know that 43 issues of the journal were published in 1819, and 51 issues in 1820. However, we have not received the complete set for 1821, thus we are unable to determine with certainty how many issues were published in that year.
For the time, the newspaper’s format, typography, and overall design were all quite acceptable. The sentences were printed in two columns within the publication, which was about the size of a sheet of paper. The newspaper’s font is legible and crisp.
The famous scholar Yevgeny Weidenbaum wrote: “The Russian language was so little known even among the city dwellers at that time that most of the representatives of the nobility who served in the expeditions of the Supreme Government of Georgia could not write their surnames in Russian.” The desire of the Governor-General Yermolov to accustom his new subjects to the rules of the Russian government was so great that he decided to print the newspaper in Georgian, understandable to the population. Yevgeny Weidenbaum also says that the newspaper was originally written in Russian and then translated into Georgian. As evidence of this, he cites documents preserved in the archives of the headquarters of the Caucasian Military District. In the Caucasus headquarters, a folder was kept – “Journal of the Georgian Newspaper of 1820”, which contained the Russian manuscript version of the Georgian Newspaper printed in 1820.
According to the renowned scholar Yevgeny Weidenbaum, “the majority of the representatives of the nobility who served in the expeditions of the Supreme Government of Georgia could not write their surnames in Russian at that time because the Russian language was so little known even among the city dwellers.” The journal was printed in Georgian, which the populace could understand, because Governor-General Yermolov was so eager to get his new subjects used to the regulations of the Russian government. Additionally, according to Yevgeny Weidenbaum, the publication was first published in Russian before being translated into Georgian. He uses records kept in the archives of the Caucasian Military District headquarters as proof of this. The Russian manuscript version of the 1820 Georgian Newspaper was maintained in a folder called the “Journal of the Georgian Newspaper of 1820″ at the Caucasus headquarters.
Despite Gorodovoi’s best efforts, the magazine ceased to exist in 1822 after failing to secure the necessary number of subscribers.
The first attempt to establish a Georgian periodical was the Georgian Newspaper, which was founded as an ideological instrument of Russia and is remembered in Georgian journalism history.
