Abashidze

The Abashidze family possibly derived from the medieval Georgian noble house of Liparitid-Orbeliani, but the family legend holds that it descended from an Abyssinian[1] officer named Abash who had allegedly accompanied Marwan ibn Muhammad’s Arab army to Georgia in the 8th century; Abash is said to have remained in Georgia and ennobled when he saved the life of a Georgian crown prince from a wolf.

By the 1540s, they had already been in possession of a sizeable fiefdom within the Kingdom of Imereti located in its eastern part and called Saabashidzeo (სააბაშიძეო; literally, "[the land] of Abashidze").

The family reached a climax of its might at the turn of the 18th century, when it possessed 78 villages, several castles, fortresses, churches and monasteries as well as 1,500 serf households.

Earlier in the 18th century, one representative of the Imeretian line went over to the Ottoman government and settled at Batumi where his descendants attained to the office of sanjak-bey.

On July 29, 1876, Prince Simon Abashidze (1837–1891) was granted the right to assume the surname and coat of arms of his father-in-law, the late Ukrainian nobleman Semen Davydovych Gorlenko, for himself and his male-line descendants (Abashidze-Gorlenko, Абашидзе-Горленко), but he died without a male heir.