Georges Charachidzé

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.

In 1985, Charachidzé, together with Dumézil, founded the successor journal Revue des Etudes Géorgiennes et Caucasiennes.

[3] Charachidzé taught Georgian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales from 1965 to 1998.