Georgian Crown Jewels

The medieval Georgian monarchs are portrayed on coins, medals, sculptured reliefs, and in frescoes wearing crowns and royal robes, frequently of Byzantine imperial design, and there is also some documentary evidence about some of their regalia.

Only pictorial depictions survive, such as on the reverse of a medal, commemorative of the Treaty of Georgievsk, produced by Timofey Ivanov of the Saint Petersburg Mint in 1790.

The new jewels—a crown, scepter, and sword—were promptly manufactured by the artist Pierre Etienne Theremin and the goldsmith Nathanael Gottlob Licht in St. Petersburg and presented to the Georgian king at a solemn ceremony in Tiflis.

After the death of George XII on 28 December 1800, the Imperial manifesto of Paul I of 18 January 1801 and that of his successor, Alexander I, of 12 September 1801, annexed Georgia to the Russian Empire.

[1] According to a more recent research by the Georgian art historian Natalia Beruchashvili, the crown might have been sold abroad and, eventually, acquired by Henri Deterding, the then-head of the Royal Dutch Shell.

Only George XII's scepter survived in the collection of the Kremlin's Armoury owing to an erroneous assumption—on account of its depiction of a Russian double-headed eagle—that it belonged to the tsar Paul I himself.