Khimshiashvili

Their likely eponymous forefather, Khimshia Abazasdze, fought Timur's invading army in 1399 and then was granted by the king of Georgia lands in Kakheti.

By the end of that century, they had been in control of Upper Adjara as one of the most important derebeys, semi-autonomous "lord of the valleys" in Ottoman Georgia.

On the other hand, Prince Ioann of Georgia, compiling his genealogy of Georgian noble families in the 1800s, claimed that the Khimshiashvili were originally from Adjara and some of them fled the Ottoman expansionism to Kakheti in 1605.

In 1879, Şerif Bey Khimshiashvili asked the Russian authorities to help into inquiry into his family's genealogy, but the results of the research were not convincing.

His son Selim Bey sought to bring all of Ottoman Georgia under his rule and staged a coup in Akhaltsikhe in order to gain control of the Eyalet of Childir.