Georgian tomb may be for Pushkin's great-grandmother

Georgian researchers might have discovered the burial place of the great-grandmother of famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, local media reported Wednesday.

Rustavi2 television showed video footage of researchers studying a burial place in the north of the South Caucasus country, where Pushkin's great-grandmother might have been buried after she died of an illness on Dec. 30, 1836, while travelling along a key road linking Georgia to Russia.

The researchers were were following a lead from diary notes made by a member of the Mozdokeli family. The diary recorded that a close relative of Alexander Pushkin had been buried in the cemetery of the Karangozishvili and Mozdokeli families after the woman had fallen ill in heavy snowfalls and died. Tamar Mozdokeli said the diary, kept by her aunt, recorded the inscription on a tombstone, which was still legible when her aunt made the diary entry back in 1973.

Tamar Mozdokeli believes the woman had been buried in the cemetery for nobles because of her high status in Russian society.

Pushkin was sent into exile in the South Caucasus after the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. The poet spent some years in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi where people can still find a monument to the poet standing near the downtown Freedom Square at the start of a street named after him.

On his mother's side, Pushkin had African roots. His great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, was an Abyssinian who was bought from a Turkish sultan palace in Istanbul as a present for the Russian tsar Peter the Great.

Pushkin was proud of his great-grandfather and wrote about him in a novel entitled "The Negro of Peter the Great."

Source: Xinhua