Keke Geladze

Ekaterine Geladze
ეკატერინე გელაძე
Geladze in 1892
Born
Ekaterine Giorgis asuli Geladze

1856/1858
Died4 June 1937 (aged 78/81)
OccupationSeamstress
SpouseBesarion Jughashvili
ChildrenMikheil
Giorgi
Ioseb
Parent(s)Giorgi Geladze (father)
Melania Khomezurashvili (mother)

Ekaterine "Keke" Giorgis asuli Geladze[a] (1856/1858[2][b] – 4 June 1937) was the mother of Joseph Stalin.

Born into a family of peasants outside of Gori, in modern Georgia, she married Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and had three sons; only the youngest, Ioseb, lived. Besarion would leave the family, leaving Geladze to raise her son. Deeply religious, she wanted Ioseb to become a priest, working as a seamstress in Gori in order to pay for his education. Geladze remained in Gori when Ioseb moved to the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, and stayed there until his rise to power in the Soviet Union as Joseph Stalin. In her older age Geladze lived in Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia; while Stalin wrote to her, he visited rarely, with the last visit in 1935. She died in 1937, and was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi.

  1. ^ Gozalishvili 1937
  2. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 742, note 21


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