Prince Grigol Orbeliani or Jambakur-Orbeliani (; ჯამბაკურ-ორბელიანი) (2 October 1804 – 21 March 1883) was a Georgian Romanticist poet and general in Imperial Russian service. One of the most colorful figures in the 19th-century Georgian culture, Orbeliani is noted for his patriotic poetry, lamenting Georgia's lost independence and the deposition of the Royal House of Bagration. At the same time, he spent decades in the Imperial Russian Army, rising to the highest positions in the imperial administration in the Caucasus. Family Grigol Orbeliani was born into a prominent aristocratic family in the Georgian capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi), three years after the Russian government deposed the Bagrationi dynasty of Georgia and annexed their kingdom. His father Dimitri (Zurab), a prince of the House of Orbeliani, served at the court of the last Georgian kings, while mother Khoreshan née Andronikashvili was a granddaughter, on her mother, Princess Elene’s, side, of Erekle II, the penultimate and popular king of Georgia, whose cult would later be introduced into Georgian literature by Grigol Orbeliani himself. Orbeliani had close family and friendly ties with the contemporary Georgian aristocratic and literary élite: Nikoloz Baratashvili, the most important poet of Georgian Romanticism, was his sisterly nephew; Orbeliani was in love with Griboyedov’s widow and Alexander Chavchavadze’s daughter, Nino, who inspired the poet with desperate, but courtly passion for nearly thirty years, although he had been betrothed in the cradle to Princess Sopio Orbeliani. He was a cousin of the two poets and generals - Alexander and Vakhtang Orbeliani. To distinguish himself from his namesake cousins, Grigol Orbeliani also used an ancestral name "Qaplanishvili". Service career Orbeliani received his early education at local nobility gymnasium and artillery school. In the 1820s, he entered the Russian military service, and took part in a series of expeditions against the Dagestani tribes, and the wars with the Ottoman and Persian empires. In March 1833, he was arrested by the Russian police in Nizhny Novgorod for his involvement with the 1832 conspiracy of Georgian nobles who plotted to murder Russian officials and reestablish Georgia's independence from the empire. Orbeliani was placed in the Avlabar prison in Tiflis, but was soon released as, due to his absence from Georgia, his contribution to a planned coup was limited to an intellectual support such as translations from the Decembrist ideologues and a bellicose poem, The Weapon (იარაღი). By virtue both of his aristocratic status and his