The Nine Martyred Children of Kola were nine young boys of the village of Kola, in the historical Georgian region of Tao, who were put to death for confessing Christ in the sixth century. According to tradition they were the children of pagan families in a community where Christians and pagans lived side by side, and they came to faith on their own initiative before being killed by their own kinsmen and fellow villagers. They are commemorated together as a single group on February 22, and the names preserved for them are Guram, Adarnerse, Baqar, Vache, Bardzim, Dachi, Juansher, Ramaz, and Parsman.
The account of their martyrdom survives in an anonymous Georgian hagiographical work, The Martyrdom of the Nine Children of Kola. The earliest known manuscript dates to the tenth century and was identified at the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos by the scholar Nikolai Marr in 1897. By the period the text describes, Christianity had been the established religion of eastern Georgia (Iberia) for some two centuries, yet older paganism still persisted in outlying regions such as Tao, and the narrative is set against this coexistence of the two communities.
Kola lay near the source of the Mtkvari (Kura) River; the area corresponds to the region of Tao-Klarjeti, and the site is commonly identified with the modern village of Göle in Ardahan province, in present-day Turkey. The children are venerated in the Georgian Orthodox Church as martyrs and, given their youth, as child-saints.
