Scholarship and Diaspora Ministry
Peradze was among the foremost academic specialists of his time in Georgian church history and manuscript studies. After completing his doctorate at Bonn with a dissertation on the history of Georgian monasticism, he taught as an associate professor there and lectured on Georgian and Armenian literature, and from 1933 held the chair of patrology in the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at Warsaw University.
Alongside his academic work he ministered to the Georgian Orthodox diaspora in Europe. Tonsured and ordained in 1931, he became the first regular priest of the Georgian Church of St Nino in Paris, a community he founded, and he established and edited the Georgian scholarly journal Jvari Vazisa ('Grapevine Cross'). Through the 1930s he located and studied important Georgian Christian manuscripts in libraries and collections across Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Austria.
Arrest and Martyrdom
Following the German occupation of Poland, Peradze used his scholarly standing to protect Georgian cultural treasures and aided Jews and other people targeted by the occupiers. He was arrested in 1942 and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died on 6 December 1942.
The accounts preserved in his commemoration relate that he offered his own life in place of fellow prisoners. By one account he took the blame for a death to spare others from reprisal; by another he entered a gas chamber in place of a Jewish prisoner. The differing versions agree that he died as a martyr in the act of self-sacrifice for others.
Veneration and Memorials
The Georgian Orthodox Church canonized Gregory Peradze in 1995, and he is commemorated on 23 November (Old Style), corresponding to 6 December. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the National Hero of Georgia in 2013.
His memory is marked by a memorial chapel in Warsaw, a museum in his hometown of Bakurtsikhe, and commemorative plaques at the University of Warsaw and at St George's Church in Bakurtsikhe.
