George the Scribe and Savva were brothers who labored as monks at the Khakhuli Monastery in Klarjeti, in southern Georgia, during the eleventh century. Sons of a man named Jacob, they were the uncles of Saint George of the Holy Mountain (George the Hagiorite), and their lives are bound up with the cultivation of Georgian ecclesiastical learning in the period sometimes called the Golden Age of Georgian Letters. They are commemorated together on December 19.
George served as a spiritual adviser at the court of King Bagrat III, who bore the Byzantine title of Kuropalates, and he took an active part in the production of ecclesiastical literature, a work of translating and copying sacred writings that flourished in his day. He afterward became a spiritual instructor at the household of the nobleman Peris Jojikisdze. His brother Savva is remembered by the Georgian Church writer George the Lesser as a righteous and blameless man.
By tradition, when the brothers learned of the piety of their young nephew George, they had his father Jacob bring the boy to them at Khakhuli for his upbringing in the monastic life. After a period of trial in which George of Khakhuli and the young George were carried off to Constantinople, the elder George on his return entrusted his nephew to the care of his brother Savva at the monastery. Both fathers reposed peacefully in the middle of the eleventh century.
