Venerable John and George, Confessors

John Maisuradze, born in 1882, and George Mkheidze, born around 1877 in the Racha region, were Georgian monks of the Bethany monastery near Tbilisi. John became its abbot in the 1920s; in 1921, according to his biography, Soviet security officers shot him and another monk on the road to Tbilisi, and he survived the bullet that passed through his chest. George, who had a military education, came to Bethany in 1924.

They lived there through the Soviet years of persecution of the Church, and John died in 1957. George, in the monastic name George-John, died in 1960 (the calendar gives 1962). Both were buried at Bethany, and the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized them as confessors in 2003.