What Lela Kurtanidze remembers most vividly about the lake was the moonlight. Watching it shimmer on the water "was a beautiful sight," she said, recalling the time in 2011 she spent on the shores of Paravani, Georgia's largest lake.
Then 21 years old, Kurtanidze was participating in the Javakheti Expedition, an annual summer camp for students organized by the Georgian Orthodox Church and Tbilisi State University. The young campers slept in tents and spent their days swimming, hiking in the foothills, and sprucing up the local churches.
More than 2,000 meters above sea level, the landscape in Georgia's southern Javakheti Province is known for its austere, unforgiving beauty, with vast grassland plains and swampy wetlands offering no respite from the wind and rain. Swimming in the lake was not for the faint of heart. At such a high altitude, the memory of winter lingered, and the waters of Paravani were ice-cold.
One of the camp leaders, Nikoloz Pachuashvili, was not bothered by the cold. A charismatic and energetic metropolitan (the clerical rank in Eastern Orthodoxy between archbishop and patriarch), Pachuashvili liked to lead by example, rising early in the morning, donning a bathing suit, and often being the first to dive in.
While she loved the sight of the moon on the water, Kurtanidze had never learned how to swim. Instead, she would just paddle, walking out slowly, always making sure she could feel the bottom beneath her feet.
***
Growing up in a poor family in a village in Imereti, a central region of Georgia, Kurtanidze was a lonely child.
"I wasn't spiritually close to anyone. That's just how I grew up," she told RFE/RL's Georgian Service.
As a student of German language and literature at Tbilisi State University, she was devoted to her studies. Over the summer, she liked to try new things, especially those she thought would advance her personal and professional growth.
Money was tight, but the camp -- which was first held in 2001 -- was free. For Kurtanidze, this was a godsend, and she attended the Javakheti Expedition three times between 2009 and 2012. She first met Pachuashvili in 2009, when the metropolitan came to the camp to visit the students, something he did regularly. Never having met a religious man of such stature, Kurtanidze was apprehensive at first, expecting him to be unapproachable.
But she found the metropolitan, now 63, to be friendly and direct, and he left her with a good impression. Sometimes, Pachuashvili would join a barbecue or watch movies with the young campers, who were mostly between the ages of 17 and 21.
"It further strengthened my belief that I was dealing with a great person," she said. A person she felt she could trust.
Lela Kurtanidze during her stay at the Javakheti camp
It was at the lake, Kurtanidze said, at her second or third time at the camp, where Pachuashvili first sexually abused her -- an allegation she first made in a November 2023 Facebook post and which the cleric, in interviews with RFE/RL, has repeatedly denied.
Kurtanidze wasn't the only one. Four other women have alleged that they were sexually abused by Pachuashvili, raising troubling questions about the impunity enjoyed by high-ranking clerics in the Georgian Orthodox Church, the country's dominant religious institution and a vocal proponent of traditional family values.
***
It all began, Kurtanidze said, when the metropolitan noticed that she couldn't swim. When he offered to teach her, she didn't for a moment think that anything bad would come of it, she told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. She didn't have a swimsuit or shorts, so she went into the water wearing a dress.
During that first lesson, the metropolitan kissed her "in a way that was too intimate," she said. Another time, while swimming in the lake, Kurtanidze said that Pachuashvili put his hand under the dress she was wearing, touching her breasts and genitals. She remembered him telling her to take off her dress. Otherwise, he said, she would never master the technique.
"When he put his hands on me, in inappropriate places, I flinched, tried to get away, and fell into the water. He [then] asked me what I was doing…as if I was doing something wrong," she said. "Sometimes I would pull away, sometimes I would try to free myself, but I was mostly obedient."
As the swimming lessons continued, Kurtanidze said that she hoped the cleric would understand that she was feeling uncomfortable and that he would eventually stop. But, back then, the student didn't have any experience with physical intimacy. Nor did she know, she said, how to recognize abuse and protect herself.
"You have two options: Either realize that something terrible is happening to you and accept it. Or tell yourself that nothing is happening. I chose the second path," she said. "He convinced me that it was a type of spiritual relationship, something that has to be hidden, because it is not understood by other people."
***
Around Javakheti, the metropolitan was a larger-than-life character, known for hiking and climbing the snow-capped peaks, sometimes disappearing into the mountain mist to hunt for Orthodox relics.
In addition to his alleged victims, RFE/RL's Georgian Service spoke to 11 people who had participated in the Javakheti camp between 2001 and 2019. All of them spoke about Pachuashvili's charisma, intelligence, and knowledge. They mentioned his love for cinema and literature, and the discussions he liked to have with the students about art. He was always keen to show off Javakheti's natural beauty and cultural treasures: the ancient monasteries and churches; the cave complexes, some dating back to the eighth century, where monks lived and prayed.
Around the villages of Javakheti, there were also rumors that the metropolitan was not of this world. He was so strong he could stop a boulder hurtling down the mountain. Some of the locals said he was so powerful, he could even stop the rain.
Nikoloz Pachuashvili had only one condition for the interview with RFE/RL's Georgian Service and that was that nothing was to be recorded.
Lisa (not her real name), a devout Christian who was considering becoming a nun, first went on the Javakheti Expedition in 2008, when she was just 19. She, too, had heard about the metropolitan's miraculous abilities and told RFE/RL that she felt that she could trust him. So much so that, when the summer camp ended, she decided to take a gap year and stayed on in the diocese of Akhalkalaki and Kurmurdo, where Pachuashvili was resident.
When the metropolitan invited her to his home in the town of Akhalkalaki to talk about her future plans, Lisa said that she wasn't the slightest bit concerned. She trusted him and, while priests in the Georgian Orthodox Church don't have to be celibate, it is a requirement for bishops, metropolitans, and patriarchs. Higher-ranking clergy are expected to lead by example, abstaining from worldly pleasures and devoting their whole lives to God.
Lisa even didn't think it strange when the metropolitan told her not to tell anyone about her visit. In fact, she said, she welcomed the attention.
"I reached for the sky with joy, [because] this godlike man noticed me, gave me his time, and suddenly we had a common secret," she said.
While she was at Pachuashvili's home, Lisa said that he took her to his bedroom and asked her to sit on the bed.
"I was very surprised, but it [still] didn't occur to me that something bad could happen," she told RFE/RL. "He asked me questions about my sex life and sexual experience. I was very embarrassed and just blurted everything out. He sat down next to me [on the bed], and then everything became blurry."
She was "stunned," she said, when he began to touch her intimately, and she didn't know what to do. None of it made any sense. How could the man who just yesterday was talking about sublime love and Bach's St. Matthew Passion now be doing such a thing?
"I couldn't believe it or didn't want to believe it," she said. "When he was leaving, he told me that what had happened was great and exciting. He said that I was special."
***
After spells in the late 1980s working for a film studio and then as a physics teacher in a high school, in his late 20s Pachuashvili decided to follow a new path. He entered the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1990, and, like many newly ordained priests, he became a monk, serving in monasteries in Tbilisi and Mtskheta, an ancient city 20 kilometers north of the capital, known for being the birthplace of Christianity in Georgia. Rising through the clerical ranks, Pachuashvili became a metropolitan in 2007.
Katherine, a participant in the 2012 summer camp, was also invited to the metropolitan's Akhalkalaki residence. Then just 19, Katherine said that things quickly turned sour.
"I was looking through vinyl records…when he reached under my dress and grabbed my behind," she told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. "I pulled away, and he made a face as if nothing had happened and [just] continued talking."
He used the same tactics with all the girls, Katherine said. He would lavish you with praise, talk to you, text you, and then all of a sudden, you had become a victim.
The Tsratskharo pass in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region
For Tamara, another woman who alleges that she was sexually abused by Pachuashvili, that emotional grooming began when she was around 10 or 11 years old. Then a bishop, Pachuashvili had been a friend of her parents since the 1990s, and she had "a [strong] emotional connection with him.
"I was a churchgoer then," Tamara recalled, and, from the age of 6, "going to church was a normal part of my life." He "became the most important person [in my life]," she said, almost "as if he was my own father."
Note To Readers
With the exception of Lela Kurtanidze, all of the women interviewed for this article who have alleged that they were sexually abused by Nikoloz Pachuashvili have asked to remain anonymous and are using pseudonyms. In some cases, identifying details, such as the women's professions and the time and location of the alleged abuse, have been removed to further protect their privacy.
The first time she remembered Pachuashvili's behavior making her feel uncomfortable was when she was 15 years old.
"He sat me on his lap and said: 'Now, you will kiss me on the right cheek, then on the left, then again on the right, and then again on the left.' I was in awe of him," she said. "Even though I found him physically unpleasant, I thought he was a great person, and I couldn't stop it."
He didn't even try to hide it, said Tamara, who is now 40 years old with teenage children.
"Touching hands, patting legs, [receiving] compliments, [saying,] 'I'm crazy about you,' and so on," she recalled. "There was one time -- I was probably around 19 -- during the Great Fast. I went in to [church] to confess, and he put his hand under my dress from the back." She remembered very clearly what he said next: "I made you blush."
They soon began an intimate relationship, one that was hidden from her family and which lasted until she was married. Back then, she said, what she felt most was guilt. Perhaps, she wondered, it was all a misunderstanding? Or perhaps he was testing her faith in God?
"My obedience, or whatever you want to call it…was based on my [religious] faith…which this man destroyed," she said. Now she didn't "even so much as look at a church" and would do everything she could to keep her children away.
Sandra had also known Pachuashvili since she was a child, as the cleric had become friendly with her parents after they did missionary work together. When she graduated from university in her early 20s, Sandra went to work in Germany for a year. There, she was hosted by a family who also happened to know Pachuashvili.
As he rose through the ranks of the church, the metropolitan would now regularly make trips to Europe. On one of those trips, Pachuashvili came to stay with her host family in Germany for a few days. During his visit, she said that he invited her up to his room and told her to come and sit by the bed.
"I told him that I didn't want to bother him…and then left," she said.
Almost a year later, not long before Sandra returned to Georgia, Pachuashvili was back again, this time to deliver a homily.
"He wrote [to me] that he was in Germany and, if I was here, he would see me," she said. "He was in another city and told me to ask my [host] family for permission to go."
The family quickly agreed.
After attending Mass and confessing her sins to the priest, Sandra went for lunch with Pachuashvili. He then asked her to come back to his hotel, she said, where he promised to tell her the news from Javakheti.
A priest gives a blessing during an Orthodox service in in Tbilisi.
The hotel room was tiny, Sandra remembered, and she said that Pachuashvili "lay down on the bed and told me to come and sit with him." She began to feel even more uneasy when he touched her hands and asked her why they were so cold. Then, she said, he suggested that she take off her clothes and lie down next to him to get warm.
"I said very coldly, 'No, thank you very much,'" Sandra told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. "I was very sad, and I remember praying to myself: 'God help me, God help me, God help me." She then left.
"Nothing else happened, but I remembered how I felt when I left that place," she said. "I had a terrible feeling of emptiness. I blamed myself."
***
From shame came silence. Almost all of Pachuashvili's alleged victims said that they didn't ever talk with anyone about what had happened to them, largely because they feared being judged and blamed. Most of them said that they never even told their own families. There was no escape from the shame, in particular the gut-wrenching and unyielding sense that everything that had happened to them was all their fault.
It took Kurtanidze, the only woman who has spoken publicly about the metropolitan, more than 10 years to find the words to describe what happened to her at the lake.
"I didn't talk about it with anyone. I buried it within myself," she said. "I was afraid that people would blame me."
For Lisa, her experience with Pachuashvil had a profound and long-lasting affect. She spent years, she said, trying to make herself more inconspicuous to men, wearing longer dresses to cover her body.
"I just couldn't communicate normally with my male peers, even on a verbal level," she said. "My self-esteem was so low that I couldn't even think about the future."
Despite going to therapy, Lisa felt like she had never fully recovered.
"For me, recalling these memories is like ripping off a Band-Aid from an old wound, with parts of the flesh sticking out," she wrote to RFE/RL. "I owe it to the girls," she said, to the ones who had already gone through this and to those who might in the future.
Sandra said that her experience is something that she has never come to terms with. While she is still religious, she no longer attends church.
"It was very hard for me to understand that what this man was preaching from the pulpit was completely different to what he was actually doing," she said.
Some of the women interviewed by RFE/RL said that they did not come forward with their stories earlier because it seemed futile to stand against such a prominent member of an organization as powerful as the Georgian Orthodox Church.
"I had a feeling that he was an influential person," Kurtanidze said, that he was not alone and had people standing behind him. "And who was I?"
Traditional gender roles and expectations play a significant role in Georgian society. Women are expected to prioritize family and children over their career. Domestic violence is common, with the law enforcement authorities often turning a blind eye. The influence of the Orthodox Church extends beyond religious observation, with clerics preaching traditional family values and warning about society's moral decay.
A common refrain from church officials is that Georgia is under attack from nefarious foreign powers and meddling human rights NGOs. In May 2013, Orthodox priests participated in an attack against activists at a rally to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and the church has repeatedly called for the cancellation of Tbilisi Pride.
The majority of Georgians (79 percent), according to a 2021 survey, believe that the Georgian Orthodox Church is the foundation of their nation's identity, with 83 percent saying it plays an important role in their family life. The church is autocephalous, meaning it is not subject to a higher religious authority and is one of the 17 independent churches of Eastern Orthodoxy.
The church's image as an upholder of moral integrity was sullied in September 2021, when the transcripts of thousands of phone calls, allegedly recorded by the country's State Security Service, were leaked. In the released material, the contents of which RFE/RL cannot verify, there was a folder named "Adulterers," listing the names and addresses of priests and nuns who were allegedly having illicit sexual relations. One of the names mentioned in the files was Pachuashvili.
***
The stately Courtyard by Marriott Tbilisi hotel is situated right on the city's Freedom Square, where Georgians have traditionally gathered to topple their leaders. Known as being one of the most expensive hotels in the capital, its rooms look out on a gilded statue of St. George, the country's most venerated saint.
It was the hotel where Metropolitan Nikoloz said that he would prefer to meet. He had only one condition for the interview with RFE/RL's Georgian Service and that was that nothing was to be recorded.
Over tea in the lobby of the Marriott, the metropolitan was polite and seemingly at ease, speaking with confidence about Greek law, classical music, and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. He said that he appreciated curious journalists, especially those who were careful and attentive. As the father of three daughters, he said, he could understand people who sought to protect the interests of women.
The Courtyard by Marriott Tbilisi (right) on the capital's Freedom Square
When he spoke about the Javakheti Expedition, he was keen to list the names of notable Georgian artists and musicians who he had brought on board over the years. The summer camps, he reckoned, had helped several thousand young people since they began in 2001, and many of the former attendees had gone on to be successful or famous.
"I still remember many of them," he said, "especially those who participated in the first 10 to 15 years when I directly led the expeditions."
When asked by RFE/RL about Kurtanidze's allegations against him, Pachuashvili confirmed that he had taught her how to swim, but he refuted the allegations of sexual abuse.
"How can you imagine teaching someone to swim without touching [them]?" he said.
Regarding the 2021 leaks from Georgia's Security Service, where his name had appeared in the files, Pachuashvili said it was "slander" meant to cause "reputational damage." The "evaluations" from the tapes, he said, were "made as a result of illegal wiretapping and not directly [found] in the content of the wiretapping."
The metropolitan refused to comment on the other women's accusations against him, dismissing them as merely "rumors." When asked, in general, if he believed he had hurt the women around him, the metropolitan said that he had always been "selfless" in his relations with women and people didn't need protection from him.
"On the contrary," he said, "my service is to protect people from danger. How well I managed [to do that] will be judged by God and society."
Many of those that RFE/RL interviewed said that Pachuashvili had had a positive impact on people's lives. He helped people, they said, both inside and outside Georgia. He would find housing for the homeless and made sure elderly people in his diocese were looked after. For others, he gave them money to help pay their medical and college bills.
Sofio Nishnianidze, a graduate of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Tbilisi State University, is one of the organizers of the Javakheti Expedition. The summer camps are still going strong, and the selection of participants for 2024 will begin in July. Nishnianidze, who has been taking part in the camp since 2014, said that he never noticed any suspicious behavior from Pachuashvili.
"I can honestly say that no one has ever mentioned anything like that to me," he wrote in an e-mailed response to questions from RFE/RL.
***
Several times during the interview at the Marriott, Pachuashvili said that a journalist who was writing about such serious charges was an investigator and a prosecutor, while the accused's right to defend themselves had been taken away.
"Why should anyone be surprised?" he asked, after "the media smeared [Ilia II, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church] over the last five years."
The "smears" that Pachuashvili was referring to began in October 2019, when an archbishop, Petre Tsaava, accused Patriarch Ilia of having sexual relations with men, including underage boys. The archbishop, who had become estranged from the church leadership and was deeply critical of some priests, made the unsubstantiated allegations in a meeting of the church's Holy Synod.
Nikoloz Pachuashvili (left)
"I am glad if I share [Ilia's] fate, at least a little," Pachuashvili said. "I agreed to the meeting [with RFE/RL] and [interview] only to encourage the clergy and parishioners -- because they will have to go through the ordeal, too," he wrote, implying that Georgian churchgoers would also be the victims of a wider campaign against the church.
"The time will come," Pachuashvili told RFE/RL. "And the Lord will judge both the righteous and the wicked."
While Pachuashvili spoke of divine judgment, theologian Mirian Gamrekelashvili said that the church doesn't have a proper mechanism to deal with such cases. There is no ecclesiastical court in Georgia, Gamrekelashvili told RFE/RL. There was a synod created in 2011, which investigated moral violations, but Gamrekelashvili said that it was no longer active. (The press office of the Georgian Orthodox Church has not responded to questions from RFE/RL about the allegations against Pachuashvili.)
It is improbable, Gamrekelashvili said, that the church will investigate the accusations against the metropolitan.
"He knows that he will go unpunished," the theologian said, adding that previous accusations leveled against high-ranking clerics went uninvestigated within the church.
Not only were the accusations against Ilia brushed under the carpet, but for Tsaava, the whistle-blowing archbishop, there were severe consequences. After he aired his allegations of pedophilia in the Holy Synod, the archbishop was removed as the head of his diocese of Chkondidi and sent to a monastery to repent.
Both Georgian police and prosecutors told RFE/RL that Pachuashvili is not under investigation for any alleged crimes. However, Ana Tavkhelidze, a lawyer who has been defending victims of sexual harassment and violence in Georgian courts for many years, said that Kurtanidze's original Facebook post would be enough for the Interior Ministry to start a probe. The accounts of the other women, she added, suggested that the number of victims could be much higher.
Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili (left) with Georgian Orthodox Patriarch Ilia II take part in a prayer as they mark the Day of National Unity in Tbilisi in 2019.
Georgian society has made significant progress on combating sexual violence in recent years, spurred on by the groundbreaking work of activists and the #MeToo movement. According to a 2017 survey conducted by the United Nations, 20 percent of women in Georgia reported experiencing sexual harassment. The same study found that 1 out of 7 women aged between 15 and 64 reported experiencing physical, sexual, and/or emotional violence from an intimate partner.
Tbilisi is a signatory to the Istanbul Convention, a treaty established by the Council of Europe with the goal of preventing violence against women, protecting victims, and ending perpetrators' immunity. And more recently, in 2019, the country's unicameral parliament adopted a law outlawing sexual harassment, defining it as "unwelcome conduct of a sexual character aiming or resulting in violation of one's dignity and creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, or offensive environment."
In the case of sexual harassment, the statute of limitations is one year in Georgia. But if the case contains signs of violence, a longer statute applies, Tavkhelidze said.
"A sexual act without consent would be sexual violence, and many circumstances indicate that there was no consent here," she said after reviewing all the evidence related to the five women given to her by RFE/RL. "The main reasons [to believe] that the will of these people was suppressed are the influence of this person, his authority, their presence on his territory, and the age difference."
Still, Kurtanidze said that she had no intention of taking the metropolitan to court. She decided to go public with her accusations because she said she believes that Pachuashvili and other clerics in the church are still abusing women.
"I don't expect them to believe me, but I know for sure [what happened to me] was sexual abuse," she said. "I did not enter into this under my own free will."
The main obstacle to telling the truth isn't memory, Kurtanidze said, but the question of whether women would be believed.
"In our society," she said, nothing a woman does is ever credible, "not even [our] confessions and not even death."