What you are reading is a history built on documents, not a family legend. A great deal of unchecked information about the Beridzes (ბერიძეები) circulates online, so we made a place where every claim is strictly graded. Each fact on the site comes with its source and its grade of reliability. We do not hide refuted claims. On the contrary, we show them openly and explain why a given view is wrong.
Grade
We use a four-grade system to show how reliable a piece of information is. Grade A goes to primary documents and academic works that we opened ourselves. Grade B goes to official data, encyclopaedic articles and secondary literature. Grade C covers news, genealogy sites and guidebooks. Grade D is for blogs, forums and folklore material. The text also uses three additional labels. Information that rests only on popular memory is marked “Tradition” (გადმოცემა). “Not confirmed” (დაუდასტურებელი) means that the information is not confirmed on the cited page, or that it is known only from a source we have not opened. Claims that do not match the truth are marked “Refuted” (არასწორი).
| Grade | Mark | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A | A | A primary document or an academic work that we opened ourselves. |
| B | B | Official data, an encyclopaedic article or secondary literature that we opened ourselves. |
| C | C | News, genealogy sites or tourist guidebooks. |
| D | D | A blog, a forum, or material that exists only as folk tradition. |
| Mark | What it means |
|---|---|
| tradition | Oral tradition, presented only as tradition and not as historical fact. |
| not confirmed | A view put forward somewhere that the sources we opened could not confirm. |
| refuted | A claim that the documents contradict, with the proper correction given in the text. |
Register
We copied Georgian passages out of the sources, although some of them are not verbatim and are given in reconstructed form. We also used machine-extracted records. The first version of the texts was drafted by a language model from graded facts, including traditions and unconfirmed information. Finally, the site's owner read the text through and approved it.
Sources 660 · Passages 70 · Timeline 80 · People 95 · Villages 287 · Terms 36 · Claims 70
refuted
Our main principle is respect for the facts. The site has no invented stories and never will. We refuse to pass off legends as historical reality, and we do not create or publish family coats of arms. Nor do we write that Beridze (ბერიძე) is the most widespread surname in Tbilisi (თბილისი). Rather than simply ignore such myths, we show them openly in a dedicated panel on the site and give the proper corrections next to them.
refuted · 13
- B-301
"Beridze is the most common surname in Tbilisi"
Refuted (K20). Not in the 2008 Tbilisi top seven. The 11,935 figure belongs to Adjara.
- B-302
"Son of the monk" (Behind the Name, forebears.io user entry)
A flat simplification no Georgian specialist endorses. Both camps in the scholarly dispute reject it.
- B-303
"Beri = bear"; "-dze is Ossetian"; an Ossetian migration (famiry.ru)
All three contradict every Georgian source. Russian Wiktionary more honestly leaves the etymology blank.
- B-304
"Princes in the 12th–14th centuries"
Akhuashvili's gloss on Vakhushti, who dates nothing. Drop it.
- B-305
"Khulo is the Beridze stronghold"
ხულო is 5th (1,126) on the 1995 data. ხელვაჩაური (3,703) and the coast are.
- B-306
"33+ surnames descend from ბერიძე"
Conflates the ბერ-root family (large and old) with derivation from ბერიძე, for which there is no evidence beyond the small Beridzeshvili group.
- B-307
"Beridzes are in the 16th-century Adjara defters, misrecorded as given names"
No secure Beridze household exists in the published Adjara defters. Only ბერული, ბერუკი, თავბერი — and -ული may be a nisba, not a truncated surname.
- B-308
"Beridzes have lived in Adjara since the 1500s"
Beyond the evidence. What is supported: ber-named Christian households in the Acharistsqali valley in the 1560s, and a very large Beridze population there by the 19th century.
- B-309
The coat of arms on Georgian Wikipedia
A 31 October 2016 own-work upload by user აკაკი ბერიძე, shown on two Wikipedia pages and carried by Wikidata item Q31354660 ('Georgian noble family') as its P94 coat-of-arms image, so it reaches every Wikidata consumer. There is no historical Beridze coat of arms; the 1922 Кавказский Гербовник's silence is a fact about rank (aznauri, not tavadi), not a lost document.
- B-310
Forebears' "96% Orthodox"
A modelled guess that ignores the Muslim Adjaran majority of bearers. Ignore. Its salary and "United Russias" widgets are noise.
- B-311
The Zesopeli church as "the Beridzes' family church"
A YouTube label with no documentary standing (K27).
- B-312
„იაგორ ბერიძე — სამეფო კარის ტახტის აზნაური" as evidence the family were throne aznaurs
Refers to one man under Russian rule.
- B-313
Every Adjaran three-brother legend as a Beridze legend
At ახო the oldest surname by tradition is ნაკაშიძე, and its three-brother tale (გურძაი, კუჭულაი, სამუნაი) is not attached to the Beridzes.
Read by us
During the research we drew a strict line between the sources we read directly, in the original, and the information we know only from the works of other authors. The distinction is critical, because the original context is often lost or distorted when a text is cited. That is why every source on the site states exactly whether we checked it directly or whether it rests on secondary citation. This lets readers judge for themselves how solid the arguments are.
Author
The Georgian Wikipedia article on the Beridzes (ბერიძეები) was created on 13 October 2016 by the user Akaki Beridze (აკაკი ბერიძე). Its first version stated that the surname had been entered in the Velvet Book of 1850. That statement was later deleted. This site too is made by a Beridze about the Beridzes, so there is a conflict of interest, and the reader should know about it. That is why every source is graded and doubts are shown openly.
| Article | ბერიძეები (ka.wikipedia) |
|---|---|
| Created | 13 October 2016 |
| Author | User Akaki Beridze |
| This site | Beqa Beridze |
| ელფოსტა | beqa@beridze.info |
Beridze, a history of the surname · Method · https://beridze.info/en/method/ (accessed 2026-10-07)method · last updated 2026-10-07 · send a correction