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Iakob Gogebashvili was born in village Variani near Gori, Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia) to a poor family of a priest Simon Gogebashvili. He studied at Gori seminary and Tbilisi before entering a theological academy in Kiev in 1861. Simultaneously, he attended the lectures in natural sciences at the Kiev University where he became familiar with the political ideas of Russian enlighteners such as Herzen, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Yet, unlike many of his contemporary Georgian intellectuals, he was affected less by the Russian radicals than by a Christian background in the seminaries of Gori and Tiflis. Returning to Georgia in 1863, he taught arithmetic and geography at the Tbilissi Seminary and later became its inspector. Gogebashvili’s apartment, frequented by the seminarian students, soon became a haven for forbidden discussions of art and politics. Consequently, he was dismissed on the orders from the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg in 1874.