Abbacy at Khakhuli
Hilarion led Khakhuli Monastery at the beginning of the eleventh century. The monastery had been founded in the second half of the tenth century by King David III Kurapalates within the Georgian Kingdom of Tao, situated in one of the gorges of the Tortum river in what is today northeastern Turkey, near Erzurum.
Khakhuli grew into one of the most important centres of literature and Georgian culture, eventually prosperous enough to be associated with a great many villages and minor feudal holdings. Hilarion's tenure as abbot placed him at the head of this flourishing scholarly and monastic community.
The Khakhuli Monastic Circle
Khakhuli was a formative centre for several notable Georgian scholars and churchmen. George the Hagiorite (Giorgi Mtatsmindeli), who would later labour at Iviron on Mount Athos, received part of his monastic formation at Khakhuli and took monastic tonsure there before his Athonite career.
Hilarion is known precisely because he belonged to this circle: the information about him derives from George the Minor, the disciple of George the Hagiorite, who composed his biographical writings in the years following 1066. This places Hilarion firmly within the documented Khakhuli–Athonite tradition of the mid-eleventh century.
Sources and Limits of the Record
Source material on Hilarion is genuinely scarce. He has no dedicated independent biography and appears chiefly within liturgical calendar lists and the writings of George the Minor. No information survives in the available sources regarding his relics, a shrine, or a formal act of glorification.
The most secure facts that can be drawn from the record are his family name, Tulashvili; his year of repose, 1041; his role as abbot of Khakhuli Monastery in the Tao region of southwestern Georgia; and the attribution of his memory to the hagiographical writings of George the Minor.
