Hilarion the Georgian was a ninth-century monastic, ascetic, and wonderworker, the son of an aristocrat of Kakheti in eastern Georgia. According to his life, he was dedicated to God from birth and raised in a monastery that his father had established on the family lands. He is commemorated on November 19, the day of his repose.
At the age of fourteen Hilarion withdrew to a small cave in the Davit-Gareji Wilderness, the monastic desert founded by Saint David of Gareji, where he passed ten years in solitary asceticism. The bishop of Rustavi ordained him a priest, and he was afterward made abbot of the Lavra of Saint David of Gareji. Seeking deeper solitude, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to venerate the holy places and settled in a cave in the wilderness of the Jordan; by tradition the Theotokos appeared to him on the Mount of Olives and directed him to return to his homeland, where he established monastic communities for women and for men.
Hilarion's later years were spent in the wider Byzantine world. He lived for five years on Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, where he celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the Georgian language, and he also journeyed to Constantinople and to Rome. He eventually settled in Thessalonica, where the tradition records his healing of a paralyzed boy at the home of the city's prefect, and where he came to be venerated as a wonderworker.
Hilarion reposed at Thessalonica on November 19, 875. The synaxarion relates that the prefect prepared a marble shrine for him and that those who approached his grave with faith were healed of their infirmities. The Byzantine emperor Basil the Macedonian later obtained his relics and translated them to the Monastery of Romana, a Georgian monastic foundation.
