Daniel Chonkadze (1830 – June 16, 1860) was a Georgian

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

 novelist primarily known for his resonant novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

 Suramis tsikhe ("Surami Fortress").

Chonkadze was born into a peasant family near Dusheti

Dusheti

Dusheti is a town in Georgia, situated in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, 54 km northeast of the nation’s capital of Tbilisi.Dusheti is located on both banks of the small mountainous river of Dushetis-Khevi at the foothills of the Greater Caucasus crest at an elevation of 900 m above sea level...

. His native village housed a mixed Georgian

Georgians

The Georgians are an ethnic group that have originated in Georgia, where they constitute a majority of the population. Large Georgian communities are also present throughout Russia, European Union, United States, and South America....

-Ossetian community, a prerequisite for the future writer's lively interest in both Georgian and Ossetian folk traditions. Educated at the seminaries of Vladikavkaz

Vladikavkaz

-Notable structures:In Vladikavkaz, there is a guyed TV mast, tall, built in 1961, which has six crossbars with gangways in two levels running from the mast structure to the guys.-Twin towns/sister cities:...

 and Tbilisi

Tbilisi

Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...

, Chonkadze then taught Ossetic

Ossetic language

Ossetian , also sometimes called Ossete, is an East Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains....

 in Stavropol

Stavropol

-International relations:-Twin towns/sister cities:Stavropol is twinned with: Des Moines, United States Béziers, France Pazardzhik, Bulgaria-External links:* **...

 and Tbilisi in the 1850s. Simultaneously he served as a church official, but would later abandon his clerical status. Much of his work was on Georgian and Ossetic folklore. He authored an unfinished Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

-Ossetic dictionary, and wrote down a collection of Ossetic proverbs using an alphabet invented by Professor Andreas Sjögren for the Ossetians. For this reason, he is considered by some to have been "a founder-father of Ossetic literature".

Chonkadze’s first and last published work, Suramis tsikhe, garnered a long-lasting success. Published in 1859/60 in the Georgian literary journal Tsiskari ("Dawn"), the novella is a mixture of folklore, history, political protest, and romantic drama in which Chonkadze passionately attacks serfdom

Serfdom

Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century...

. For censorship reasons, the tale was given a medieval setting filled with allegories. The contemporary socio-political system is symbolized by the crumbling Surami fortress that requires a living person to be buried within its walls to stand firm. The novel was further famed by the eminent Armenia

Armenia

Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...

n filmmaker Sergei Parajanov who directed his multi-award winning The Legend of Suram Fortress

The Legend of Suram Fortress

The Legend of the Suram Fortress is a 1984 film directed by Georgian SSR-born Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov, his first film after 15 years of censorship in the Soviet Union, a film stylistically linked with his earlier The Color of Pomegranates : The film consists in a series of...

in the 1980s. Chonkadze died of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

at the age of thirty, and many of writings were destroyed by his relatives as a potential source of infection.