Commonwealth Graves site, Tbilisi
Image: Major Jono Rilling, Flight Sergeant Matt Searle with Commander Steve Quantrill, Royal Navy, British Defence Attaché to Georgia, Armenia, at the British Military Cemetery, Tbilisi, 2025.
There have been British graves here since January 1919. The first to be interred here was Rifleman William Tester, aged 21, who had served with the 4th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, son of Mr and Mrs J. Tester, of 403, Battle Rd, St. Leonards-on-Sea. (Their house is still there today.) Serving in Macedonia from 1915, some of the Battalion returned to France in June 1918, while their remaining soldiers were to become part of the Army of the Black Sea.
When this military cemetery was originally laid out, it was then an empty hillside on the outskirts of Tbilisi. Ambulances of the 27th Division were based in the nearby Armenian Seminary. As the British troops left the Caucasus and the Soviets took over Georgia, the graves became largely forgotten – though there are reports from 1937 of an elderly English lady, who came to the city as a governess in the time of the Tsar, tending the graves.
The British Military Cemetery, Tiflis, photographed in July 1919, by Major R.C. Everett.
The area was built up as the city expanded in the 1950s and today the site is part of a Georgian family’s back garden. Down a little side street there is a small green plaque on a metal garage door, indicating that here is a Commonwealth Graves Site. Once a memorial stone was finally placed here in 2000, then each November the British Embassy holds a ceremony of remembrance, as well as an official reception at the embassy itself attended by various dignitaries and different nationalities.
In the garden, it says on the stone, in both English and Georgian: ‘1914–1918. In memory of those men of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Indian Army who died in service in this region during the First World War and were buried nearby. Their Glory shall not be blotted out’.
Amongst the flower bushes and vines there is a second smaller plaque with the inscription: ‘225 (Scottish) General support Medical Regiment. We will remember them. September 2007.’
Memorial stone to British and Indian troops who served in the Caucasus.
Military staff from the French Embassy attending the service of Remembrance in the grounds of the British Embassy, Tbilisi.
