A Georgian monk of Shavsheti who built a cell and chapel at Parekhi and gave himself to ascetic labor in the wilderness.
Our Venerable Father Michael of Parekhi
Michael of Parekhi was a Georgian monastic of the early medieval period, remembered as the founder of the cliffside monastery of Parekhi in the region of Tao-Klarjeti. A native of the village of Norgiali in Shavsheti, in southern Georgia, he was tonsured in the Midznadzori wilderness and pursued the eremitic life before establishing a community in a remote, rocky setting. His foundation belonged to the wider flowering of Georgian monasticism associated with Gregory of Khandzta, and his disciples carried that monastic movement onward into the region of Samtskhe.
Knowledge of his life survives only indirectly. The biography composed by his disciples did not endure, and what is known of him is drawn from hagiographical writings of the 10th and 11th centuries, including the accounts surrounding Gregory of Khandzta and Serapion of Zarzma. He is commemorated on May 27.
According to the tradition recorded in the Georgian sources, Michael directed two of his disciples, Serapion and John, to the region of Samtskhe. There they established a monastery in the village of Zarzma, remembered in the later sources as a great monastic centre. The episode links Michael's foundation at Parekhi to the broader expansion of Georgian monasticism in Tao-Klarjeti and the neighbouring provinces.
The synaxarion relates that Michael was granted the gift of working wonders. By tradition, after he left his cell to dwell atop a large boulder, the devil once caused him to stumble and fall from the rock, but he was preserved unharmed; Gregory of Khandzta afterward set up a cross on either side of his cell. The same accounts report that many pilgrims who visited his grave at Parekhi were healed of their infirmities.