Sir Oliver Wardrop
(Sir) John Oliver Wardrop KBE CMG, (1864-1948) was a British diplomat, traveler and translator, known best for his role as Great Britain’s first Chief Commissioner of Transcaucasus in Georgia, Eastern Europe (1919–21), and also as the founder and benefactor of Kartvelian studies at Oxford University.
After travelling to Georgia, which was then part of the Russian Empire, in 1887, Oliver Wardrop wrote his study The Kingdom of Georgia, published in 1888. In 1894 during his second journey to Georgia he mastered the Georgian language and published a series of books on Georgia, including his translation of Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani’s The Book of Wisdom and Lies.
On his death Wardrop and his sister Marjory Wardrop, also a scholar of Georgian literature, left a legacy to Oxford University with which the Georgian Society was founded in 2003.
In October 2015, a statue of Sir Oliver and his sister was placed in the park behind the Parliament building in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. [1] [2]
