Father Khakhanov, an Armenian, conducted the ceremony, Father Kasradze recorded the marriage, and Father Christopher Charkviani, a family friend, sang so finely that Yakov Egnatashvili 'generously tipped him 10 roubles', no mean sum. The bride entered with her bridesmaids, who were careful not to tread on the train, a special augur of bad luck. The singers burst into their elevating and harmonic Georgian melodies accompanied by a zurna, a Georgian wind instrument like a Berber pipe. In the church, the choir gathered in the gallery below them, men and women stood separately among the flickering candles.

The garlanded couple then rode to church together in a colourfully decorated wedding phaeton, bells tingling, ribbons fluttering. The groom and his friends gathered for toasts at his home, before parading through the streets to collect Keke and her family. 'It was', Keke remembers, 'hugely glamorous.' The male guests were true karachogheli, 'cheerful, daring and generous', wearing their splendid black chokhas, 'broad-shouldered with slim waists.' The chief of Beso's two best men was Yakov 'Koba' Egnatashvili, a strapping wrestler, wealthy merchant and local hero who, as Keke puts it, 'always tried to assist us in the creation of our family'. The marriage was celebrated with the rambunctious festivity of the wild town of Gori.

The wedding, according to tradition, took place just after sunset Georgian social life, writes one historian, was 'as ritualised as English Victorian behaviour'.

Beso was an enviable groom, a true karachogheli, with beautiful moustaches, very well dressed - and with the special sophistication of a town-dweller.' Nor was Keke in any doubt that she herself was something of a catch too: 'Among my female friends, I became the desired and beautiful girl.' Indeed, 'slender, chestnut-haired with big eyes', she was said to be 'very pretty'. 'Beso', says Keke in newly discovered memoirs, 'was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him. On, a handsome young cobbler, the very model of a chivalrous Georgian man, Vissarion 'Beso' Djugashvili, aged twenty-two, married Ekaterina 'Keke' Geladze, seventeen, an attractive freckled girl with auburn hair, at the Uspensky Church in the small Georgian town of Gori.Ī matchmaker had visited Keke's house to tell her about the suit of Beso the cobbler: he was a respected artisan in Baramov's small workshop, quite a catch.

Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore