Prince Ilia was born in
Tbilisi in 1790 as the fifth child of the then-crown prince
George and his second wife Princess Mariam
Tsitsishvili in the lifetime of his grandfather, King
Heraclius II. Ilia was 10 years old when his father died in December 1800 after two years of a troubled reign. In the ensuing succession crisis, Ilia's elder half brother and regent for the vacant throne,
David, vied with Heraclius II's son,
Iulon. The situation was exploited in 1801 by the Russian Empire to make annexation of Kartli-Kakheti, the eastern Georgian kingdom, followed by the deportation of the Georgian royal family to Russia proper. In 1803 Ilia himself witnessed the killing of the Russian general Ivan Lazarev by his mother, Queen Dowager Mariam, when Lazarev tried to force her out of her bedroom for resettlement in Russia. Mariam and her children were eventually deported to Russia, where Mariam was confined to a monastery. Ilia was accepted in the
Page Corps for military training. Prince Ilia, known in Russia as the
tsarevich Ilya Georgyevich, was commissioned in March 1812 as a
podporuchik of the
Jäger Guards Regiment, with which he served in the
war with
Napoleon's
Grande Armée. Under the command of Major-General
Karl von Bistram, he fought at
Smolensk and was marked for distinction at Borodino. In September 1812 illness forced him to retire from active service to
Moscow. During the
1813–14 campaign he served in the Reserve Army of General
Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky in the vicinity of the besieged French fortress of
Modlin in
Poland. In 1823 Prince Ilia was transferred to the
Izmailov Guards Regiment with the promotion to colonel. He retired with that rank the same year. Prince Ilia mostly lived in Moscow. In 1832, the Russian government revealed that Georgian nobles and intellectuals plotted a coup against the Russian overlordship. Among the principal leaders of the conspiracy was Ilia's brother
Prince Okropir, living in
St. Petersburg. Although one of the numbers, Philadelphos Kiknadze, testified on interrogation that Prince Ilia was also present when Okropir discussed the Georgian affairs with him, Ilia was never brought to a trial or otherwise persecuted. While living in Russia, like many of his siblings and relatives, Ilia showed interest in literature. In 1844, he translated from French into Georgian the
Leibniz–Clarke correspondence as "ბაასი ორთა უჩინებულესთა ფილოსოფთა ევროპიისათა კლარკ და ლეიბნიცისა" ("The conversation between the two preeminent philosophers of Europe, Clarke and Leibniz"). He died in Moscow at the age of 64 in 1854 and was interred at the
Intercession Monastery. == Family and descendants ==