Today, October 31, severed heads and bloodstained costumes become seasonal entertainment. But October 31 also appears on the Orthodox calendar as the commemoration of Christians whose severed heads were no theatrical props—and whose Muslim executioners offered a brutally simple escape: renounce Christ.1
In other words, while the modern West plays at demons and ghosts, the Georgian Orthodox Church remembers a genuine demonic spectacle: the systematic slaughter of 100,000 Christians who refused to abandon Jesus Christ.
In March 1226, the Khwarazmian sultan Jalal al-Din Mingburnu, leading an army of Turkmen, captured the Georgian capital of Tbilisi after local (fifth column) Muslims opened the city gates at night. What followed was not ordinary wartime pillage. It was a deliberate genocide of Christians—one of many that have been deliberately hid from you.
The Georgian account describes the scene with unsparing clarity:
Words are powerless to convey the destruction that the enemy wrought: tearing infants from their mothers’ breasts, they beat their heads against the bridge, watching as their eyes dropped from their skulls…
A river of blood flowed through the streets during this orgy of sadism. The Muslims castrated young boys, systematically raped women, and stabbed mothers to death over the lifeless bodies of their children. The whole city shuddered with wailing. The Mtkvari River and the streets ran red.
What Sultan Jalal al-Din did next turned the massacre into an explicit test of faith—one that still stands as a clear historical example of jihadist terror against Christians who refused to renounce Christ.
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