In Georgia, the story of Akaki Khoshtaria’s life is often folklorically told as an epic of the man who built the first railroad in Iran, who owned most of Georgia’s soap, fish and wool production, and who founded the Georgian Navy. Khoshtaria’s true story, though remarkably eccentric, actually centers around securing oil concession in the southern Caucasus Region in the early 20th century.
Born in the village of Sujuna in Samegrelo, Khoshtaria was the son of regional governor, Methode Khoshtaria. After finishing school, Akaki Khoshtaria actually studied to become an Agronomist, an expert in soil health, at the Gardening and Winemaking Institute in Nikita. In 1898, Luka Asatiani, the ruler of Batumi, invited Khoshtaria to be the city’s head gardener. However, in what many would consider a stroke of luck, Khoshtaria quickly transformed from an award-wining gardener to an oil magnate.
The story goes that in the early 1900s, Khoshtaria and one of his friends were shipping oil from Poti to Odessa, Ukraine, when they were caught in a storm and had to divert to a Turkish port for safety. At this port, they sold all of his ship’s cargo at an unexpectedly high profit, which allowed him to re-invest in the best oil-extraction and transportation equipment available. Consequently, Khoshtaria founded a new company, the “Russo-Persian Oil Producing and Trading Company,” and quickly became one of the biggest oil producers in the Eastern Hemisphere. In 1916, the Iranian government granted him three critical provinces: Gilan, Mazandaran and Astrabad. Known as the “Khoshtaria Concession,” his stake in Iranian oil became highly sought after by Russian and English oil companies. In 1920, Khoshtaria sold his concession to Anglo-Persian, a British oil company, for £200,000, which is equivalent to ₾9.7 million today.
With Khoshtaria’s great wealth also came great social responsibility. In the years before his death in 1932, he funded scholarships for dozens of Georgian students to study at universities in Paris and Berlin and donated the equivalent of ₾2.5 million to Tbilisi State University and Georgian Theatre Royal. Khoshtaria also financed a railway line from the city of Poti to his hometown; purchased paintings from the prominent Georgian artist Lado Gudiashvili and French, cubist artist André Lot for the Art Museum of Georgia; and honored his previous work as Batumi’s head gardener by donating to the city’s botanical gardens.