Vazavard

Vazavard, or Varazvard, is the brother who accompanies Asam to Kambechani in the Bagrationi origin legend told by Sumbat Davitis-dze in the eleventh century. In Sumbat's Life and Tale of the Bagratids, seven brothers descended from King David leave Palestine and are baptized in Armenia; three remain there as ancestors of the Armenian Bagratuni, and four proceed to Kartli, where Guaram is chosen eristavi and founds the Georgian line, Sahak goes to Kakheti, and Asam and Varazvard go to Kambechani.

There, the chronicle says, the two brothers killed the Persian commander, took the province, and settled at Khornabuji, and their descendants were still ruling there when Sumbat wrote. The text does not distinguish the brothers' roles and records nothing else about Varazvard: no date, no wife, no children, no death. Kambechani lay in the east of Kakheti, and its fortress of Khornabuji near modern Dedoplistsqaro was already a major settlement in the fifth century before falling to the Sasanians, so the story attaches the family to a real stronghold on the Persian frontier.

Modern historians, following Cyril Toumanoff, reject the legend of the seven brothers as a construction designed to give the dynasty a biblical pedigree, and derive the Georgian Bagratids from the Armenian Bagratuni prince Adarnase, father of Ashot I, in the late eighth century. Vazavard belongs to the story the Bagrationi told of themselves, not to the history that can be verified.