Zurab Sotkilava

In 1960, Sotkilava graduated from the Tbilisi State Polytechnical Institute.

Sotkilava began playing association football during childhood. At age 16, he joined Dynamo Sukhumi where he played full-back. In 1956 he became captain of the Georgia national team, and two years later he joined Dynamo Tbilisi.[2] In 1958 he incurred severe injuries while playing in Yugoslavia. This ultimately led to the end of his sports career in Czechoslovakia the following year.[3]

In 1965 he graduated from the Tbilisi Conservatory under the guidance of David Andguladze. Between 1965 and 1974 Sotkilava was a soloist of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre (named after Zakaria Paliashvili). From 1966-68 he was a student at La Scala where his teacher was Dinaro Barra. He later became a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory where he remained until 1988. After six years he became chairman of the International Tchaikovsky Competition and was a member of the Bologna Academy of Music, at which point he became known for his singing of Giuseppe Verdi's works.

By 2000, he became Kinoshok chairman of Anapa Film Festival which was hosted throughout the CIS and Baltic States.[4]

In 2015, he was diagnosed with a malignant pancreatic tumor; he died in 2017, at age 80,[5] and was survived by his wife, Eliso Turmanidze, and his two daughters.