George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
"To be awake is everything"
First of all I would like to point out that because of the scarcity of information about Gurdjieffs early years, and the lack of independant confirmation of Gurdjieffs own, apparently heavily edited, account in "Meetings with Remarkable Men" it is difficult to ascertain exactly what, where and when things actually happened. "Meetings with Remarkable Men" contains many sudden jumps in the narrative, unexplained gaps and missing periods. It is therefore difficult to attempt to piece together the various different and sometimes conflicting accounts of Gurdjieffs life.
There is some debate as to exactly when, and consequently where, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born. In his passport, and in the newspapers reporting his death, he is said to have been born on the 28th of december 1877, but one of his most prominent pupils, J.G Bennet, wrote in a book published in 1949, the same year that Gurdjieff died, that he had been born in 1866. Colin Wilson writes in his short but interesting biography about Gurdjieff that he thinks the year 1873 is the most probable. This is important, since if Gurdjieff was born in december 1877 he was a russian, but if he was born earlier he was turkish, since Gumru, or Alexandropol as it was renamed, was taken from Turkey by the russians in 1877, during the Turk-Russian war. 
We do know that he was born in the greek quarter of Gumru/Alexandropol sometime in the ´sixties or ´seventies, and that his parents were rather poor. His father, Giorgios Giorgiades, was a greek lumberer turned carpenter who freelanced as a storyteller, and his mother was armenian. The family moved to the city of Kars about the year 1878. Kars was a more international city than Alexandropol had been, and so were to provide the young Gurdjieff with the stimulation which his growing intellect needed. The Gurdjieff household was greek-orthodox, and the young Gurdjieff was meant to become a priest, and so recived schooling from Father Borsh, the Dean of the Cathedral at Kars, who apparently told him that our ancient forefathers possessed much wisdom and knowledge that had been forgotten about. (Gurdjieff would later apply to the Georgian Theological Seminary but fail and be denied entrance.)
This were something that would inspire Gurdjieff later in life, and would be a constant theme in his subsequent teachings. Gurdjieff was also fascinated with the occult and paranormal, and tells of several strange incidents in his youth were he wittnessed things that apparently couldn´t be explained in conventional ways. He started working at an early age, like most children of the time, and found that he was good with practical and mechanical things. He used to earn money by working as a handyman, repearing watches and doing carpenting, in Alexandropol, and in his early teens he started working at the railway station at Tiflis. By saving the money he got from his work at the railway he managed to save enought to quit his job and start to study. A friend of Gurdjieff, Sarkis Pogossian, a young man studying to be a priest, had come to live with him, and the two had, through long discussions, come to the conclusion that there existed a body of "secret teachings" that had been preserved since time immemorial. Determined to discover these secret teachings, the two friends moved to the ruins of the old armenian capital of Ani. There, one day while exploring an old tunnel they discovered the remains of an old cell, and inside they found some old armeninan documents.
They had the documents translated and found that they spoke of a mysterious society, "The Sarmoung Brotherhood", that were supposed to have existed in the city of Nivssi, that were the old name for the city of Mosul. The documents revealed that the brotherhood had moved to a valley located about three days journey away from Nivssi. Since this valley lay only about a few hundred kilometers away, Gurdjieff and Pogossian decided go and see if they could find any trace of the mysterious brotherhood. During their journey, which was made dangerous due to brigands and warring tribesmen, they met an armenian priest who let them stay at his house for a month. The priest told them about an old map that he had, and that a russian nobleman had once offered to buy it from him, and when refused, had paid 200 pounds to copy it. Gurdjieff saw the map and realised that it was an ancient map of "pre-sand Egypt". One day Gurdjieff and Pogossian managed to copy the map while the priest was away, and they decided to go to Egypt instead. They traveled to Smyrna, where they befriended a group of english sailors bound for Alexandria. 
They managed to get work aboard their ship, Gurdjieff as a polisher and Pogossian in the engine-room. When they reached Alexandria, Pogossian had decided to stay aboard the ship and continue on to Liverpool, so Gurdjieff got off alone. Gurdjieff now spent some time in Egypt visiting the pyramids, where he met, seemingly by chance, Yuri Lubovedsky, the russian nobleman who had offered to buy the map of ancient Egypt. The two became friends, and in Lubovedsky´s company Gurdjieff traveled to Thebe, where he studied the various greek mysteries.
In july of 1926 Aleister Crowley is reported to have visited the Prieuré at Fountanbleu, but accounts of this meeting varies and there seems to be some confusion as to if it actually took place. Some sources say it did and some say it did not. According to the most widely circulated version of the story the meeting between Gurdjieff and Crowley ended with Crowley being thrown out and humilliated by Gurdjieff. One should note that this story is most often circulated among the followers of Gurdjieff and disregarded by the followers of Crowley. Make of it what you will.
