David and Tarichan of Georgia
The Holy Martyrs David and Tarichan, Children of Georgia
Martyr · Child Martyr · d. 693, in the province of Tao
Commemorated 18 May — Murder of the two boys by their pagan uncle on the mountain above Divri
David and Tarichan were two Georgian boys, the children of the nobleman Vardan and his wife Tagine, kinsfolk of the royal house, murdered in the year 693 by their own uncle Theodosius because they would not leave the faith of their baptism. Theodosius, a pagan, had seized their dead father's estate and tried to secure it by adopting the boys into his own religion — offering them sweets, an inheritance and the affection of a father; they answered that they were content with the faith of their father and would keep it until their souls left their bodies. Their mother fled with them to the province of Tao, where they kept sheep on a mountainside; there Theodosius ambushed them and stabbed them both. The Georgian tradition surrounds their deaths with wonders — David's shepherd's staff struck root and became a tree, the murderer was struck blind on the spot, and Tagine restored his sight with earth soaked in her son's blood, forgiving him — and the story ends not with vengeance but with the uncle's baptism and the building of two churches over the boys' graves.
The seizure of the inheritance
The account is set in the Georgia of the late seventh century, a country divided between the Byzantine and the Arab spheres, where the old aristocratic houses were Christian but paganism survived in the mountains and among individual families. Vardan and Tagine are described as pious Christians and relatives of the king. Vardan died while his two sons were still small children, and his wife's brother Theodosius, who was not a Christian, took possession of everything the family had.
Theodosius's difficulty was that the boys would one day be men and would have a legal claim on their father's estate. His solution was to absorb them: if he could bring his sister and her sons over to his own religion he could adopt the children, and the property would never be reclaimed. He put the bargain to Tagine plainly — leave the faith of the crucified Christ, take mine, and I will adopt your children. She answered him with the sentence the Georgian tradition has kept: it was enough that he had seized her sons' estate; the inheritance they would receive from their Father in heaven he could not seize.
The children's confession
Foiled by the mother, Theodosius went to work on the sons. He called them to him, embraced them, and gave them sweets — the detail is preserved because it is the exact measure of their age — and made them the offer that would have made them rich: now you are my sons, and everything I have is yours; trust me as obedient sons trust a beloved father; turn from your father's faith and I will show you a better way.
The account says the two were silent for a moment. Then they answered together that they were perfectly content with their father's faith and would remain loyal to it until the day their souls departed from their flesh, and that they were ready to suffer everything for the love of their Lord and heavenly Father. It is the whole of their teaching and the whole reason they are in the calendar: two small boys who could be bribed with sweets and could not be bribed out of their baptism.
The flight to Tao and the murder
Theodosius did not dare use open force, fearing the anger of the Christian community around him; he made peace with the household and planned a murder in secret. Tagine sensed what was coming and fled south with her sons into the province of Tao, the highland country of the upper Chorokhi where Georgian monasticism would later flourish.
His informers told Theodosius that the brothers were pasturing sheep on a mountain top, and he laid an ambush. But the boys heard the noise of the armed men and saw them coming before the attack. What follows is the detail that makes the story unbearable and unforgettable: David, seeing his uncle, was glad, and ran towards him to embrace him — and Theodosius stabbed him before he reached him. The tradition adds that the martyr's shepherd's staff fell from his hand as he died, and where it struck the ground it became a great tree; two hundred years afterwards Christians felled it and divided the wood among themselves as a relic.
Tarichan, who had watched his brother killed, ran for the village of Divri to fetch help. The pursuers overtook him, stabbed him, and left him dead in the open.
The blinding and the forgiveness
When the men came back to Theodosius they found that God had taken away his sight. The account says they were so struck that they could neither speak nor move from the place. After a time Theodosius wept, and the tears were the beginning of his repentance.
Tagine came, and in the first rage of grief denounced her brother, so that those who heard the crying of the inconsolable mother wept with her. But while she was stroking the bodies of her sons, Theodosius turned to her and said that the inextinguishable Light had shone upon her from the unapproachable and true and eternal Light, and asked her to pray to the holy martyrs that the Lord would have mercy on him and make him worthy of the seal of Christ. Hearing that, Tagine understood that God had received her children as a holy sacrifice; and — the turn on which the whole story rests — she said, "May God forgive you the murder of my sons." Then she took up a handful of the earth stained with David's blood, anointed her brother's eyes with it, and his sight came back at once.
After
The Georgian account is unusually careful about the sequel. Theodosius confessed his crime before the Catholicos himself, was baptised, and built a church in honour of his nephew Saint David. The mayor of Divri took Tarichan's relics and built a church over them in his name. Tagine went to live in the village of Tadzarani and reposed there. And as a sign of the sanctity of the martyrs, the tradition says, their bodies shone with a radiant light each evening when night fell.
The year given is 693.
Feast and commemoration
May 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 31). The two children are commemorated by the Georgian Orthodox Church, whose calendar is the source of the feast, and are carried on the Russian and OCA day-lists, which supply the fullest English form of the Life; they are not in the Greek Menaion. Their cult is local to the province of Tao and to Divri, where the two churches raised over them stood.
They belong to the small and affecting class of the Georgian child-martyrs and martyrs of the household, and are read in Georgia as an icon of the forgiveness of enemies: the point of the story as the tradition tells it is not the murder but the mother's "May God forgive you," and the earth of her son's blood healing the man who shed it. The day always falls in the Pentecostarion, whose movable propers take precedence.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contests received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
The two are painted as two boys standing together, of the same height or with David a little the elder, in the short belted tunic and cloak of Georgian lay dress, each holding the small cross of the martyrs; their beardless faces and their size are the whole of their identification, and the inscription names them. Where a narrative element is added it is David's shepherd's staff, or the tree that grew from it — the sign proper to them — and sometimes the sheep of the mountain pasture; the blinded uncle and the mother anointing his eyes with the bloodied earth appear in the fuller Georgian cycles.
No pre-1900 image of David and Tarichan was located for this collection — a search of Wikimedia Commons for them returns nothing at all — and the Menologion of Basil II, in any case a Greek source covering only September to February, does not contain them. The entry wants an icon; Georgian church art of the Tao region would be the place to look.
Disputed questions
- The date and the historical frame. The year 693 is the figure transmitted by the Georgian tradition and repeated by the Slavonic and OCA notices; it is not independently documented, and the Life as it survives is a devotional narrative of a kind written down well after the events, with the two-hundred-year note about the felling of David's tree showing that the text as we have it is at least of the ninth century or later. The substance — a pagan kinsman, a disputed inheritance, two child confessors, a local cult at Divri in Tao — is of the sort that local memory preserves reliably even when its chronology is soft.
- The spelling of the second name. Georgian ტარიჭანი is rendered Tarichan, Tarichani and Tarechan in English lists; the OCA prints Tarichan and the Greek and Slavonic day-lists Tarechan. They are one name.
- Child-martyrs, or youths? The account's details — the sweets, the running to embrace the uncle, the shepherding — indicate children, and the Georgian Church honours them as child-martyrs; no age is given in the text. This entry classes them as child-martyrs on that ground, with the reservation noted.
- Not the many other Davids of the calendar. This David is neither David of Thessalonica the dendrite (June 26), nor David of Saint Anne's Skete, the Athonite new-martyr of the same day (†1813), nor David the Prophet-King, nor David the Builder, the Georgian king, nor David of Gareji of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers — the most famous Georgian saint of the name, whose feast belongs to the Thursday after the Ascension.