Dinar of Hereti
The Holy and Right-believing Queen Dinar of Hereti
Queen · Righteous · d. 10th century
Commemorated 30 June — Memory of the queen of Hereti who returned her people to the Orthodox faith
Dinar (Dinara) was the tenth-century queen of Hereti, the principality of south-eastern Georgia on the Alazani between Kakheti and the Caucasian Albanian lands, who with her son Ishkhanik brought her people out of the Monophysite confession that had spread through the eastern Transcaucasus and into communion with the Chalcedonian Orthodox Church of Georgia. That is the substance of her sanctity, and it is recorded in the Georgian chronicle Kartlis Tskhovreba, "the Life of Kartli." Her name travelled far beyond Georgia: a Russian Tale of Queen Dinara, current from the fifteenth century, made her the heroine of a war against a Persian shah, and her figure — a queen on a white horse, victorious — was painted in the throne-hall of the Moscow Kremlin, where it may still be seen. Because the Russian tale is romance rather than chronicle, her identity was long disputed in the Russian Church, many taking her for Tamar the Great; the Georgian sources settle it on the queen of Hereti. She is commemorated on June 30.
Hereti and the Monophysite question
Hereti was a small kingdom in the extreme east of the Georgian world, lying along the lower Alazani and marching with Kakheti to the west and with the country of the Caucasian Albanians (Aghvank) to the east. Its position made it a confessional frontier. From the sixth century, when the Armenian Church and with it much of the eastern Transcaucasus rejected the Council of Chalcedon, Hereti and its neighbours were drawn into the anti-Chalcedonian orbit, while Kartli and Kakheti — the Georgian heartlands — held with Byzantium and the Chalcedonian definition. To be the ruler of Hereti in the tenth century was therefore to hold a border that was doctrinal as much as territorial, and the question of which communion the country belonged to was still open when Dinar came to power.
The queen and her son
The Georgian chronicle names her as regent for, and then colleague of, her son Ishkhanik, prince of Hereti. Under them the country was brought back into the Orthodox — Chalcedonian — communion: the churches of Hereti passed to the Georgian rite and the Georgian hierarchy, the anti-Chalcedonian clergy withdrew or conformed, and the frontier of Orthodoxy in the eastern Caucasus was pushed back east. The Georgian tradition credits the initiative to Dinar herself, and the tenth century is the moment at which Hereti begins to appear in the sources as a Georgian and Orthodox country rather than as a marchland of Albania. The result, in the language of the synaxaria, is that "a great part of the eastern Transcaucasus was saved" from the heresy, and it is for this — not for a conquest — that she is honoured.
The Russian legend
Some centuries later the name reappears a thousand miles to the north. A Russian narrative, the Tale of Queen Dinara (Повесть о царице Динаре), circulating in manuscript from the late fifteenth or the sixteenth century, tells of an "Iberian" queen, daughter of a king Alexander, who at her father's death is threatened by the shah of Persia, refuses tribute, prays before an icon of the Mother of God, rides out at the head of her army, and wins. It is a moral tale about a woman's courage and trust in God, addressed to a Muscovite audience with its own reasons for liking stories of tribute refused; the Georgian material in it is thin and much rearranged. Its influence, however, was considerable: Queen Dinara on her white horse was painted among the exemplary rulers in the throne-hall of the Kremlin (the Palace of Facets), and the name entered Russian devotional usage. Routes for the story's transmission northward through the Caucasus and the Slavic tribes have been suggested on the basis of the Armenian historian Movses Kaghankatvatsi (Moses of Kalankatuk), whose History of the Caucasian Albanians is the chief eastern source for that country.
Feast and commemoration
June 30 (church date; New Calendar civil June 30; Old Calendar civil July 13). She is kept in the Georgian calendar and, following it, in the Russian books and in the Orthodox Church in America's calendar; she is not in the Greek or Antiochian menaia. The Georgian Church, which keeps the Old Calendar, observes the day on July 13 civil. Her day falls on the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles, and she is sung with the apostolic office; she is not to be confused with Tamar the Great (May 1), with whom the Russian tradition long confused her, nor with Nina of Georgia (January 14), the enlightener of the nation, whose apostolic work hers continued at the eastern edge of it four centuries later.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O mother, was preserved undistorted that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O righteous Dinar, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
There is no ancient icon of Dinar, and no settled Byzantine type. What exists is twofold. In Georgia she is painted, in modern icons, as a crowned queen in the Georgian royal dress, holding a cross and often a model of a church — the type of a right-believing sovereign who restored the faith, and close to the way Tamar is painted. In Russia the image that carried her name was not an icon at all but a secular wall-painting: the victorious queen on a white horse among the exemplary rulers of the throne-hall of the Kremlin, an emblem of the Tale of Queen Dinara rather than a liturgical portrait, and repainted more than once since the seventeenth century. No pre-1900 icon of the saint has been located and none is stored here; the modern Georgian icons are living iconographers' copyrighted work, which no uploader's licence on a photograph of them can release.
Disputed questions
Who is the Dinar of the Russian books? For a long time she was taken to be Tamar the Great (†1213), the greatest of Georgia's queens and the obvious candidate for a tale of a victorious Iberian sovereign; but Tamar's reign will not fit the chronology or the circumstances of the tale, and Tamar has her own well-attested cultus and feast (May 1 and the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers). The identification now generally accepted, and the one the Orthodox Church in America adopts, is with the Dinar of Hereti of the Kartlis Tskhovreba — the tenth-century queen whose achievement was confessional. What remains true is that the Russian tale is not a life of her: it is a legend that has attached her name to a different story, and the saint commemorated on June 30 is the queen of Hereti, not the heroine of the Persian war.
How much is known of her? Very little. The Georgian chronicle is terse; no vita survives; the year of her death is not transmitted, and nothing is recorded of her personal life or her burial. This entry accordingly gives an honest short life rather than a long one, as the record allows.