Golinduc of Persia
The Holy Martyr Golinduc, in holy baptism Mary, of Persia
Martyr · Confessor · d. 591, at Nisibis
Commemorated 12 July — Repose at Nisibis after eighteen years' imprisonment for the faith
Golinduc was a Persian noblewoman, the wife of the chief magus of the Sasanian court, who was converted by a vision, baptised with the name Mary, and for her refusal to return to her husband and to the religion of the fire was shut up for eighteen years in the Persian state prison. Released at last, she preached Christ openly under Khosrau II, was received with honour by the Roman authorities on the frontier, made her pilgrimage to the holy places of Jerusalem, and died on the road home at Nisibis in 591. Her Life was written within a decade of her death, first in Syriac by Stephen of Hierapolis and then in Greek by Eustratius of Constantinople, which makes her one of the best-documented saints of the Persian Church.
The wife of the chief magus
She was born a Persian of rank in the reign of Khosrau I Anushirvan (531–579), and was given in marriage to the chief magus of the empire — the head of the Zoroastrian priesthood and one of the great officers of the Sasanian state. The Life presents her as a woman of unusual intelligence who came to see through the religion in which she had been raised before she had any knowledge of another, and who prayed, out of that emptiness, that the true God would show himself.
The answer came in a vision. An angel, she said, took her out of the body and showed her the two ends: the place of punishment where the worshippers of fire were held, and the place of light where the Christians were, and told her that the second was not for her unless she were baptised. She sought out a Christian priest — a dangerous thing for the wife of the chief magus — and received holy baptism, taking the name Mary.
Eighteen years in prison
Her husband, when he understood what she had done, denounced her to the king. Khosrau tried first to reclaim her by persuasion and then by threat; she answered that she was already married to Christ, and refused to return to her husband or to the fire. She was condemned not to death — the execution of a woman of her rank would have made an intolerable scandal — but to perpetual imprisonment, and was shut in the great state prison that the Persians called the Fortress of Oblivion, whose inmates were legally dead and whose names were never spoken again. There she remained for eighteen years, through the end of Khosrau's reign and into that of his son Hormizd IV (579–590).
The Life fills those years with what the hagiographers of the Persian Church always report of them: visions and consolations, an angelic visitant, the light in the cell, the failure of every attempt at coercion. Two episodes stand out because they are circumstantial. The Roman ambassador Aristobulus, sent to the Persian court, obtained access to her, and it was he who taught her the Psalms, which she had never learned; and when at length she was brought out and tortured, the Life reports that the instruments did not hold and the sentence could not be carried out, so that she was returned to her cell.
Freedom, Jerusalem and repose
The upheaval that ended Hormizd's reign — his deposition and murder in 590, the usurpation of Bahram Chobin, and the flight of Khosrau II to the Romans, who restored him — broke the persecution. Golinduc came out of prison and, in the interval of tolerance that followed, preached Christ openly in Persia, which is the act on which her title of martyr chiefly rests. Crossing into Roman territory she was received with great honour by the bishops of the frontier; Domitian, Metropolitan of Melitene, the emperor Maurice's kinsman, took charge of her, and it is from that circle that the written Life derives.
She went up to Jerusalem and prayed at the Holy Sepulchre and the other holy places, and began the journey back towards her own country. She reposed on the way, at Nisibis — the old frontier city, then Persian — in the church of St Sergius, in the year 591.
The two Lives
Her memory is unusually well attested for a saint of the Persian mission. A Syriac Life was composed by Stephen, bishop of Hierapolis (Mabbug), who had met the people concerned; the Syriac is lost, but it was translated and reworked into Greek by Eustratius, presbyter of the Great Church at Constantinople and the biographer of the Patriarch Eutychius, within a few years of her death — a rare case of a hagiographical text standing within living memory of its subject. The Greek Life is the source of the synaxarion notice, and through it of the July 12 commemoration in the Greek and Slavonic calendars.
Feast and commemoration
July 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 25). Hers is a synaxarion commemoration without a proper service in the printed Menaia; where it is kept, the common of a woman martyr is used. She belongs with the long roll of Persian martyrs and confessors that the Byzantine calendar received from the Church of the East — Symeon bar Sabba'e and his companions, Sadoth, the martyrs under Shapur — and is among the latest of them, and among the very few who came out of a Persian prison alive.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy lamb, O Jesus, crieth with a loud voice: Thee, O my Bridegroom, I love, and seeking Thee I contend, and I am crucified and buried together with Thy baptism; I suffer for Thy sake that I may reign with Thee, I die for Thee that I may live in Thee. Accept, then, as a spotless sacrifice her that with longing was slain for Thee. By her intercessions, O merciful One, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou wast wedded to the priest of the fire and didst find a better Bridegroom; and for eighteen years the Fortress of Oblivion could not make thee forgotten, for the angels visited thee and the Psalms were thy food. O Golinduc, called Mary, thou didst come out and preach Him openly: pray that we be not silent.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Golinduc is painted as a mature woman in the long dress and mantle of a Persian noblewoman, the head covered, holding the cross of the martyrs and sometimes a scroll; where the tradition distinguishes her Persian origin it does so by the patterned, high-collared robe and the jewelled headband rather than by any attribute. Narrative treatments show the angel taking her out of the body to see the two places, the baptism, and the prison, from whose barred window a light shines. She may be grouped with the Persian martyrs in composite icons of the Eastern martyrs.
No storable image has been found. Wikimedia Commons returns no results at all for her under any of the transliterations of her name; the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and cannot serve a July saint. A the list of icons still being sought entry is recorded instead.
Disputed questions
- Martyr or confessor? She was not put to death: she survived her tortures, outlived her persecutors, and died in peace at Nisibis. The calendars nevertheless title her martyr, on the ground of the eighteen years' imprisonment, the tortures endured, and the open preaching that invited death. Both classifications are carried in this entry, which is the honest description of what the sources report.
- July 12 or July 13. The Greek synaxaria and the Slavonic Prologue give July 12; some Greek and Melkite calendars, and a number of Western martyrological entries, give July 13. July 12 is followed here as the reading of the majority and of the jurisdictional calendars consulted.
- Which Khosrau. Her conversion and imprisonment fall under Khosrau I (531–579), her release under or just after Hormizd IV, and her freedom to preach under Khosrau II (590–628). Notices which compress this into a single reign have telescoped an eighteen-year imprisonment that in fact spans three kings.
- Her Persian name. Golinduch (Middle Persian Gulandukht, "daughter of the rose") is the form given by the Greek Life; the calendars render it Golinduc, Golindukh and Golinduch indifferently. Mary is her baptismal name and is the one the Syriac tradition prefers.