Kaikhosro the Georgian
The Holy Martyr Kaikhosro the Georgian
Martyr · d. 1612, in Persia
Commemorated 16 June — Tortured to death under Shah Abbas I for the veneration of the holy icons
Kaikhosro was a Georgian who was tortured to death by Shah Abbas I in 1612 for refusing to give up the veneration of the holy icons. His memory survives by a narrow thread: the commemoration books and the painted figures of the Monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem — the Georgian house outside the walls of the city — where he was inscribed among the benefactors and the martyrs, and the eighteenth-century researches of Archbishop Timote (Gabashvili), who catalogued what he found there and carried the name into the Georgian tradition. He is commemorated on June 16.
The reign of Shah Abbas I (1587–1629) was the hardest passage in the long martyrdom of Christian Georgia. The shah's campaigns into Kartli and Kakheti in the first decades of the seventeenth century emptied whole provinces, deported the population of Kakheti into Persia by the tens of thousands, and set the Georgian nobility a standing choice between apostasy to Islam and death. Out of those years come the great Georgian martyr-commemorations — the hundred thousand martyrs of Tbilisi are of an earlier century, but Queen Ketevan, flayed and killed at Shiraz in 1624, is of exactly this reign, as is Kaikhosro.
What is transmitted of Kaikhosro himself is a single sentence with a date and a cause: that in 1612 he was put to torture and died under it at the order of Shah Abbas, and that the charge was his veneration of the holy icons — the refusal, that is, to accept the Muslim prohibition of images along with the rest of the religion pressed on him. Of his family, his station, his province, and the place and manner of the tortures, the record consulted preserves nothing.
Transmission of the memory
His name was kept where Georgians kept their dead: at the Monastery of the Holy Cross (Jvari) outside Jerusalem, the Georgian foundation which for centuries received the offerings, the commemoration-lists and the portraits of the Georgian crown and nobility. In the eighteenth century Archbishop Timote (Gabashvili), one of the founders of Georgian church history, travelled to the holy places and made a record of what the monastery preserved — its frescoes and its books of commemoration — and it is through his account that the martyr Kaikhosro is known at all. His image is reported among the painted figures of the monastery.
Feast and commemoration
June 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 29). Georgian usage, and in the OCA's enumeration of the day, which carries the Georgian saints of the Church of Georgia; he does not appear in the Greek or Antiochian menaia for June 16. He belongs with the martyrs of the reign of Shah Abbas — with Queen Ketevan the Martyr (September 13) and the Georgian confessors of the Persian deportations — and is commemorated with the whole company of Georgian saints in their synaxis.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Kaikhosro, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for possessing thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Georgian martyrs of the Persian persecutions are painted in the dress of their own rank and century — the long chokha with its rows of cartridge-pockets, or the robes of a nobleman of the Safavid period — holding the martyr's cross, and often with the instrument of their death beside them. Kaikhosro's proper attribute, given the cause of his death, is the icon held in the hands or pressed to the breast: the sign of what he refused to surrender. His reported figure among the wall-paintings of the Monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem is the only early image of him named in the sources, and no photograph of it in the public domain has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- A record of one witness. Everything rests on Timote Gabashvili's report of the Jerusalem monastery's frescoes and commemoration books, a century and more after the event. That is a serious source of its kind — the Holy Cross lists are among the primary documents of late medieval Georgia — but it is a single line of transmission, and the Life cannot be filled out beyond it without invention. Nothing further is asserted here.
- The name. Kaikhosro (Georgian ქაიხოსრო, from the Persian Kai Khosrow) was a common name in the Georgian nobility, borne by princes of Kartli, atabegs of Samtskhe and members of the houses of Gurieli and Jaqeli in these very generations. The martyr is not to be identified with any of them on the strength of the name alone, and no such identification is made here.
- The charge. "For his veneration of the holy icons" is the received formula. It should be read as shorthand for a refusal to apostatise, in a persecution whose demand was conversion to Islam, rather than as a doctrinal proceeding about images of the kind the Byzantine iconoclast controversy produced.