Nine Kherkheulidze Brothers and the Martyrs of Marabda
The Holy Nine Kherkheulidze Brothers, with their Mother and Sister, and the Nine Thousand Martyrs of Marabda
Martyr · d. 1 July 1625, at the battle of Marabda in Kvemo Kartli
Commemorated 3 August — Commemoration of the nine brothers, their mother and sister, and the nine thousand who fell at Marabda
On 1 July 1625, on the field of Marabda in Kvemo Kartli, a Georgian army of some twenty thousand under King Teimuraz I and Giorgi Saakadze met a Persian force more than twice its size sent by Shah Abbas I to punish the Georgian rising. The Georgians had communicated before dawn. The royal standard — the banner that Georgian tradition traces back to Didgori and Basiani — was carried that day by the nine brothers of the Kherkheulidze house; and as each fell it was taken up by the next, until all nine were dead, and then by their sister, and when she fell by their mother, who held it until she was killed. About nine thousand Georgians died on the field. The Georgian Church keeps them all on August 3 as martyrs: men who went to a battle they knew they would not survive, for a faith the Shah had come to take from them.
The rising of 1625
Shah Abbas I of Persia had spent two decades reducing eastern Georgia. The deportations of 1616 had emptied Kakheti — the Georgian chronicles count them in the hundreds of thousands — and the policy of the Persian court was the conversion of the Georgian nobility to Islam and the settlement of Turkic tribes in the Christian provinces. In 1625 the Georgians rose. At Martqopi, on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), Giorgi Saakadze destroyed the Persian army of Qarchikhan Beg, and for a few months eastern Georgia was free.
Shah Abbas answered with a second and much larger army under Isa-Khan Qurchibashi. The Georgians — the forces of Teimuraz I, king of Kakheti, with Saakadze and the nobles of Kartli — took position at Marabda, south of Tbilisi. They were about twenty thousand against upwards of fifty thousand.
The morning of the battle
The Georgian accounts of the eve and the morning of Marabda are among the most vivid passages in the national historiography, and the Church has taken them as the record of a martyrdom rather than of a battle. The whole army received Holy Communion before dawn. Bishop Domenti (Avalishvili) of Ruisi proposed to serve the Liturgy for them; the soldiers' answer, which the tradition has kept, was that if he would take up his sword and fight beside them, then let him serve — and he did both. The bishops of Rustavi and of Kharchashno were on the field, and fell there.
The distinction between soldier and martyr, which a Byzantine synaxarion would have kept carefully, is deliberately collapsed here. These men were not arrested, tried and given the choice of the fire; they were killed in a defensive battle. But the war was a war of religion, the alternative to fighting was apostasy, and they had prepared for the day by communion and confession. The Georgian Church commemorates them accordingly.
The nine brothers, their sister and their mother
The standard of the kingdom was entrusted to the Kherkheulidze brothers, nine sons of one house — the same banner, in the tradition, that had gone before the Georgian army at Didgori in 1121 and at Basiani in 1202, the two great victories of the Georgian golden age. To bear it was the highest honour the field afforded and, at Marabda, a sentence of death: the banner is where the enemy strikes.
The brothers fell one after another, and each time the banner passed to the next living brother. When the youngest was killed, their sister, who had come to the field, took it up and held it; and when she in turn was struck down, their mother raised it and carried it until she was killed over her children. Nine sons, a daughter and a mother, in one day, around one piece of cloth.
Among the other commanders who died were Davit Jandieri, Aghatang Kherkheulidze and Baadur Tsitsishvili. King Teimuraz fought in the line until sunset; the chronicle says he broke every sword that was put into his hands.
The outcome
Marabda was, on the count of the field, a Persian victory: the Georgians withdrew and about nine thousand of them lay dead. It was also the end of Isa-Khan's campaign. Persian losses were very heavy, the army could not exploit the ground it had taken, and the war passed into the mountain guerrilla in which the Georgians had the advantage; within a year the Shah's project of turning eastern Georgia into a Persian province with a Muslim nobility had failed. The Georgian judgement on the battle has always been that the nine thousand bought the survival of the country and of its faith with their lives, and that is the sense in which they are honoured.
Veneration
The memory of the nine brothers passed at once into Georgian poetry and folk song, and the scene of the banner handed from brother to brother, then to the sister, then to the mother, is one of the fixed images of Georgian national self-understanding — treated in modern Georgian literature, painting and monument. The Church of the Nine Brothers Kherkheulidze keeps their name in the landscape. The Georgian Orthodox Church numbers them, with their mother and sister and the nine thousand, among its martyrs, and appoints their commemoration on August 3, the day of the protomartyr Razhden — the first Georgian martyr and, in this pairing, the last great company of them, kept together on one day.
Feast and commemoration
August 3 (church date; New Calendar civil August 3, Old Calendar civil August 16), kept by the Georgian Orthodox Church and carried into the American calendar from the Georgian, on the same day as the Georgian protomartyr Razhden. The Greek and Antiochian calendars do not keep it. The day falls within the Dormition fast (August 1–14).
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest 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 intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Georgian
Kontakion — Tone 2
Nine brothers held one banner, and passing it from hand to dying hand they gave it to their sister, and she to their mother, and the field of Marabda received them all in one day; wherefore, O holy martyrs of Georgia, with the nine thousand who communed before the dawn, pray that we may not let fall what has been given into our hands.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
The commemoration is modern in its iconographic development, and its type is fixed by the narrative rather than by an old model: the nine brothers ranged in a rank, young men in Georgian dress with the martyr's cross, the banner standing among them, and their mother and sister at the side or below, the mother holding the staff of the standard; in some compositions the battle is shown beneath, with the fallen. Painted versions in Georgian churches, and the icon in the church that bears their name, are all works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
No pre-1900 or otherwise licence-clean image has been located for this collection. The one image on Wikimedia Commons that depicts the commemoration is a modern Georgian icon uploaded with a bare "public domain" tag by someone who is not its painter; under the icon policy an uploader cannot license another artist's living work, and the file has been rejected on that ground rather than stored.
Disputed questions
- The date of the battle. Georgian and Persian sources give 1 July 1625 (Old Style), with some accounts placing the engagement on 30 June. The commemoration on August 3 is a liturgical placement and not the anniversary of the fighting.
- The numbers. "Nine thousand" is the figure the tradition transmits for the Georgian dead and it has become part of the title of the commemoration; the strengths of the two armies — twenty thousand against fifty thousand or more — are likewise the chronicle's figures. Modern military historians treat all of them as approximations in the usual manner of seventeenth-century battle accounts.
- Nine brothers, or a family? The names of the individual brothers are not transmitted as a reliable roll; the chronicles name Aghatang Kherkheulidze among the fallen commanders, and the sister and mother are not named at all. The repository follows the sources in keeping them as a company rather than asserting a list of names.
- Martyrs or fallen soldiers? The question has been raised, and the Georgian Church's answer is embedded in the commemoration itself: the criterion applied is the confession the death served, not the manner of the killing. The repository records the classification martyr as the Georgian Church gives it, and states the ground here.