Salome the Georgian
The Holy Martyr Salome of Jerusalem, of the Georgian nation
Martyr · d. 13th century, at Jerusalem
Commemorated 20 July — Martyrdom at Jerusalem
Salome was a Georgian nun of the women's community attached to the Monastery of the Cross at Jerusalem in the thirteenth century, who was seized by the Muslim authorities of the city for speaking openly in defence of Christ. Under threat she at first denied him; then, repenting, she came forward and confessed publicly that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, and for this she was tortured and beheaded, and her body burned. Almost nothing else has survived of her, and the Georgian and OCA calendars keep her on July 20 with the barest of notices. Her memory is preserved chiefly for the shape of it: a denial, a repentance, and a second confession that could not be retracted.
The Georgians at Jerusalem
The Georgian presence in the Holy City in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was substantial and old. The Monastery of the Holy Cross, west of the walls, was the great Georgian house of Palestine — rebuilt in the eleventh century, endowed by the Georgian crown, and a centre of Georgian learning; Shota Rustaveli is traditionally said to have ended his days there. Around it lived a colony of Georgian monks, nuns and pilgrims. Salome belonged to a women's monastery of this Georgian community.
The thirteenth century was violent for all of them. The Khwarezmian irruption of 1244 devastated the Christian establishments of Jerusalem, and the Mamluk regime that followed was intermittently harsh toward the monasteries; Georgian sources of the period record more than one martyrdom among their people in the Holy Land.
Denial, repentance, martyrdom
The account transmitted is short. Salome was arrested for her outspoken defence of Christ before the Muslim authorities. Threatened with death, she denied him. Whatever passed in her afterwards is not recorded; what is recorded is that she repented, returned of her own accord, and confessed publicly before those who had taken her that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. She was tortured to make her recant a second time, would not, and was beheaded; her remains were then burned, that no relics should be left to the Christians.
The Georgian sources associate her death with that of another martyr of the same community, Luke of Jerusalem, and place it after his — the notices give dates in the 1270s — while other lists place her simply in the thirteenth century.
Feast and commemoration
July 20 (Old Calendar civil August 2), kept by the Georgian Orthodox Church and, following it, by the OCA, on the great feast of the Prophet Elijah. No proper office is transmitted; she is sung, where she is sung, from the common of a woman martyr. She is commemorated also in the synaxis of the Georgian saints.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy lamb, O Jesus, crieth with a loud voice: thee, my Bridegroom, do I love, and seeking thee I contend, and am crucified and buried with thee in thy baptism; I suffer for thy sake that I may reign with thee, and die for thee that I may live in thee. Receive me as a spotless sacrifice, offered to thee in love. By her prayers, O merciful one, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No image of Salome is transmitted, and no icon of her earlier than the modern Georgian revival has been located for this corpus. She would properly be painted as a nun-martyr of the Georgian type: in the dark monastic habit and veil, holding the martyr's cross in her right hand, the left open before the breast in acceptance; where the Georgian saints are shown in composite panels she takes her place among the martyrs of the Holy Land. The distinguishing episode of her life — the denial and the return — has no established iconographic form.
Disputed questions
- Date. The Georgian tradition connects her martyrdom with that of Luke of Jerusalem, whose memory is kept in February, and dates it after his, in the later 1270s; the calendars give only "13th century." This entry indexes her in the thirteenth century.
- The identity of the persecutors. The English lives say "Persian Moslems," which is not a usable description of the rulers of Jerusalem in that century; the phrase probably renders a Georgian idiom for Muslims generally, and the historical setting is the Ayyubid–Khwarezmian–Mamluk disorder of the middle and later thirteenth century.
- How much is known. The sources themselves say that very little has come down; nothing is transmitted of her family, her age, her monastic name, or the year. No detail is supplied here that the record does not carry.
- Not to be confused with Salome the Myrrhbearer, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, nor with Salome the Midwife of the Nativity narratives, nor with the Herodian Salome of the Gospels.