Shushanik of Georgia
The Holy Martyr Shushanik (Susanna), Queen of Georgia
Martyr · Queen · b. c. 440, Armenia; daughter of Vardan Mamikonian — d. 17 October 475, in the fortress of Tsurtavi
Commemorated 28 August — Commemoration in the Slavic and Byzantine calendars, 17 October — The day of her repose, kept as her principal feast in the Georgian Church
Shushanik — the Slavic books call her Susanna — was an Armenian noblewoman, daughter of the general Vardan Mamikonian who fell at Avarayr, and wife of Varsken, the pitiakhsh or viceroy of the Georgian march of Gugark. When Varsken went to the court of the Persian king Peroz and there apostatised to Zoroastrianism, promising to bring his wife and four children over with him, she left the palace, shut herself in a cell beside the church at Tsurtavi, and would not be moved. Her husband beat her, dragged her by the hair, chained her, and finally shut her in a fortress prison, where she lay six years, ministering by her prayers to the sick who were brought to her window, and died of her treatment on 17 October 475. The account of it was written within a decade by her confessor, the priest Iakob Tsurtaveli, who saw the whole thing: The Martyrdom of Shushanik is the oldest surviving work of Georgian literature and one of the most immediate martyr-acts in any language. Her relics were translated to the Metekhi church at Tbilisi in 578.
Family and marriage
She was born about 440 into the first house of Armenia. Her father was Vardan Mamikonian, the sparapet — commander-in-chief — who led the Armenian revolt against the religious policy of Yazdegerd II and was killed at the battle of Avarayr in 451, the defining event of Armenian Christian memory. Shushanik therefore grew up inside the very question that would kill her: whether a Christian people under Persian rule may be compelled to the fire-altars. Her given name in the household was Vardeni, "little rose," after her father; Shushanik is the form the tradition kept.
She was married to Varsken, son of Arshusha, the pitiakhsh of Gugark — a Georgian border-province, whose ruler held his march between the Georgian kingdom of Kartli and the Persian empire and answered in practice to the Great King. It was a political marriage between two Christian dynasties on the same frontier. They had four children, three sons and a daughter.
The apostasy
About 470 Varsken went to the court of the shah Peroz I. What he wanted from the visit was advancement; what he did to get it was to renounce Christ and accept the religion of the Magi, and — the detail that made the crime unforgivable to Iakob and to everyone since — to undertake on his own initiative that he would bring his wife and his children with him into it. He was rewarded with a Persian royal bride and returned to Tsurtavi.
A messenger reached the household before he did. Iakob's account of Shushanik's reaction is famous for its plainness: she heard the news, struck herself on the face, wept, and said that her husband had thrown himself into hell and had tried to drag her with him. Then she got up, left the palace, and went to a small cell beside the church at Tsurtavi, and lived there.
Six years
Varsken sent for her, cajoled, then threatened, then came himself. Iakob — who was present through most of it, and whose text is at its most disturbing precisely where it is most restrained — records the beatings, the dragging by the hair across the floor, the kicking, the chains put on her hands and feet, the blows from a poker. He records also her answers, which are never rhetorical: she would rather die than share her husband's soul; she did not fear him; she had been given in marriage to a Christian and this man was not he.
He shut her up first in the church cell and then, when the local bishops and nobles could not persuade her, in a prison in the fortress of Tsurtavi — hot, verminous, with thorns strewn on the floor, and guards to keep visitors away. She was there six years, from about 469 to 475. The guard was not close enough to keep the country away: people came to the window with their sick, and the tradition of her healings begins in her lifetime and at the prison wall. The Georgian katholikos and the local bishops interceded for her without effect; even Varsken's own brother is reported to have tried.
She died in the prison on 17 October 475, of what six years of that treatment does to a body, in her middle thirties. Iakob was with her, and buried her at Tsurtavi as she had asked.
Aftermath
The martyrdom had a political sequel. Varsken's conduct — apostasy, the murder of a Mamikonian princess, and open collaboration with the Persians on the Georgian frontier — was one of the causes that brought King Vakhtang I Gorgasali of Kartli into open revolt; Vakhtang had Varsken tried and executed about 484. In 578 the relics of Shushanik were translated from Tsurtavi to Tbilisi and laid in the church of the Metekhi on the rock above the Kura, where they remain the city's chief relic.
The Martyrdom of Shushanik
Her confessor Iakob Tsurtaveli wrote the Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik (წამებაჲ წმიდისა შუშანიკისი დედოფლისაჲ) within a few years of her death — the usual dating is between 476 and 483. It is the oldest surviving work of Georgian literature, and its importance to the language and to the historiography of the Caucasus is out of all proportion to its length. It is also, simply as a document, unusual: an eyewitness martyr-act with no legendary apparatus, no contests of rhetoric with a governor, no miracles at the moment of death — only a marriage, a betrayal, a woman who will not move, and six years. The Armenian Church, which keeps her as well, has an Armenian recension of the same text.
Feast and commemoration
August 28 (church date; New Calendar civil August 28; Old Calendar civil September 10) in the Slavic and Byzantine calendars, where she appears as Martyr Susanna, Queen of Georgia; this is the day on which she is kept in Russian usage and by the OCA. The Georgian Church keeps her on October 17, the day of her repose, as one of the great national saints, and her memory is also joined to the commemoration of the Georgian martyrs of the Persian persecutions. The Armenian Church keeps her in its own calendar. On August 28 she shares the day with Moses the Ethiopian.
She is named in the account of Eustathius of Mtskheta, the Persian convert martyred at Mtskheta in 589, as one of the witnesses of the same long conflict between the Georgian Church and the fire-worship of the Sasanian empire.
Not to be confused with Susanna of Rome (August 11), the Susanna of the Book of Daniel, or the Susanna commemorated with Archelais and Thecla.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy lamb, O Jesus, crieth aloud with a great 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 I die for Thee that I may live in Thee. Accept me as a spotless sacrifice, who with longing am offered unto Thee. By her prayers, O merciful one, save our souls.
Original translation from the Georgian
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou wouldst not go down with thy husband into the darkness he had chosen, O noble Shushanik, but wast shut up six years in a prison for the confession of Christ, and there didst heal the sick who came to thy window; wherefore Georgia honoureth thee as her first martyr-queen, and Armenia as the daughter of her champion.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
Shushanik is painted crowned and in the robes of a royal woman — the liturgical title having settled her iconography — with the martyr's cross in her right hand, her hair covered, and often a chain or fetter shown at her wrist or lying at her feet as the sign of the six years' imprisonment. Georgian icons and frescoes frequently set her beside the other great women of that Church, Nino the Enlightener of Georgia and Ketevan the Queen, the three of them making the national triad of the woman apostle, the woman martyr of the fifth century and the woman martyr of the seventeenth. Narrative scenes, where they occur, show her leaving the palace for the cell, the beating by Varsken, and her death in the fortress. In Armenian usage she appears as the daughter of Vardan Mamikonian, sometimes in the same composition as her father.
No pre-1900 icon of Shushanik in a verifiable public-domain reproduction has been located for storage in this collection.
Disputed questions
"Queen." Iakob calls her dedopali, which in Georgian covers both "queen" and the lady of a great house, and the Slavic and Greek books have made her outright "Queen of Georgia." She was in fact the wife of the pitiakhsh of Gugark, a frontier viceroy and not a king; the royal title is a liturgical honorific of later date. The Russian calendar's placing of her husband's principality in Hereti rather than Gugark is likewise a later simplification.
Armenian or Georgian? She was Armenian by birth and family, Georgian by marriage, residence, death, burial and cultus, and is honoured by both Churches; the Martyrdom survives in both languages. Neither claim excludes the other, and the dispute is modern rather than ancient.
The dates. 475 for the death is secure from Iakob; the six years of imprisonment place the apostasy about 469, though some reckonings put the whole sequence a few years later. October 17 is the day of her repose and her Georgian feast; August 28 is the day of the Byzantine and Slavic commemoration, and the reason for the transfer is not recorded. In this entry August 28 is ranked primary and October 17 secondary, because August 28 is the day on which this corpus enumerates her and the schema allows exactly one primary feast; the Georgian Church's own reckoning is the reverse, and a reader should take October 17 as her principal day.