Syra of Persia
The Holy Virgin-Martyr Syra of Persia
Virgin · Martyr · d. c. 559, in Persia — strangled
Commemorated 24 August — Martyrdom by strangling under Chosroes the Elder
Syra was the daughter of a Zoroastrian priest of Karkh-Seleucia in Persia, brought up in the fire-religion and trained for its service, who came to Christ through the poor Christians she met at the doors of the temple and through a healing she received by touching a priest's robe. Her Passion is one of the most psychologically detailed martyr-narratives of the Persian Church: it records her long hesitation, the counsel of a stepmother who urged her to worship fire outwardly and believe inwardly, a bishop who refused to baptise her for fear of what she would do under torture, and the vision of her dead mother that ended her doubt. She made her confession aloud in the fire-temple itself, was disowned and denounced by her own father, was baptised at last in prison by bribing a guard, and was strangled under Chosroes the Elder about 559.
The daughter of a magus
The Passion names her home as Karkh-Seleucia in the district the Greek text calls Elimais or Abizarde — the great twin-city complex on the Tigris, in the heartland of the Sasanian empire. Her father was an illustrious priest of the fire-worshippers: a mobed of the state religion, that is, a member of the class which under the Sasanians held the religious establishment and much of the judiciary, and which was the natural enemy of the Christian minority within Persia.
Her mother died while she was still a child, and her father, wishing her to have nothing to do with the Christians who were numerous in the cities of Mesopotamia, sent her away to Tharsis to be trained as a priestess of the fire. The precaution failed in the most ordinary way possible. Serving at the temple, she fell into conversation with the Christian beggars who sat at its doors — the poor being, then as often, the only missionaries with access — and from them she first heard of Christ.
The healing and the long hesitation
The turn of her story is a sickness. Falling ill, and having learned enough to believe that the God of the Christians could heal, she went to a Christian priest and asked him for ashes from the church — a sacramental of the Persian Church, ash from the censer or the altar, given to the sick. He refused her: she was the daughter of a magus and he had every reason to fear a trap. As she turned away she touched the hem of his robe, and was healed. The Passion draws the parallel it means us to draw, with the woman with the issue of blood in the Gospel, and it is the hinge of the narrative: she is convinced not by argument but by the same evidence the Gospel offers.
What follows is the section that gives this life its unusual honesty. Syra did not go straight to baptism. Her family grew suspicious. Her stepmother — who claimed to be a secret Christian herself — counselled her to do what she said she did: worship the fire outwardly and keep the faith inwardly, and so save both her soul and her life. The advice held her for a long time, and the Passion does not pretend otherwise. What broke it was a vision: she saw her dead mother in a place of desolation, and the shining dwellings of the Christians beyond it, and understood what the compromise cost.
She went then to a bishop and asked for baptism. He refused her too — not from suspicion, but from pastoral fear: she was young, her father was powerful, and he judged that if she were baptised and then arrested she would deny Christ under torture and be worse off than before. His counsel was that she should confess openly first, and be baptised afterwards if she stood. It is an extraordinary piece of advice, and she took it literally.
The confession and the trial
At the hour of the morning sacrifice, in the fire-temple, before the assembled worshippers, Syra declared aloud: "I am a Christian; I reject the false gods, and I believe in the true God."
Her father shut her up at home, and when neither persuasion nor beating moved her, he himself denounced her to the authorities and the case went up to the court of Chosroes the Elder — Khosrow I Anushirvan, whose long reign (531–579) saw both a formal toleration of Christians and repeated exemplary executions of Persian nobles who apostatised from Zoroastrianism. Her offence was of exactly that kind: not being a Christian, which was tolerated, but being a magus's daughter who had left the fire, which was treason.
She was imprisoned and tortured, and did not yield. Still unbaptised, she bribed a guard to let a priest come to her, and received the mystery in prison. From that point the Passion records wonders: her chains fell from her repeatedly and had to be replaced; when guards attempted to violate her, one was struck down with sickness and another died.
Martyrdom
She was condemned to be strangled. The one request the Passion records her making is characteristic of the whole account: worn out by the tortures and afraid she would die of sickness before sentence could be carried out — and so be cheated of the martyr's crown she had waited so long and hesitated so much to claim — she asked that the execution be carried out quickly. It was, about the year 559.
Her body was thrown out to be eaten by dogs, which would not touch it; and the Christians of the city came by night and buried her.
Feast and commemoration
August 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 6). She is kept with the other saints of the day in both the Greek and the Slavonic Menaia, and belongs to the great body of Persian martyrs whom the Byzantine calendar received from the Church of the East — a company running from the four hundred years of Sasanian persecution and including such better-known names as the martyrs under Shapur II. Among Orthodox Christians of the Middle East her memory has a particular weight, as one of the relatively few Persian women martyrs whose interior struggle, and not merely whose death, has been transmitted.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a virgin-martyr)
Thy lamb Syra, O Jesus, crieth out 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; I die for Thee, that I may live in Thee. Accept me as a spotless sacrifice, offered to Thee with love. By her intercessions save our souls, O merciful One.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Syra is written as a virgin-martyr: a young woman in the long tunic and maphorion, the head covered, holding the cross of martyrdom in the right hand, the left raised open in confession. Where a Persian setting is indicated, the dress is given the patterned brocade and the jewelled border by which Byzantine painters signalled the Persian nobility — the same convention used for the Persian martyrs generally.
Narrative treatments, which are rare, draw on the two scenes the Passion makes vivid: the saint touching the hem of the priest's robe and being healed, painted as a deliberate echo of the Gospel scene of the woman with the issue of blood; and her confession in the fire-temple, with the fire-altar and the magi behind her. The final scene — the body cast out and the dogs refusing it — belongs to the passion-cycles and is not painted alone.
No pre-1900 image of her has been located for this collection, and the Menologion of Basil II, which contains many Persian martyrs, covers only September–February and so cannot supply an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Her name. The Greek synaxaria print Σίρα (Sira), which the Slavonic and English calendars render Syra; the underlying Persian name is Shirin, and the Syriac acts call her so. The three forms belong to one person, and the English "Syra" should not be read as a gentilic ("the Syrian") — she was a Persian.
- Not to be confused with the Shirin who was the Christian queen of Chosroes II Parviz two generations later, a well-known figure of Persian romance and of the Nestorian chronicles. The confusion is easy in Persian sources and impossible in the Greek, which keeps the martyr and the queen wholly apart.
- The date. The acts are dated by the reign of Chosroes the Elder (531–579); the year 559 given in the calendars is a traditional figure, not a documented one. The commemoration itself, August 24, is fixed and universal.
- The transmission. The Persian acts of this period reach the Byzantine calendar by way of Syriac collections, translated into Greek and abridged for the synaxarion. The detail preserved in the Greek notice — the stepmother's counsel, the bishop's refusal, the bribe in the prison — is far richer than a synaxarion normally carries, which is good evidence that a full Passion stood behind it.