Zabulon and Sosanna
Our Venerable Fathers and Mothers Zabulon and Sosanna, the Parents of Saint Nina, Enlightener of Georgia
Venerable · Righteous · d. 4th century
Commemorated 20 May — Glorification by the Church of Georgia
Zabulon and Sosanna were the parents of Nina, the Equal-to-the-Apostles and Enlightener of Georgia, and are venerated for what they gave up as much as for what they were. Zabulon was a Cappadocian nobleman and an officer of the Roman army who, having captured a king of the Franks in battle, obtained the baptism of the prisoners and stood godfather to them, and then their release — so that a whole people came to Christ by his intercession. Renouncing his rank, he went to Jerusalem, served the patriarch, and married Sosanna, the patriarch's sister; their only child Nina was born to them in Cappadocia. When the girl was about twelve they sold all they had and returned to the Holy City, where Zabulon withdrew to the wilderness as a solitary and Sosanna was set to the service of the poor and the sick, and they never saw each other or their daughter again in this life. The Church of Georgia glorified them in 1996; their feast is May 20.
The witness
Zabulon and Sosanna are known from the Georgian Life of Saint Nino — the composite hagiographical dossier preserved in the Kartlis Tskhovreba ("Life of Kartli") and in the Conversion of Kartli, the oldest strata of which are early but which reached its present form much later. They are therefore saints whose whole biography is the prologue of somebody else's, and the material must be handled as what it is: a hagiographer's account of a saint's ancestry, valuable for what the Georgian Church believed about its own origins and treacherous as chronology.
Zabulon: the soldier and the Franks
Zabulon was of a noble family of Cappadocia — the same province from which Nina is called "Nino of Cappadocia" — and took service in the imperial army, where he distinguished himself. The Life sets his career against the background of the martyrdom of Saint George, whose kinsman by some accounts he was, and brings him to Rome.
The episode on which his sanctity turns is a campaign against the Franks (the Life's term for a people of the western frontier). Zabulon defeated them and took their king and his retinue prisoner and brought them to the emperor, who condemned the captives to death. The prisoners, hearing of the faith from their captor, asked to be baptised before they were executed; and Zabulon obtained the baptism for them, and himself stood as their godfather, and then went to the emperor and begged their lives. The emperor gave them, and the Franks went home Christians, and their people were converted after them.
It is worth noticing what the story is doing. Zabulon is presented as a man whose one recorded action is to turn a military victory into a conversion and a pardon: he wins by the sword and then refuses the sword's fruits. The Georgian tradition read the enlightenment of Georgia by his daughter as of a piece with this — a family in which the Gospel was carried to the nations twice.
Jerusalem, marriage, and the birth of Nina
Zabulon then went as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, where he gave away his wealth and entered the service of the Patriarch Juvenal. There he met the patriarch's sister Sosanna, and the patriarch himself solemnised their marriage. The couple settled in Cappadocia — the Life names Kolastra — and there their only daughter Nina was born.
Of Sosanna in these years the account says that while she raised the child she gave herself to prayer and to almsgiving, which is the whole of her recorded life before Jerusalem. The girl was brought up in a house where the faith was the household's business.
The separation
When Nina was about twelve, her parents did a thing the Georgian Life presents without any softening: they sold everything they had and went back to Jerusalem as a family, in order to give themselves and their child wholly to God.
With the patriarch's blessing, Zabulon took leave of his wife and daughter and went into the wilderness — the Life does not say where, and does not follow him; he disappears into the anchoritic life beyond the Jordan and nothing further is recorded of him, not even the place of his death. Sosanna was appointed by her brother to the service of the poor and the sick in the Holy City, a diaconal office in substance if not in a title the sources give us. Nina was entrusted to the care of an aged woman, the elder Niaphora (Sara Niaphori), under whose teaching she conceived the desire for Georgia.
The separation is the reason these two are venerated. They are honoured neither as martyrs nor as teachers but as parents who gave up their only child and each other, and whose renunciation the Church of Georgia understood as the seed of its own baptism.
Glorification
Their cult is old in Georgia and was formalised late. The Georgian Orthodox Church numbered them among the saints in 1996, honouring them as confessors of the faith who had brought many to Christ and had left the world; the commemoration was set on May 20, and it is as the glorification rather than as a death-day that the calendar keeps it — neither of their reposes is dated in the sources.
Feast and commemoration
May 20 (church date; New Calendar civil May 20, Old Calendar civil June 2) — the commemoration of their glorification by the Church of Georgia, not of a repose. The feast is kept in Georgia and is carried by the Orthodox Church in America on its day-list; it is also on the Greek synaxaristes as "Ἅγιοι Ζαβουλὼν καὶ Σωσσάνη." Their daughter's own principal feast is January 14, kept on the leavetaking of the Theophany, and in Georgian usage the two commemorations are read together. May 20 always falls within the Pentecostarion, and the movable propers ordinarily prevail over it.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Noble in birth and nobler in mercy, thou didst buy the lives of thine enemies with thy prayers, O Zabulon, and thou, O Sosanna, wast a mother of mercy to the poor of the Holy City; ye offered your only daughter and one another to God, and He gave you a nation for your children. O holy parents of Nina, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
They are painted together, and almost always with their daughter: the standard composition sets Zabulon on one side as a middle-aged or elderly man — in the mantle of a nobleman where his soldiering is meant, or, more usually, in the dark tunic and analavos of a desert ascetic, since it is as a hermit that he died — and Sosanna on the other in the maphorion of a matron, holding a vessel or a loaf for the poor she served. Between or above them stands Nina with her characteristic grapevine cross. Zabulon may carry a scroll; Sosanna's hands are frequently open in the gesture of almsgiving. Modern Georgian churches also show the Frankish captives kneeling at Zabulon's feet at their baptism, the one narrative scene proper to him.
No storable icon has been located. Their iconography, like their formal cult, is essentially post-1996 and is the copyrighted work of living Georgian iconographers; a Wikimedia Commons media search under their names, together and separately and in combination with Saint Nino, returns no results. Under this collection's rule that a photograph's free licence does not license the painting beneath it, no modern Georgian icon of them could be stored even where one is found on Commons with a CC tag, unless the licence is granted by the iconographer. The entry is therefore left without an image.
Disputed questions
- The chronology is impossible as it stands. Juvenal was Patriarch of Jerusalem from 422 to 458; Nina's mission to Kartli belongs to the 320s or 330s, and her repose is placed about 335. A Sosanna who was Juvenal's sister cannot have been the mother of a woman active a century before him. The anachronism is a known feature of the Nino dossier, which was compiled and re-compiled long after the events and which supplied its heroine with the most distinguished Jerusalem connection its redactors knew. What survives criticism is the tradition's substance — Cappadocian, well-born, Jerusalem-connected parents who ended their lives in ascetic and charitable service — not the patriarch's name. This repository records the tradition and the objection together and does not silently emend either.
- Who the "Franks" were. The Life's Franks are almost certainly an anachronism of the same kind, a later name applied to whichever western or northern people the story originally concerned; the substance of the episode (captives baptised, godfathered, and spared) is independent of the identification.
- Sosanna's office. Popular accounts style her a deaconess, and her appointment to the care of the poor and sick corresponds exactly to what a deaconess of fourth- or fifth-century Jerusalem did. But no source we have consulted gives her the title, and deaconess is therefore not asserted in this entry's classification.
- The name. Georgian სოსანა is rendered Sosanna, Sosana, or Susanna in English; the OCA uses Sosanna, which is followed here. Zabulon appears also as Zebulon and Zabulun. Neither has a Wikidata identifier at the time of writing.
- Kinship with Saint George. The tradition that Zabulon (or Nina) was related to the Great-martyr George is a strand of the Georgian Life and is one reason for George's enormous prominence in Georgia; it is not independently attested.