02 — Her Person and Family

Who Shushanik was: daughter of the Armenian sparapet Vardan Mamikonian, great-granddaughter of the catholicos Sahak the Parthian; her names — Shushanik, the diminutive of Shushan, and the disputed birth-name forms Vardeni/Vardandukht; her marriage to Varsken, heir of the pitiakhshate of Gugark; her children; and her piety as her confessor’s narrative depicts it.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (shared pre-division veneration with the Armenian Apostolic Church)

Contents

File Description
daughter-of-vardan-mamikonian.md The Mamikonian inheritance: Vardan the sparapet of Avarayr and the lineage of St. Sahak; the name forms and their disputes; what the Martyrdom itself says of her descent, and what the Armenian sources add
marriage-into-the-house-of-gugark.md The marriage to Varsken: the Mihranid house of the pitiakhshes, the prior bond between Gugark and the Mamikonians, her children, her title “queen” (dedopali), and her piety as Jakob depicts it

Summary

The Martyrdom introduces its heroine by her blood: she is the daughter of Vardan, the Armenian sparapet who fell at Avarayr for Christ in 451 (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, trans. Lang, 1976; Ełishē, trans. Thomson, 1982). Everything in her story is charged by that descent — the persecutor’s wife is the martyr’s daughter — and by the marriage that placed her in the house of Gugark, whose previous lord had sheltered her orphaned Mamikonian cousins (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991; Toumanoff, Studies, 1963). The first file treats the lineage and the disputed forms of her name; the second, the marriage, the children whose apostasy she grieved, and the portrait of her piety that her confessor drew — pinned, per §3.5, to his text.

See Also