The Six Years in the Fortress

The heart of the Martyrdom is not the beating but the endurance: six years, on the source’s own count, in fetters in a cell in the fortress of Tsurtavi — cold, vermin, hunger, and an asceticism that turned the prison into a hermitage. Her confessor, who visited her there, records the paradox that made her cult: the imprisoned queen became the spiritual mother of the march, the sick healed at her prayer and the troubled counseled through her window. This file reconstructs the prison years from the text, with the source’s own figures, per §3.5.

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

The Source’s Own Figures

The Martyrdom counts its heroine’s ordeal precisely, and the figures should be given as the source gives them. The imprisonment in the fortress lasted six years: “she spent six years in prison in the same fetters, with affliction, starvation, thirst and distress,” in the Armenian recension’s summary sentence (The Passion of Saint Shushanik, Armenian version, trans. Maksoudian, 1997, at attalus.org); the Georgian text carries the same six-year count (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; so too the received Life — “six years” — Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006). The whole passion, from the first violence at the banquet to her death, spans seven years in the text’s reckoning — she sickens and dies in the seventh year of the ordeal (Maksoudian, introduction, 1997: “seven years” of suffering, death “in the eighth year” of the Peroz-anchored count; Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). The difference between the figures is the pre-fortress phase: the year or so of palace confinement between the banquet and the transfer to the citadel (see The Refusal and the First Violence). Modern retellings that give “seven years’ imprisonment” are rounding the ordeal into the cell; this collection keeps the source’s distinction: six years in the fortress, seven of passion.

The Cell

Jakob’s description of the prison is the most physically concrete writing in early Georgian literature, and its concreteness is an argument for his presence. The cell was in the fortress of Tsurtavi; the queen was fettered — the text insists on the fetters’ permanence, six years “in the same fetters” — and the narrative dwells on the afflictions of the place with a nurse’s specificity rather than a rhetorician’s: the summer heat of the Kvemo Kartli lowlands, the winter cold, the vermin — fleas and lice — the hunger and thirst, the sores and swelling of a body immobilized in irons (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; Armenian version, trans. Maksoudian, 1997; on the passage’s realism, Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44). Per §3.5 these are the confessor’s observations, shaped for a martyrology; but their type is telling — later hagiography multiplies tortures, while Jakob’s horrors are the undramatic ones of neglect and time, which invention rarely chooses (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the text’s early realism; see What an Eyewitness Account Gives).

To the prison’s afflictions the text adds the queen’s own: she fasted beyond the prison’s hunger, kept vigil, prayed the Psalter unceasingly, and refused the mitigations that reached her — the food, clothing, and comforts sent from the palace, whether from Varsken’s calculation or the household’s pity (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; Machitadze, Lives, 2006). The refusal had a logic the text makes explicit: accepted comfort from the apostate’s hand would have been the first installment of the compliance she was imprisoned for withholding. Her asceticism, in the Martyrdom‘s theology, is not self-punishment but the cell’s conversion — the prison regime, embraced voluntarily and exceeded, becomes a monastic rule; the fortress becomes a hermitage; the sentence becomes a vocation (ibid.; for the type’s afterlife in Georgian monasticism, see The Beginning of Georgian Literature).

The Ministry from the Cell

Then the paradox on which the cult was founded, attested by the eyewitness himself: the prisoner became the region’s intercessor. Jakob records that the people of the march — Georgians and Armenians alike — came to the fortress: the sick, the childless, the grieving, seeking her prayer and her counsel; and that healings followed — the text attests that those who came in sickness “received healing” through her intercession, and that childless women came and bore children (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; the received Life summarizes the same tradition — Machitadze, Lives, 2006). She counseled and consoled through the years; the clergy attended her — Jakob himself, whose access as confessor is the narrative’s own warrant — and the cell functioned, in effect, as the shrine it would become (ibid.).

Per the repository’s rule (§3.5 and METHODOLOGY §3.5 on miracle accounts), the healings are reported as what the source attests: the claims of a devoted eyewitness writing for a community that had itself frequented the cell. Three sober observations frame them. First, the attestation is as early as hagiographic miracle-attestation ever is — not a century-later accretion but the report of a contemporary participant; whatever one’s judgment of the events, the belief in them is documented fifth-century fact. Second, the pattern — crowds seeking intercession from a living confessor, and healings reported — is the standard sociology of sanctity in late antiquity, abundantly paralleled; the report requires no literary borrowing to explain it. Third, the text’s restraint remains notable: no spectacular wonders, no visions staged for the reader, no vengeance-miracles against Varsken — the living Shushanik of the Martyrdom works nothing except prayer, and the healings happen around her, not as her performances (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; contrast the developed wonder-cycles of the later Georgian Lives, Rapp, Studies, 2003; see Methodology).

The Long Middle, and What It Attests

Six years is a long time, and the Martyrdom‘s long middle — the stretch its dramatic structure can least control — is where the historian learns most. Through it the text shows, in passing, the ordinary machinery of the march grinding on around the imprisoned queen: the church’s calendar being kept (the text marks feasts and fasts through the prison years); the clergy negotiating access; Varsken occupied with his lordship and his Persian service, his household divided; Jojik and his wife maintaining their dangerous sympathy (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). It also shows the persecution’s stalemate: Varsken could not release her without capitulation, could not break her by attrition, and would not — for whatever mixture of calculation and residual restraint — simply kill her. The six years are thus themselves a historical datum: this was a persecution constrained by the victim’s rank, her family’s power (the Mamikonians were not to be provoked lightly — see Daughter of Vardan Mamikonian), and the watching Christian nobility of two lands. The slow death in the cell was, among other things, the form of murder a pitiakhsh could politically afford — and even so, the Martyrdom‘s sequel shows, he had miscalculated: the affair cost him his life at King Vakhtang’s hands in 482 (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991; see Veneration and the Political Sequel).

By the seventh year the attrition had done its work. The text describes her body broken — ulcerated, swollen, wasted — while her regimen never slackened; the final illness, the farewells, and the death of 17 October are the next file’s matter (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; see The Death of the Queen).

References

Jakob Tsurtaveli. The Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik (c. 476–483). Condensed English trans. in D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd rev. ed. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The cell, the fetters, the afflictions; the fasts and Psalter; the refusals; the crowds, healings, and counsel; the church-year rhythm; the seventh-year decline.)
The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, preliminary version in Sion (1997); online at attalus.org/armenian. (“Six years in prison in the same fetters, with affliction, starvation, thirst and distress”; the seven-year ordeal.)
Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006. (The received Life: six years; the ministry to the poor and sick.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: the prison chapters’ realism.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (Early realism vs. later wonder-cycles.)
Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The political sequel constraining and following the persecution.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository. (Miracle accounts reported as attested; attestation-pinning.)