Feasts and Calendars
When is St. Shushanik kept? The data are genuinely tangled, and this file sorts them per §4.2, date by attested date: the Georgian Church’s principal feast of 28 August (O.S.; 10 September N.S.); the 17 October commemoration that preserves the Martyrdom’s own death-day in Orthodox calendars; and the Armenian Apostolic placements, where the movable calendar and the menologia diverge. Each date is pinned to its source; none is harmonized away.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (shared pre-division veneration with the Armenian Apostolic Church)
The Anchor: the Death-Day in the Source
One date in this file is fifth-century: the Martyrdom places Shushanik’s death on the seventeenth of October (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; see The Death of the Queen). A martyr’s dies natalis is the natural feast, and 17 October is indeed where part of the Orthodox liturgical tradition keeps her: the Eastern Orthodox calendars carry the commemoration of the “Martyr Susanna (Shushanik), Queen of Georgia” on 17 October, and the received Life is read under that date in the English-language synaxaria (so the OCA’s lives of the saints for 17 October, carrying Machitadze’s account; Machitadze, The Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006). Every other date in this file is a fact about the churches’ calendars, not about the fifth century.
The Georgian Feast: 28 August (O.S.) / 10 September (N.S.)
The Georgian Orthodox Church’s principal feast of St. Shushanik falls not on her death-day but on 28 August of the Julian calendar — 10 September on the civil (Gregorian) calendar, by the twentieth-/twenty-first-century conversion (Machitadze, The Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006, under 28 August: “Memory 28 August (10 September)”; the same double date in the English carriers of the Georgian calendar, pravoslavie.ru and the OCA lives, which list her under both 28 August and 17 October). The Georgian Church follows the Julian calendar, so its 28 August is presently civil 10 September; parish and diaspora notices therefore appear under either number, a perennial source of confusion this paragraph is meant to end.
Why 28 August? The sources available to this collection transmit the date without transmitting its rationale. [Disputed/unresolved: the origin of the 28 August feast. The natural hypotheses — a translation-of-relics anniversary (feasts of translation regularly displace or double the dies natalis; the Metekhi tradition would be the obvious candidate — see The Relics and Metekhi); a Georgian liturgical reorganization at some later date; or an old local Tsurtavi usage — are each plausible and none documented in the materials this collection could check. The received Life gives the feast as a datum (Machitadze, Lives, 2006); the collection reports it as such and declines to invent an etiology.] What can be said firmly is the present shape of the Georgian usage: 28 August (O.S.) is the feast; 17 October preserves the death-day in the wider Orthodox commemorations; and the two dates are complementary layers of one cult, not a contradiction (per §3.5, each pinned to its carrier: the feast to the modern Georgian calendar via Machitadze; the death-day to the fifth-century text).
The Armenian Placements
The Armenian Apostolic calendar is structured differently — most saints’ commemorations are movable, keyed to the cycle of Easter and the fixed anchor-feasts — and Shushanik’s Armenian dates reflect it. The evidence in hand:
- The 1834 Constantinople menologion (the Armenian synaxarial tradition translated with Maksoudian’s version of the passion) assigns her commemoration to 20 Kʿałocʿ, glossed as 28 December in that edition’s calendar concordance (The Passion of Saint Shushanik, Armenian version with menologion notice, trans. Maksoudian, 1997, at attalus.org).
- Modern reference treatments of the saint report her Armenian Apostolic commemoration as falling in the movable autumn cycle — the English-language encyclopedic tradition gives a window in late September/October for recent calendars [Disputed: the Armenian commemoration date. The menologion’s fixed 20 Kʿałocʿ / 28 December (Maksoudian, trans., 1997) and the movable autumn placements reported in modern references (e.g., the standard encyclopedic entries giving late-September dates for the Armenian and Armenian Catholic usage) cannot be reduced to one number: the Armenian month-names’ equivalences drifted historically, the modern Armenian Church calendar reassigns many commemorations year to year, and the diaspora eparchies vary. This collection reports the attested placements with their carriers and does not harmonize them; a definitive statement would require the current Armenian Church directory (Tonatsuyts) year by year, which was not available to check.]
The tangle is instructive rather than scandalous, and it is exactly the pattern the repository’s methodology predicts (METHODOLOGY §3.5): liturgical calendars preserve cult with great tenacity and chronology with none; a saint’s presence in the calendar is ancient bedrock, while the calendar-date’s history is a study in drift, reform, and local usage. That Shushanik stands in the Armenian calendar at all — with her own passion-text behind her — is the historically weighty fact (see A Saint of the Undivided Caucasus); which week the commemoration lands in is administration.
The Disambiguation, Once More
Calendar work makes the warning of the master README concrete. Under 17 October the Greek and Slavic calendars commemorate, among others, figures rendered “Susanna”; hagiographic aggregators regularly conflate the Georgian queen-martyr with St. Susanna the Myrrhbearer (Luke 8:3) or with the Roman virgin-martyr Susanna (commemorated in August in both East and West — a proximity to 28 August that invites exactly this error). They are distinct persons; the queen-martyr’s identity is fixed by the epithets (“of Georgia,” “the Queen,” Georgian Šušaniki dedopali) and by the Life attached to the entry (Machitadze, Lives, 2006; the OCA entry “Martyr Susanna, Queen of Georgia” preserves the distinction correctly). This collection uses “Shushanik” without exception, and readers checking calendars should match Lives, not names.
Liturgical Texture
Of the content of the feasts, briefly, per the sources’ reach. In the Georgian tradition the Martyrdom itself is the saint’s great liturgical monument — composed for a community that would hear it, and read (in excerpt and paraphrase) in her honor since; the Georgian hymnographic tradition for her feast (troparion and kontakion of the martyr-queen) is carried in the Georgian service-books and, in English, in the calendar publications that follow Machitadze (Machitadze, Lives, 2006; on the text’s liturgical function, Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44). In the Armenian tradition her memory travels with the Vardanankʿ complex — the daughter beside the father in the church’s memory of the age of martyrs (Passion, Armenian menologion notice, trans. Maksoudian, 1997). At Metekhi in Tbilisi her shrine’s feast is a fixture of the city’s church year (Machitadze, Lives, 2006; see The Relics and Metekhi). Beyond these attested generalities the collection does not go; hymnographic texts are quoted nowhere above because none could be checked in a citable edition.
Summary Table
| Date | Calendar | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 October | The Martyrdom’s death-day; Orthodox commemoration | Fifth-century attestation (the day, not the year) | Jakob Tsurtaveli, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA lives 17 Oct. |
| 28 August O.S. / 10 September N.S. | Georgian Orthodox principal feast | Modern Georgian calendar; origin of the date unresolved | Machitadze, Lives, 2006 |
| 20 Kʿałocʿ (28 December) | Armenian menologion (1834) | Fixed menologion placement | Maksoudian, trans., 1997 |
| Movable autumn placements | Modern Armenian Apostolic usage | Reported; not harmonizable with the above | Modern reference treatments [Disputed — see above] |
See Also
- A Saint of the Undivided Caucasus — why two churches’ calendars carry her at all
- The Death of the Queen — the 17 October death-day and the disputed year
- The Relics and Metekhi — the shrine whose feast the Georgian date may reflect
- Methodology — cult-tenacity vs. chronology-drift as a general rule
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 17 October death-day.)
- Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006; English text carried by pravoslavie.ru and oca.org. (Feast 28 August (10 September); the Life under both dates; the Metekhi shrine.)
- The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version with the 1834 menologion notice), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, preliminary version in Sion (1997); online at attalus.org/armenian. (20 Kʿałocʿ / 28 December.)
- Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints: “Martyr Susanna, Queen of Georgia” (17 October) and the 28 August lives — oca.org. (The English-language calendar carriers; used per §2.3 as locators for Machitadze’s account.)
- Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: the text’s liturgical function.)
- Scripture: Luke 8:3 (Susanna the Myrrhbearer — the disambiguation).
- METHODOLOGY.md §2.3, §3.5, §4.2, this repository. (Aggregators as locators; attestation-pinning; unharmonized reporting of divergent data.)