09 — Legacy

What Shushanik left: a national literature that begins with her passion — the Martyrdom as the fountainhead of fifteen centuries of Georgian letters; a place in Georgian identity as the first of its martyr-queens; and the long line of Caucasian women martyrs and confessors that runs from her through St. Ketevan of Kakheti, read beside the apostolic figure of St. Nina. The section closes with the collection’s sober assessment.

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

Contents

File Description
the-beginning-of-georgian-literature.md The Martyrdom as the first monument of Georgian letters: the alphabet’s first century, the hagiographic corpus it opened (Abo, the Assyrian Fathers’ Lives, the Athonite school), its modern canonization in Georgian education and identity
women-martyrs-and-assessment.md The women of the Georgian calendar from Nina to Ketevan; Shushanik as the archetype of the Caucasian queen-confessor; the assessment: what the Church has in Shushanik, and what history has

Summary

Georgian literature is nearly unique among the world’s literatures in beginning not with epic or chronicle but with a woman’s passion, written by her confessor — and Georgian cultural memory has never let the fact go: the Martyrdom stands first in the school anthologies and first in every history of the literature (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44). The first file follows that literary legacy; the second sets her among the holy women of the Caucasus — above all St. Ketevan, the seventeenth-century queen tortured to death by another Persian empire, whose passion reads as Shushanik’s returned (see St. Ketevan of Georgia) — and closes the collection with its assessment.

See Also