Repose and Canonization

Tamar died in 1213, after a reign of some three decades at the summit of Georgian power. Her burial place has never been found — the great open question of her story — and the competing traditions (a secret niche at Gelati; removal toward Jerusalem; and other claimed sites) remain unresolved. This file sets out her death, the mystery of her tomb, and her canonization by the Georgian Orthodox Church, with her feasts.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Her Death (1213)

Tamar died in 1213, having reigned as sole monarch since 1184 and as co-ruler since c. 1178. Her consort David Soslan had predeceased her in 1207; she was succeeded by their son, George (Giorgi) IV Lasha (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; the Tamar of Georgia entry gives her death as 18 January 1213, at Agarani). The tradition holds that she had been ill for some time and died in retirement, and the near-contemporary “Histories” surround her death with the same veneration that had marked her life, presenting it as the holy end of a holy reign.

[Disputed: the exact date and place of Tamar’s death are given with some variation. The year 1213 is standard (some older accounts give 1207 or 1210–1213); the precise day (18 January is cited) and the place (Agarani castle, or the fortress of Nacharmagevi) rest on the tradition and are not firmly fixed (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; the Tamar of Georgia entry). This collection gives 1213 and treats the finer detail as traditional.]

Her death fell only a decade or so before the first Mongol incursions and the catastrophe that would break Georgian power under her children — George IV Lasha (who died in 1223, some say of wounds, others of illness) and then her daughter Rusudan, in whose reign (1223–1245) the Mongols overran the kingdom (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The near-coincidence of Tamar’s death and the end of the Golden Age fixed her, in Georgian memory, as the last sovereign of the good times — a fact that shaped both her cult and her legend (see Tamar in Georgian Memory).

The Mystery of the Tomb

The single most famous unresolved question about Tamar is where she is buried. Despite her fame, and despite the official tradition of a royal burial, her grave has never been located, and a century of archaeological investigation has failed to find it (survey of the burial question: “a series of archaeological studies, beginning with Taqaishvili in 1920, has failed to locate it”; see the full treatment in Methodology).

[Disputed: St. Tamar’s burial place is unknown, and several traditions compete. (a) The official account holds she was buried at Gelati, the Bagrationi dynastic monastery near Kutaisi, where the Georgian kings were interred; one legend adds that she was placed in a secret niche, hidden so that her enemies could not desecrate the tomb of so venerated a queen. (b) A thirteenth-century letter attributed to the French knight Guillaume de Bois is read as reporting that Tamar’s son George IV Lasha was transporting his mother’s remains toward Jerusalem, for burial near the holy places she had endowed. (c) Georgian folk and local tradition has identified as many as seven other putative grave-sites, including one at Zhibiana in Ushguli, high in the Svaneti mountains. No excavation has confirmed any of them. (Survey of the burial traditions; Taqaishvili’s excavations from 1920; the Guillaume de Bois letter; the seven claimed sites.) The honest statement is that the grave has never been found.]

The tradition of the secret burial is itself significant. If Tamar’s tomb was deliberately hidden — as the Gelati “secret niche” legend and the Jerusalem tradition both, in different ways, suggest — the concealment may have been a precaution against desecration in the age of invasion that followed her death. Whatever its origin, the result is that Georgia’s most beloved sovereign has no shrine-tomb; and Georgian culture, as noted elsewhere in this collection, transfigured that hard gap into a symbol — the queen who “belongs to everyone and to no one,” whose grave is “in the heart of the Georgian” (Robakidze, 1918; see The Queen and the Legend). The unknown grave is the limit case of what can be known about even so famous a saint, and this collection reports it as unknown rather than choosing among the traditions (see Methodology).

Canonization and Feasts

Tamar was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church and is venerated as the Holy Righteous King (Queen) Tamar — a right-believing sovereign (a category akin to the Slavic blagovernaya, the pious ruler venerated for holy rule and defense of the faith rather than for martyrdom). She is commemorated on two days:

  • 1 May (Old Style; corresponding to 14 May on the Gregorian calendar), her principal feast; and
  • the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women — the third Sunday of Pascha (the second Sunday after Easter) — on which she is honoured together with the women who came to the tomb of Christ (Orthodox Church in America, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion, giving both 1 May and the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women; the Antiochian Archdiocese synaxarion likewise).

The association with the Myrrh-Bearing Women is fitting and doubtless deliberate: the queen whose own tomb was never found is commemorated with the women who came seeking the tomb of the Lord — a liturgical resonance between the myrrh-bearers at the empty sepulchre and the sovereign whose sepulchre is empty of any trace we can find. Her veneration, long established in Georgia, has spread through the wider Orthodox world, and she is honoured in the calendars of other Orthodox Churches (OCA and Antiochian synaxaria; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1956, on the Georgian royal saints and their veneration).

[Disputed: the calendar dating of Tamar’s feast is given as 1 May Old Style, which corresponds in the current era to 14 May New Style; some Georgian and other sources accordingly list “14 May,” which is the New-Style equivalent of the same feast, not a separate day (OCA synaxarion, 1 May; Georgian sources giving 14 May). Both refer to the one principal feast, alongside the movable commemoration on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women.]

The Saint at the Summit

Tamar’s canonization gathers up everything this collection has set out: the sanctified Bagrationi kingship, the patronage of the Church, the tradition of personal piety and clemency, the memory of the Golden Age, and — poignantly — the unknown grave. The Church did not canonize a documented biography; it received and ratified the veneration of a sovereign held holy by the people she ruled and the tradition that remembered her, as it does with all its saints (the theology of ecclesial reception, on which see Methodology (St. Xenia)). What it venerates is Tamar the holy king — the woman who ruled Georgia at its height, endowed its Church, and passed into the memory of her nation as its greatest and most beloved sovereign, her earthly tomb lost but her name imperishable.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Tamar’s death in 1213; the succession of George IV Lasha and Rusudan; the Mongol collapse; the burial mystery.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (Her canonization as a right-believing queen; the feasts of 1 May and the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. (The Georgian royal saints and their veneration.)
  • Survey of the burial traditions: the Taqaishvili excavations from 1920; the secret-niche-at-Gelati tradition; the Guillaume de Bois letter and the Jerusalem tradition; the seven claimed sites including Ushguli; Robakidze’s 1918 formulation. (Used to locate the traditions, not as a terminal citation.)
  • Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry (used to locate the 18 January 1213 / Agarani death detail and the calendar equivalence 1 May O.S. = 14 May N.S.).