Assessment

A sober closing assessment of St. Tamar: the greatness of the historical sovereign weighed honestly, the tension of saint and national symbol held open rather than resolved, and the limits of what can be known — above all the unfindable grave — acknowledged as the honest boundary of the whole account. Following the repository methodology, this file names the live questions and adjudicates none it cannot.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Historical Achievement, Soberly Weighed

Stripped of panegyric and legend, the historical Tamar remains a sovereign of the first rank. She inherited a throne no woman had held, secured it against aristocratic challenge, and ruled Georgia for some three decades at the summit of its medieval power. Under her the kingdom won its greatest victories (Shamkor, Basiani), reached its greatest extent, founded a friendly empire on the Black Sea (Trebizond), and produced the classic monuments of its civilization (Vardzia, the Vepkhistqaosani). That much is documented, not merely praised, and it is achievement enough to justify her fame without any embellishment (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998; see The Queen and the Legend).

The sober qualifications are equally real, and this collection has stated them. Tamar did not personally command her armies; the victories were won by David Soslan and the Mkhargrdzeli in her name. Her empire was a hegemony of conquest, structurally fragile, and it did not survive her by a generation. The Golden Age she crowns was begun by her great-grandfather and extended by her son; its cultural summit is not hers alone. And the sources that make her reign vivid are panegyric, so that much of what we “know” of her — especially her inner life — is the tradition’s ideal rather than documented fact. None of this diminishes a genuinely great reign; it simply keeps the greatness truthful (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994; see Methodology).

Saint and National Symbol: The Central Tension

The hardest interpretive question about Tamar is the relation between the two things she is: a canonized saint and the supreme symbol of Georgian nationhood. These have fused so completely in the Georgian imagination (see Tamar in Georgian Memory) that they are rarely distinguished — and yet, for honest assessment, they must be.

[Disputed: the relation between Tamar’s sanctity and her national-symbolic role is a genuine interpretive question on which honest observers can differ, and this collection does not adjudicate it. (a) One view holds that the two are properly inseparable: that in the tradition of holy Christian kingship, to have ruled a Christian nation well, defended and endowed its Church, and lived (as the tradition attests) in personal piety and mercy simply is the form her sanctity takes, so that her greatness as a sovereign and her holiness as a saint are one thing, and the national veneration is a legitimate mode of the religious one. (b) A more cautious view warns that the fusion of saint and national symbol risks subordinating the religious to the political — venerating Tamar as the emblem of national greatness and lost statehood more than as a holy person, so that the cult can become an expression of nationalism in religious dress, and the saint can be conscripted for ends (national, political) not her own. The tension is real and live; it is the same tension that attends every warrior-king saint and every strongly national cult, and per METHODOLOGY §4 this collection names the positions and leaves the weighing to the reader (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on Tamar as national symbol; the general problem of national saints).]

The honest course is not to resolve this tension by collapsing one side into the other — neither reducing Tamar’s sanctity to nationalism nor pretending the national veneration is purely religious — but to hold it open, and to be aware, when one venerates or studies Tamar, of which Tamar one has in view: the holy sovereign of the Church’s commemoration, or the personified golden age of the nation’s memory, or (most often) both at once, entangled beyond easy separation.

The Sanctity-and-Statecraft Question

Closely related is the tension this collection treated in Section 08: that the saint was a war-making sovereign of a hard state (see A Holy Queen). The assessment here is the same as there: Tamar’s is the sanctity of holy rule, not of renunciation, and it must be venerated as such — with the wars, the statecraft, and the hard exercise of power included, not airbrushed away. Whether such holy-kingship sanctity is fully intelligible to a modern sensibility that instinctively separates power from holiness is itself a live question; but it is the tradition’s own category, shared with her great-grandfather David the Builder and with the warrior-saints generally, and the honest reader receives it on its own terms rather than imposing a modern one (see St. David the Builder).

The Limit of the Unknown Grave

Any assessment of Tamar must end where the record itself ends: at the unfindable grave. That the most famous sovereign of medieval Georgia lies in an unknown place, sought for a century without success, is the permanent reminder that even the best-loved and best-attested figure has a hard boundary of what can be known — and this collection has made that boundary a structural principle rather than an embarrassment (see Methodology and Repose and Canonization). The Georgian culture’s response — to make the lost grave a symbol of the queen’s belonging to the whole nation — is a genuine and beautiful transfiguration of the gap; but as assessment it must be said plainly that it is a transfiguration of a gap, not a filling of it. Where Tamar is buried is not known, and honesty holds that limit.

A Closing Word

St. Tamar is, at the last, a figure who repays sober treatment better than most. The legend is so luminous, and the national love so deep, that the temptation is either to believe all of it or, in reaction, to debunk it; and both would miss the real Tamar. The real Tamar is a great historical sovereign, a genuine object of the Church’s veneration, and a figure so wrapped in a nation’s love that history and legend can barely be prised apart — and the truest homage is to see her clearly on all three counts: to grant the documented greatness, to receive the sanctity on the tradition’s own terms, to honour the legend as a nation’s poetry about itself, and to keep the three distinct. That is what this collection has tried to do. The Church commemorates her on 1 May and with the Myrrh-Bearing Women; Georgia keeps her in its heart, where Robakidze said her grave is; and the historian records a woman who was called king, ruled a nation at its height, and passed into a memory no invasion could destroy.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The documented achievement and its limits; the fragility of the empire; the Mongol aftermath.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Tamar as national symbol; the saint-and-nation question.)
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The documented sovereign; the imaging of holy kingship.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (The feasts and the Church’s veneration.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 and §4, this repository (attestation-pinning and the both-sides treatment of live disputes).