Tamar in Georgian Memory

Across eight centuries Tamar has remained the supreme figure of Georgian national memory — the saint and the sovereign, “Mother Tamar,” the personification of the golden age to which Georgians looked back through every subsequent misfortune. This file traces that enduring cult: its origins in the catastrophe that followed her reign, its life in folklore and literature, its role in modern Georgian nationhood, and its persistence to the present.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Memory Born of Catastrophe

Tamar’s unique place in Georgian memory was fixed, in large part, by what followed her. Within a generation of her death in 1213, the Mongol invasions broke the power she had raised to its zenith: her son George IV Lasha died in 1223, her daughter Rusudan reigned over the beginning of the collapse, and the united, ascendant Georgia of the Golden Age gave way to centuries of fragmentation, invasion, and subjection (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, on the Mongol collapse; see The Empire at Its Zenith). Against that long descent, Tamar’s reign shone in retrospect as the last and greatest height — the summit before the fall. To remember Tamar was to remember Georgia when it had been united, powerful, wealthy, and free; and so her memory became inseparable from the national longing for that lost greatness (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). The elegiac power of the Tamar cult — its undertone of a golden age forever lost — is the gift of the catastrophe that came after her.

“Mother Tamar” and the Folk Cult

In the popular and folk memory, Tamar became more than a historical sovereign: she became “Mother Tamar” (Tamar Mepe, King Tamar; and affectionately deda Tamar), a maternal, protecting, almost mythic figure of the whole nation. As the section on legend describes, the folk imagination attributed to her the building of countless castles, churches, and towers across the land, credited her with wonders, and in the mountains merged her with older legendary and mythological strata (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend). This folk Tamar was a living presence in the traditional culture — invoked in song, story, and place-name, her image a fixture of the Georgian imagination from the court to the remotest highland village (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the folk cult). The religious veneration of the saint and the national-folk veneration of the queen grew together and reinforced each other: Tamar was at once the holy sovereign the Church commemorated on 1 May and the beloved “Mother Tamar” of the people, and for most Georgians the two were never really distinct.

Tamar in Modern Georgian Nationhood

When Georgian national consciousness revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — under Russian imperial rule, and then through the Soviet period and to independence — Tamar became one of its central symbols. The Georgian national-revival writers and intellectuals invoked her as the emblem of the nation’s historic greatness and independent statehood; the writer Grigol Robakidze’s 1918 essay, with its image of the queen whose “grave is in the heart of the Georgian,” belongs to this modern nation-building appropriation of Tamar as the soul of Georgia (Robakidze, 1918; see The Queen and the Legend). Through the Soviet decades, when open religious and national expression was constrained, Tamar could be honoured in a nationally acceptable form — as a great historical ruler and cultural patron, the sovereign of Rustaveli’s age — even where the saint could not be openly venerated; and with the recovery of independence and the revival of the Georgian Orthodox Church at the end of the twentieth century, the saint and the national symbol were reunited in full public veneration (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on Tamar in Georgian national memory).

The Living Cult to the Present

Tamar’s veneration is fully alive in Georgia today. She is one of the most beloved of all Georgian saints, her feast kept on 1 May and on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women; churches, monasteries, and countless girls bear her name; her image — the crowned queen of the Vardzia and Betania frescoes — is among the most recognizable in Georgian religious and national iconography; and the sites associated with her, above all Vardzia, are places of both pilgrimage and national pride (Orthodox Church in America, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion; on the enduring cult, Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1956, and the living practice of the Georgian Church). The unfindable grave, far from diminishing the cult, has arguably deepened it: with no single shrine to localize her, Tamar belongs to the whole nation, venerated everywhere and buried nowhere — exactly as Robakidze said.

The Two Venerations

The persistence of the Tamar cult across eight centuries owes to the fusion, in her single figure, of two kinds of veneration that ordinarily run apart: the veneration of a saint, and the veneration of a national symbol. She is honoured by the Church as a holy sovereign, and by the nation as the personification of its greatest age; and because these two devotions coincide in her, each lends the other its strength — the saint gives the national symbol its sacred depth, and the national symbol gives the saint her extraordinary popular reach. This fusion is the source of her unique standing, and it is also, as the assessment that follows argues, the point at which the honest observer must take care: for the very completeness with which the saint and the symbol have merged makes it necessary, if one wishes to see clearly, to distinguish them (see Assessment).

See Also

• Assessment — the saint and the national symbol distinguished and weighed
• Tamar in Poetry and Legend — the folk cult and its legendary Tamar
• Repose and Canonization — the death and the unfindable grave at the root of the memory
• The Empire at Its Zenith — the Golden Age the memory enshrines

References

• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The Mongol collapse after Tamar; the folk cult; “Tamar’s castles” and the mountain memory.)
• Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Tamar as the personified Golden Age; her place in modern Georgian national memory.)
• Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. (The Georgian royal saints and the enduring veneration.)
• Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (The living veneration; the feasts.)
• Robakidze, Grigol. Essay on Tamar (1918): “her grave is in the heart of the Georgian.” (Cited via the survey of the burial traditions and the modern national memory.)