The Church Fathers · c. 476–483
The Martyrdom of Shushanik
Iakob Tsurtaveli
What it is
An Armenian princess married to a Georgian prince who converts to Zoroastrianism to please the Persian king. She refuses to follow him, is beaten, dragged by the hair, and imprisoned for six years in a cell where she dies, attended by the priest who wrote this down.
Why it lasted
The oldest surviving work of Georgian literature, written by an eyewitness who was her confessor. It is also a rare account of a marriage breaking on religion, told with the husband given his own words.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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