Shirin
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- For the city in Uzbekistan, see Shirin, Uzbekistan.
Shirin or Shirin the Armenian (? – 628) (Persian: شيرين) was the Armenian Christian wife of the Sassanid Persian Shahanshah (king of kings), Khosrau II. In the revolution after the death of Khosrau's father Hormizd IV, the General Bahram Chobin took power over the Persian empire. Shirin fled with Khosrau to Syria where they lived under the protection of Byzantine emperor Maurice. In 591, Khosrau returned to Persia to take control of the empire and Shirin was made queen. She used her new influence to support the Christian minority in Iran, but the political situation demanded that she do so discreetly. Initially she belonged to the Church of the East, the so-named Nestorians, but later she joined the monophysitic western-Syrian church. After conquering Jerusalem in 614, the Persians supposedly captured the cross of Jesus and brought it to their capital Ctesiphon, where Shirin took the cross in her palace. After the fall of Khosrau, Firdausi remembered Shirin in his epic, the Shahnama. Around 1180 the Persian poet Nezami wrote of her alleged love for the master builder Farhad in his epic Chosroes and Shirin. This story grew to be a myth with Shirin and Farhad being symbols of pure, unrequited love. The long standing myth spread to Turkish, and Indian literature, living on even as far as Europe with Goethe’s West-oestlicher Divan. Shirin is also mentioned in Shahrazad's The Book of One Thousand and One Nights on the 390th night with the story of Kosrau and Shirin with a fisherman.
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[edit] References
- Wilhelm Baum: Shirin: Christian - Queen - Myth of Love, 2004 (orig. german: Schirin. Christin - Königin - Liebesmythos. Eine spätantike Frauengestalt - Historische Realität und literarische Wirkung, 2003).
