Shirin

Shirin (? – 628 a.d.) ( _fa. شيرين) was a 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.

In Persian literature

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.

According to the myth Shirin and Khosrau fell in love by seeing each other in portraits, but their first meeting was long delayed. Before Shirin agreed to marry Khusraw, there were obstacles to be overcome, including the vanquishing of Farhad, a rival for Shirin’s affections.

The long standing myth spread to other ethnic literature, living on even as far as Europe with Goethe’s "West-oestlicher Divan". Shirin is also mentioned in Scheherazade's The Book of One Thousand and One Nights on the 390th night with the story of Kosrau and Shirin with a fisherman.

See also

*Khosrau Parviz
*Sassanid Empire
*Chosroes and Shirin
*Nezami
*Sarkash

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).
* Gianroberto Scarcia: "Scirin. La Regina dei Magi", Ed. Jaca Book, Milano, 2004.