Everything about Shirin totally explained
» For the city in Uzbekistan, see Shirin, Uzbekistan.
Shirin (? –
628 a.d.) was a wife of the
Sassanid Persian
Shahanshah (king of kings),
Khosrau II. She was from Chuzistan and was described in several sources as a beautiful woman. 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.
Further Information
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