Queen Tamar of Georgia
Queen Tamar was the first female king of Georgia. She was the elder daughter of King George III, who made her his co-regent in 1178. After her father’s death in 1184, Tamar succeeded him as ruler of the country, which she stayed until her death in 1213.
From the very beginning, Queen Tamar had to face multiple challenges. As Georgia’s first female ruler, who was crowned king, not queen, her legitimacy was questioned by many of the Georgian nobles.
To calm the situation, Tamar married Yuri, a Russian prince, in 1185, much against her own will. But already two years later she divorced him and had him expelled from the country, putting an end to Yuri’s ongoing attempts to overtake assume power.
In 1191 Queen Tamar married a second time, this time to a man of her own choosing, the Alan prince David Soslan, with whom she had two children, Lasha George IV and Rusudan, the two successive monarchs on the throne of Georgia.
Queen Tamar must have been a woman of exceptional intelligence, endurance and will power. She was a member of the Bagrationi dynasty, one of the oldest Christian reigning royal families in the Middle Ages, who ruled Georgia until the early 19th century.
Throughout her reign, Queen Tamar greatly expanded the kingdom’s territory out to present-day northern Turkey and parts of today’s Azerbaijan, bordering the Caspian Sea.
Therefore, Queen Tamar’s reign from 1184 until her death in 1213 is referred to as the Golden Age of Georgia, a medieval period of not only exceptional military success and economic prosperity, but also flourishing art and culture. It was during that period that Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli wrote his world-famous poem “The Knight in the Panther's Skin”.
And historians believe that Queen Tamar actually lived in Vardzia from 1193 to 1195 during a military conflict with the Seljuk Turks. During that time she enlarged and expanded the famous cave complex, turning the original military fortress into a fortified cave monastery, giving a home to nearly 2000 monks at its peak.
Picture Credits: DMO
Project “Increased regional added value in the tourism sectors of Georgia by Digital Heritage Tourism Guides” was funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) with funds of Austrian Development Cooperation.
