David of Sassoun

Historical context

The epic took shape in the centuries after the Arab conquest of Armenia. Scholars generally trace its historical core to the eighth to tenth centuries, when the mountain district of Sassoun resisted Arab demands for tribute. Over time the storytellers folded in older material, including pre-Christian myth, as well as later layers shaped by encounters with Byzantines, Seljuks and others.

Sassoun itself was a rugged region of the Armenian highlands, and its geography favoured local self-rule. Its people had a long reputation for refusing outside authority. The epic celebrates exactly that reputation, turning stubborn mountain independence into a heroic ideal.

For centuries the epic lived only in performance. Village storytellers, who were often illiterate, recited or half-sang episodes at gatherings and adapted them to their listeners. In 1873 the scholar and bishop Garegin Srvandztiants wrote down a full version from a peasant named Krpo in the Mush region. He saved the tradition just as it was beginning to fade.

Summary of the story

The epic is usually divided into four branches. In the first, the Armenian princess Tsovinar drinks from a sacred fountain and conceives twin brothers, Sanasar and Baghdasar, before she is taken to the caliph of Baghdad. The fountain is the source of their more than human strength. The twins found the fortress of Sassoun and establish the line of heroes.

The second branch centres on Sanasar's son, Mher the Elder, who kills a lion with his bare hands and earns the name Lion Mher. He defends Sassoun and its people, but an entanglement with the ruler of Egypt ends in his death and leaves his homeland exposed.

The third and most famous branch belongs to Mher's son, David. Raised without knowing where he came from, David grows into a giant-hearted, impulsive hero. He rebuilds his father's monastery and refuses to pay tribute to the invading Msra Melik, who, though Sassoun does not know it at first, is his own half-brother. David defeats him in single combat. Later David himself is killed by a poisoned arrow shot by his own daughter, at the urging of the Sultana of Akhlat. The fourth branch follows David's son, Mher the Younger. He finds the world too corrupt for his strength and is finally sealed inside the Raven's Rock, to emerge only when the earth is just enough to bear him.

Main characters

A single family line holds the four branches together, and each generation shows a different side of heroism: founding, guarding, liberating and waiting. The women of the epic are unusually strong and often drive the plot.

Beside the human characters stand David's horse, Kurkik Jalali, a speaking, flying steed handed down through the generations, and the Lightning Sword. Both behave almost like characters in their own right.

• Sanasar and Baghdasar: the twin founders of Sassoun, miraculously born and made strong by a magical spring.
• Mher the Elder: the lion-slaying hero of the second generation, who defends Sassoun and dies through a foreign entanglement.
• David of Sassoun: the central hero, generous, hot-tempered and honest, who frees Sassoun from tribute by defeating Msra Melik.
• Khandut: the noblewoman of Kaputkogh (Tabriz in some versions), who sets out to win David and becomes his wife.
• Mher the Younger: David's son, too strong for a corrupted world, shut inside the Raven's Rock until justice returns.
• Msra Melik: the ruler of Msr who demands tribute from Sassoun and is defeated by David in single combat.

Themes and key ideas

The central theme is resistance to unjust demands. The heroes of Sassoun are not conquerors. They fight when tribute collectors arrive, when their land is invaded or when the weak are abused. Time and again David gives warning before he strikes, and he refuses to attack an opponent who is unprepared. The epic presents this insistence on a fair fight as the mark of a true hero.

A second theme is the tension between strength and wisdom. Every hero in the line is immensely powerful, yet each is put in danger or brought down by his own impulsiveness. Mher the Elder is trapped by a foreign alliance, David is careless about oaths, and Mher the Younger can find no use for his strength at all. The epic admires courage while showing that courage alone is not enough.

The ending of the fourth branch adds the theme of justice postponed. Mher the Younger enters the rock because the earth cannot hold him. He will return only when wheat grows to the size of a rosehip and barley to the size of a walnut, in other words when the world becomes fair. This image of a hero waiting inside a mountain has become one of the most powerful symbols in Armenian culture.

Language and style

The epic was composed and handed down orally, and its style shows it. The lines are rhythmic and were often chanted rather than spoken. Formulas and set phrases repeat to help the reciter remember, and episodes follow a predictable shape that listeners can keep up with through a long evening. Each reciter told it differently: around a hundred and sixty variants have now been recorded, and some fifty of them published.

The language is dialectal and vivid, full of village humour, boasting matches, insults and comic exaggeration. The heroes are not solemn. David in particular is often funny, careless and childlike, which gives his moments of moral seriousness all the more force.

In 1939 a team of Armenian scholars combined the collected variants into a single readable text for the epic's celebrated millennium. Most modern readers, students included, know the epic through that combined version, while researchers work with the individual recorded variants.

Legacy and adaptations

Since it was written down in 1873, the epic has become the central reference point of Armenian folk culture. Hovhannes Tumanyan retold the David branch as a long poem in 1902, and Yeghishe Charents, Avetik Isahakyan and many others wrote their own versions, carrying the material to new generations of readers.

Yervand Kochar's equestrian statue of David of Sassoun, unveiled in 1959 in front of the Yerevan railway station, is one of the best-known monuments in Armenia. The epic has also inspired operas, films, animations, paintings and school pageants, and in 2012 it was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.

It is often compared with the Iliad, the Song of Roland and the Shahnameh. For students it offers an easy way into medieval Armenian history, into oral tradition, and into the way a community turns memory into story.