The Life of Sallara and his Mother Elishbah

Sallara and his mother Elishbah lived through turbulent times: the “last great war of antiquity” fought between Byzantium and Iran, as well as the astonishingly successful Muslim Arab invasions, which led to the collapse of the empire of Iran and the rise of the new Islamic empire. Yet this holy couple, bound by their love for each other and for God, continued unperturbed by these events in quiet devotion to their faith and their local community, performing healings, exorcisms and other wondrous deeds. The account of their lives, published here for the first time, focuses on their small patch of northern Mesopotamia, now in southeast Turkey, and in particular on the two monasteries of Mar Awgen and Mar Yohannan, of which Sallara was the abbot and which still stand today, and on the villages round about, for whose inhabitants the monasteries served both as employers and as providers of all manner of social and divine services. This book, as well as presenting an edition and translation of the Syriac text, will explore this local world and how it fared in the fast-changing Middle Eastern region to which it belonged.