Shahmaran

The honey was nearly gone when the woodcutters stopped answering him. Hasib had passed the last of it up out of the cistern hidden beneath the cave floor, jar after jar, and when he called for the rope there was only the sound of donkeys moving off through wet scrub. He shouted until his voice gave out. Then a scorpion dropped past his shoulder onto the stone, and after he had killed it he stood in the dark and wondered where a scorpion comes from in a pit that had been full of honey. There was a crack in the wall. Behind the crack there was light.

He widened the gap with his knife and crawled into a passage that ran to an iron door fastened with a silver padlock, the golden key still sitting in it. Beyond the door lay a hall with a pond that glittered like water, and above the pond a mound of green jasper carrying a golden throne ringed by thousands of stools in gold, silver and emerald. He counted twelve thousand of them, sat down on the throne because there was nothing else to do, and fell asleep. He woke to hissing. Every stool held a serpent a hundred cubits long with eyes like live coals, and the pond was not water at all but small snakes in numbers nobody could count. A serpent the size of a mule came forward carrying a golden dish, and in the dish lay something that shone, with the face of a woman.

She spoke first, in his own language. Have no fear of us, O youth. I am the Queen of the Serpents and their Sultaness. Then she had fruit brought to him, apples and grapes and pomegranates and pistachios and almonds, and apologised that there was no meat in her house.

In the Arabic version of the cycle, which belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Thousand and One Nights, she carries the name Yamlīkha, a name that also attaches to one of the Seven Sleepers and that scholars have connected to Iamblichus. Across Anatolia, Iran and Kurdistan she has a different title, and it is the one that stuck: Shahmaran, the shah of snakes. Her story travelled with the collection and then far past it, into Turkish and Kurdish oral repertoires that share the shape of the tale and disagree cheerfully about the details.

What she looks like is the most stable thing about her, because people kept painting her. From the waist up she is a woman with a crown and long dark hair, hands open and empty. Below that she is a serpent, coiled in loops of green and gold, and in most painted versions a second small snake head rises at the tip of her tail, so that the figure watches from both ends. A stone plaque about half a metre square, found at Ani and now in the museum at Kars, gives a serpent body with a second head lifting from its back and a face that reads as female. Tarsus disagrees with all of this and insists that its own Şahmeran was a man.

Nobody tells you where she came from. She has no birth in these stories, no parents, no making. She is simply already there, underground, holding court in a chamber the sun has never reached, and in the Anatolian tellings her kingdom sits seven layers below the surface where the snakes live at peace with one another. In the Arabic text she winters on Mount Qaf at the world’s edge and leaves a deputy behind to rule for her. When she enters, every serpent in the hall drops off its stool onto the cold floor in homage, and she has to gesture them back up before anything else can happen.

She kept the boy for two years and taught him, and she filled the time with stories, the wanderings of Bulukiya and the long unhappy love of Janshah. In the Anatolian versions the teaching is more practical: which root, which leaf, which fever. When she finally let him go she asked for one promise, that he would never enter a bathhouse again, and he swore it.

The vizier Shemhour was a magician who had read what would happen. He had posted watchers at the door of every bath in the kingdom with instructions to report any man whose belly turned black in the steam. Turkish tellers make the sign more visible: scales come up on the young man’s skin while he washes. In Tarsus they will show you the building where it happened, the Şahmeran Hamamı in the Kızılmurat quarter, a fifteenth-century bath said to stand on a Roman one.

So they took him back to the cistern. The vizier threw incense on a chafing dish and worked through three formulas of conjuration while the men stood around the well mouth, and then the water sank away and something opened in the rock with a noise like thunder, and grown men fainted and a few of them died of it. She came up on the back of a serpent as big as an elephant, sparks coming off it, and she looked around the ring of faces until she found the one she knew. Where is the covenant you made with me. She wept, and he wept, and then she told him to pick her up and set her on his head, because her death had been arranged before either of them existed. She knew how it ended and told him what to do anyway.

The instructions she gave him on that walk are the whole point of the story. Refuse to kill me. Let the vizier do it himself, and let him cut me in three and set the pieces boiling in a brass pot. He will be called away. He will tell you to drink the first scum and save the second for him. Do the opposite. Shemhour swallowed the first skimming, swelled, and dropped dead with the phial still in his hand. Hasib drank the second and the whole scheme of the world opened in front of him, the courses of the planets, the properties of every mineral and plant, medicine and geometry and the making of gold. The king Kerezdan, rotting with leprosy, ate her flesh over three days, sweated through a night, and shed his old skin in scales. In the Anatolian line the wisdom lands elsewhere. Some tellers say the young man was Lokman Hekim, the great physician, who afterwards walked in the countryside and heard the plants call out what they were good for.

Her powers all follow from what she is. She commands every snake there is, she speaks to humans in their own tongue, she knows the medicine hidden in roots and leaves, and she can read her own ending without flinching from it. Her body itself is the sharpest of these, since the same pot yields a poison and a cure depending only on which skimming you take.

Her limits are just as tight. A magician with incense and the right words can pull her out of the ground against her will. She cannot outrun what is written for her. Her safety rests entirely on one human keeping one promise, and the secret is carried on his skin where anyone who knows to look can read it. She saves the king, teaches the physician, punishes the traitor, and none of it can be done while she is alive.

Above ground she never really went away. Workshops in Mardin still turn her out on wooden panels, on metal platters and on mirrors, and the reverse glass paintings hang in living rooms to keep the house safe, doing the same work as the hand of Fatima or the blue glass bead against the evil eye. In 2016 the Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan, painting in prison, gave her two heads in red, green and yellow. In 2021 a poster at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul set her over an image of the Kaaba and students were arrested for it. The anthropologist Dilşa Deniz reads her as a defeated goddess of Kurdistan, a body in which opposites are held in balance, though the written record starts with the Arabic cycle and that older descent is an argument rather than a documented line. In Tarsus none of this is theoretical. They point at the marble slab where she was killed, they show you the stains, and they have been waiting a long time for the snakes to settle the account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Shahmaran?

Shahmaran is the queen of snakes in Turkish, Kurdish, Persian and Arabic folklore, shown as a crowned woman from the waist up and a coiled serpent below. She rules an underground kingdom of serpents, speaks human language, and knows which plants cure which illnesses. In the Arabic version preserved in the Thousand and One Nights she is called Yamlīkha.

What happens in the legend of Shahmaran?

A young man falls into an underground chamber, meets Shahmaran, and is sheltered and taught by her for two years. She releases him on his promise never to enter a bathhouse, because bathing reveals a mark on his skin that betrays her hiding place. A magician vizier forces him to give her up, and Shahmaran instructs him on how her boiled body should be used before she is killed.

Is Shahmaran good or evil?

Shahmaran is benevolent in every version of the story. She feeds and protects the man who falls into her realm, teaches him medicine and the properties of plants, and even after he breaks his oath she tells him exactly how to survive what is coming. The betrayal in the tale belongs to the humans, not to her.

What does the name Shahmaran mean?

The name comes from Persian shāh, meaning king, and mār, meaning snake, with the plural ending -ān, so it means roughly “shah of snakes.” Turkish spells it Şahmeran or Şahmaran and Kurdish Şahmaran. The title describes her sovereignty over all serpents rather than naming her personally.

Why do people hang pictures of Shahmaran?

Her image is hung in homes and worn as an ornament for protection and good fortune, in the same way as the hand of Fatima or the blue glass bead used against the evil eye. Workshops in Mardin produce her portrait on wooden panels, metal platters and mirrors, and reverse glass painting of Shahmaran is a living craft in southeastern Turkey.

Related Entries

Zahhak, Simurgh, Peri, Div, Melek Taus, Melusine, Lamia, Echidna, Medusa, Naga, Manasa, Nure-onna, Yamata no Orochi, Ouroboros, Wadjet