Shahmaran, the Queen of Serpents

Shahmaran, the half-woman half-serpent queen of an underground kingdom of snakes, is one of the most reproduced images in southern Turkey, and one of the least documented. Her story can be traced book by book. The oldest telling that can be dated is Ottoman: the Câmasbnâme that Mûsâ Abdi finished in 833 AH (1429-30) for Sultan Murad II, 5,122 couplets whose oldest surviving copy sits in the Vatican Library. Its hero is Câmasb, son of the prophet Daniel, abandoned in a well of honey by his fellow woodcutters. The Arabic version printed as The Queen of the Serpents in the Thousand and One Nights calls him Hasib Karim al-Din and adds the scheming vizier; Edward Lane cut all fifty-three nights of it out of his English edition as extravagant absurdity. Tarsus supplies the place: an Ottoman bathhouse where the queen is said to have been killed, fifty metres from a tomb venerated as the prophet Daniel's. The name means shah of the snakes, a masculine title, and the town's own 1986 statue of her is a man.

Every version of this story reached us through a named book, and the books do not agree. Laying them side by side — work, passage, date, and what each one adds — is the only way to see where Shahmaran actually comes from, and it produces a chain that is more interesting than the vague antiquity usually claimed for her. The name is a masculine title. Persian shāh-i mārān means "shah of the snakes". It is a king's word, not a queen's, and the figure it names is not consistently female. In the fieldwork Nilgün Çıblak collected in Tarsus, some variants describe the upper half as a man and others as a woman; Neşe Yıldıran's survey of Near Eastern serpent symbolism, which Çıblak follows, records that outside Anatolia the figure is male, and reads the Anatolian feminisation as the pull of the region's mother-goddess imagery. The Shahmaran that has stood in a Tarsus square since 1986, by Emine Berika İpekbayrak, is a man: no crown, wavy hair, twelve snakes coiled around him. The first link is a name, not a story. The hero is called Câmasb in Ottoman Turkish, Djamasp in the first French printing and Jamasp in Burton's notes — that is Jāmāsp, the sage and minister of the Kayanian king Vishtāspa, and the Zoroastrian book attributed to him is the Jāmāsp-nāmag. Jivanji Jamshedji Modi printed the Pahlavi, Pāzend and Persian texts together in Bombay in 1903, so the book can be read rather than invoked. It is a question-and-answer apocalypse: Vishtāspa asks Jāmāsp about creation and about the end of the world, and the last chapters deal with the coming saviour. There is no serpent queen in it, and no Shahmaran. A word search of Modi's edition returns 290 occurrences of "Jamasp", 47 of Vishtāsp/Gushtāsp and 57 of Zoroaster/Zarathushtra — the controls — against zero for "queen" and zero for any spelling of Shahmaran. The three occurrences of "serpent" are a passing reference to the Mār-nāmeh, a separate Persian booklet for taking omens from snakes; Gōčihr, the astronomical dragon burnt by molten metal at the end of time; and the two snakes on Zahhāk's shoulders. So the Zoroastrian layer is real and it is a dead end: Ottoman poets borrowed the title of a famous book of wisdom and the name of its sage, not its contents. The oldest datable telling is Ottoman and it is dated to the year. Mûsâ Abdi, a poet of Murad II's court, wrote his Câmasbnâme at Aydıncık near Bandırma in the space of a year and finished it in 833 AH (1429-30), at the sultan's request. It runs to 5,122 couplets in the fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün metre, with fourteen ghazals, a tevhid, a na't, panegyrics for Murad II and for the grand vizier Hoca Mehmed Paşa, and an elegy. Copies survive in Istanbul, Ankara, Erzurum and Konya, and abroad in Paris (BnF 1363), London (British Museum Add. 24962), Oxford (Bodleian 2086), Leiden (1558) and the Vatican, where Barberini Orientale 103, copied by Mevlânâ Mahmud, is the oldest known manuscript of the poem. Abdi says only that he versified "a book of the same name" and never names its language; In Mustafa Erkan's summary of the scholarship, E. J. W. Gibb took it for a verse translation of the Arabian Nights tale and Mélikoff traced it to Ṭabarī instead. Abdi's plot is the familiar one, with two things missing that everybody now repeats. Daniel the prophet dies leaving his book of wisdom for the son his wife is carrying; the boy, Câmasb, learns nothing at school and no trade, and ends up cutting firewood; sheltering from rain in a cave he and his companions find a well full of honey, they lower him in, take the honey and abandon him; he widens a hole and comes out in the kingdom of the snakes, where Shahmaran treats him as a guest and tells him the story of Bulkıya. Shahmaran lets him go on his oath of silence. The ruler, here Keyhusrev, falls ill, learns that only Shahmaran's flesh will cure him, and Câmasb — in fear for his life — gives up the secret. Shahmaran is taken by a talisman, killed, and the king is cured by the medicine made from her flesh. There is no scheming vizier in this version, no old woman, no bathhouse and no poison. The Arabic version has a different hero's name and a different villain. In Richard Burton's translation of 1885, the tale of "The Queen of the Serpents" occupies Nights 482 to 536 of volume five. The hero is Hasib Karim al-Din, son of the Greek sage Daniel; the queen is never called Shahmaran, only "Queen of the Serpents and their Sultānah"; the sick man is King Karazdan of Persia and the Seven Countries, and his disease is leprosy. The villain is the grand wazir Shamhur, "a crafty magician and diviner", who works out from a book that whoever has spent two years with the queen will come out of a bathhouse with a blackened belly, and posts three mamelukes at the door of every bath in the city until Hasib is dragged into one. And the poison is not a body part: Shamhur boils the queen's flesh in a brass cauldron, and it is the first skimming of the broth that kills him and the second that fills Hasib's heart with wisdom, exactly as the queen had told him privately on the road. The tale was printed in Europe before Burton and then deleted. In 1828 G.-S. Trébutien published in Paris the Contes inédits des Mille et une Nuits from Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's manuscript; volume one carries "Histoire de Djamasp et de la Reine des Serpens", nights 479 to 536. Von Hammer's own preface calls it "one of the oldest Persian stories" and then warns the reader, in the same breath, that the Prophet's mission is announced inside it and that modern translators and compilers had allowed themselves far greater anachronisms. That sentence, dated and signed, is the earliest claim of antiquity for this story that can actually be cited — and its author already hedged it. His version differs from Burton's in details worth keeping: the king is Gouserdan, the vizier proves his case with a letter rather than a book, and the remedy prescribed is not the queen's flesh but her milk. Eleven years later Edward Lane left the whole story out of his celebrated English Nights. We know why because Burton records it in a footnote: Lane dropped it "because 'it is a compound of the most extravagant absurdities'. He should have enabled his readers to form their own judgment." Fifty-three nights of narrative vanished from the version of the Arabian Nights that the English-speaking world read for two generations, which is a large part of why Shahmaran is a household image in Anatolia and almost unknown outside it. Tarsus enters last, and for a reason that is on the map. Nothing in Abdi, in Trébutien or in Burton happens in Tarsus. What Tarsus has is a building and a grave. The Şahmeran Hamamı stands on Şahmeran Sokak in the Kızılmurat quarter, fifty metres north of the Makam-ı Şerif mosque, which holds the tomb venerated as that of the prophet Daniel — the father of the hero in every literary version of the tale. The bath is thought to have been built by the Ramazanoğulları in the fifteenth century on Roman foundations; in 1651 it was attached to the Softa Mahmut Paşa endowment, and it was repaired in 1873. Local tradition holds that Shahmaran was killed inside it, and that the reddish tinge on the navel stone and the inner walls is her blood. The Tarsus versions Çıblak recorded in 2007 from four named informants supply everything the Ottoman poem lacks: the vizier who dabbles in magic, the scaly back, the order that the whole town be washed, the three boilings — first water to the vizier, who dies; second to the sultan, who is cured; third to Câmasb, who becomes chief vizier — and a variant in which the hero is not Câmasb at all but Lokman Hekim, the patron of physicians, who learns medicine at Shahmaran's side. One belief collected there is worth quoting for its shape: the snakes do not yet know their queen is dead. She told them she was going to the bath and then to a wedding, and they mistake the sound of drums for the wedding still going on. On the day the drums stop, they will come down into Tarsus.

Tarsus (Mersin province, Turkey). The building at the centre of the local tradition is the Şahmeran Hamamı, on Şahmeran Sokak in the Kızılmurat quarter of the old town, roughly fifty metres north of the Makam-ı Şerif mosque and its tomb of the prophet Daniel. Road works over the years left the bath below street level; it is now entered down seven or eight steps, which is also the best way to recognise it from outside. Nilgün Çıblak recorded it as a working bathhouse in 2007, with the dressing room raised to two floors and an octagonal pool added. That is no longer the case: travel and visitor reporting through 2025 describes it as closed and awaiting restoration, visible from the street only. Check locally before travelling — this is exactly the kind of detail that changes without notice, and the bath is municipal-scale heritage, not a ticketed monument. A short walk away, a Shahmaran statue by Emine Berika İpekbayrak has stood in one of the town squares since 1986. It is worth seeing precisely because it contradicts the postcard image: this Shahmaran is male and wears no crown. Tarsus also holds St Paul's Well and the Eshâb-ı Kehf cave sanctuary north of the town. The festival. There is no annual "Shahmaran festival". What exists is the Uluslararası Tarsus Festivali, run by Mersin Metropolitan Municipality, held in early November: first edition 2022 (themed on Cleopatra), second edition November 2023 (themed on Shahmaran, opening with a show called Şahmeran Tarsus'ta), third in 2024 and fourth on 7-9 November 2025. Shahmaran was the theme of one edition, not the name of the event. Getting there. Tarsus is about 25 km east of Mersin and 40 km west of Adana, on the main Mersin-Adana road and rail corridor; the nearest airport is Adana Şakirpaşa. The old town is walkable and the sites above are within a few hundred metres of each other. Mardin, roughly 600 km to the east, is the other place that claims the tradition, and it is where the reverse-glass Shahmaran paintings are still made and sold in the bazaar workshops — bought historically as trousseau and wedding pieces. Sökmen and Balkanal note that the under-glass technique itself has almost disappeared in Turkey, so what is on sale in either town is largely printed or painted on other supports.