Detected the missing body of the executed queen

The remains of a woman stored in a church in India are more likely to belong to a Georgian queen who was executed 400 years ago, according to a new DNA study.

The results of DNA analysis revealed, the newly discovered remains were found by Queen Ketevan, wife of King Kakheti in Georgia in the 1600s. After her husband was killed and the country fell into the hands of Persian King Shah Abbas I , Mrs. Ketevan became a prisoner of the invaders.

Queen Ketevan was ill and emaciated in Shiraz, Iran, for nearly a decade after that. However, in 1624, King Shah Abbas asked her to convert from Christianity to Islam and become his concubine.

Because the Emperor Ketevan appealed, the King of Persia sent soldiers to torture and execute her on September 22, 1624. Not long after that, the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized Ms. Ketevan.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Mitochondrion magazine quoted Niraj Rai, a researcher from the Center for Molecular and Cell Biology in Hyderabad, India, who said that before his death, Queen Ketevan had become friends with two St. Augustine monks. those who are very devoted to her. Legend has it that, in 1627, these two monks secretly extracted the queen's remains and took them out of Iran.

An old Portuguese document recorded, Queen Ketevan's bones were kept in a black stone casket, hidden in the window of St. Augustine Convent in Goa, India.

After centuries, a part of the monastery has collapsed and many valuable objects have been sold out. The first attempts to find the queen's remains have failed.

However, starting in 2004, researcher Rai and his colleagues unearthed the area they believed contained the remains of Mrs. Ketevan. They eventually found a piece of broken arm bone and two other pieces of bone, as well as pieces of black boxes.

To determine if the bone fragments belonged to Ketevan, the researchers extracted DNA that was only found in the cytoplasm of the egg and was passed on to the mother.

The results showed that the arm bone belonged to a woman with a genetic line U1b. While the survey of 22,000 people in the Indian subcontinent did not detect anyone with the genetic line U1b. In contrast, this genetic line is relatively common in a sample of 30 people from Georgia.

Two other pieces of bone provide evidence that they belong to common genetic lines in India, reinforcing documents that suggest that Queen Ketevan's remains are stored in the same place as the bones of the two monks. direction.