On Saturday the Armenian Apostolic Church celebrates one of the three feasts related to St. Gregory the Enlightener, who converted King Drtad and hence Armenia to Christianity and who was the first Catholicos of all Armenians. This particular feast commemorates …
Catholicos Nersess I, known as St. Nersess the Great, lived in the fourth century and was Catholicos from 353-373. He clearly would not have used the language of “social justice,” today a phrase meant to invoke wide-ranging demands for a …
St. Hripsime (Հռիփսիմէ), in her struggle with King Drtad (Տրդատ, also spelled Trdat) before his conversion to Christianity, was “strengthened by the Holy Spirit” and “struggled like a beast.” Drtad was known for his martial prowess and strength: the historian …
From the perspective of the liturgical calendar, this week could very well be one of the strangest of the year. As we have discussed before, the temporality of the Armenian Apostolic Church emerges from the quality of different “kinds” of …
This Thursday, May 28, marks the 102nd anniversary of the First Republic of Armenia. After a series of military victories known as the Heroic Battles of May, the most famous of which is the Battle of Sardarabad which we discussed …
Զանգեր ղողանջեք, Bells, Ring out! Սրբազան քաջերին կանչեք. Call the Pure and …
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a significant Armenian Catholic population in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. While the Armenian Apostolic Church had intermittent contact with the Roman Catholic Church since at least the period of the …
Few figures loom larger in the ecclesial history of the nineteenth century Armenian Church than the man known affectionately as Khrimian Hayrig. Hayrig, a diminutive form of the Armenian word for father, captures the love and respect nearly universally felt …
“On this day…” begins most entries in one of the most remarkable and yet under-utilized liturgical books of the Armenian Apostolic Church. So ubiquitous is this little phrase that the book itself is known in Armenian as the Յայսմաւուրք/Haysumavurk, which …
Bishop Drtad Balian was the Bishop of Caesarea/Gesaria/Կեսարիա (modern-day Kayseri in Turkey) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Living during the time of famous hierarchs like Khrimian Hayrig and Malachia Ormanian (the author of the monumental ecclesial-national history …