The cradle of great original myths
It is in Armenia, it is said, that "the Almighty establishes the earthly paradise". And Christian Armenia paid with an often cruel history for the carelessness of the Garden of Eden! Cradle of original myths, Armenia claims a history as old as humanity, whose first steps it supported, when the earth, after the Flood, was repopulated with Noah and his people around Mount Ararat, today in Turkey, but which watches over Yerevan, and a whole people. The Armenians, who call themselves Hai, and their country, Haïastan, trace their family tree back to Noah, whose ancestor Haïk was their great-great-grandson, according to a tradition reported by thefifth-century Armenian historian Moses of Khorene. These biblical references tell us how much this land is steeped in Christianity. Its early conversion radically changed the destiny of a nation already rich in a history forged in the crucible of the ancient world, between Hellenic and Persian influences, of which it made a happy synthesis, and gave it an identity that it preserved at the cost of immense sacrifices. Unified by the Artaxiades, whose most powerful dynasty, Tigran the Great, carved out a vast and ephemeral empire between the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean, Armenia was torn between Rome and Persia, and became a power again under the Arsacid dynasty of the Parthians, when it made this decisive choice. The Rhandeia Agreement (63 AD), under which a Parthian Arsacid occupied the Armenian throne under Rome, allowed the Armenian dynasty to assert itself between Romans and Parthians. Summoned to choose sides, the Armenian Arsacids chose Rome when their Parthian elders in Persia were overthrown by the Sassanians (224-651), eager to impose Nazism on the vassal countries.
The decisive choice of Christianity
This tension between East and West was confirmed with Trdat III (298-330) who embraced Christianity in 301. Legend has it that after persecuting, like his overlord the emperor Diocletian, the many Christians in an Armenia evangelized by the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, the king was transformed into a wild beast. An Armenian Christian from Cappadocia, Gregory, who had been languishing at the bottom of a well for 13 years, was called to his bedside. The king regained his human form, became a Christian, and entrusted Gregory with the task of "enlightening" the country by founding a church in Etchmiadzin. But he came up against the resistance of a paganism that had its faithful and its places of worship, such as the elegant temple of Garni, and which had been recovered by the organization of the Mazdean magi, supported by the Persians, in their efforts to subdue the country. Although the Armenian princes, who had become fervent Christians, destroyed the pagan temples and erected churches on the sites of Christian martyrdom, such as the one dedicated to St. Hripsimea at Etchmiadzin, it took a century to extirpate the ancient deities from the Armenian sky. A period of unrest, which Romans and Persians took advantage of to divide Armenia in 387: in the west, the Roman-Byzantine Empire, which had become Christian, practiced a policy of assimilation; in the east, the Persians, hostile to Christianity, caused the fall of the Armenian Arsacids in 428. It was then that the historical personality of the Armenians was forged: the baptism of Trdat III made Armenia the first Christian state, 90 years before the Roman Empire; the creation in 406, by Saint Mesrop Machtots, of the alphabet, imposed the Armenian language in the administration and the liturgy, reinforcing an identity which will be expressed in the battle of Avaraïr, in 451, opposing the army of the king of Persia to the Armenian troops led by the knight Vartan Mamikonian. The Armenians were defeated, their leader perished, but the Persians gave up trying to impose Mazdaism. Thus, the defeat of Avaraïr is celebrated as a major victory by the Armenians and a founding episode of Christian Armenia, if not a choice of civilization, as a westernizing reading of history implies. Armenia has certainly preserved a certain pagan heritage, the Marian tradition betraying a survival of the cult of the goddess Anahit (the first grapes are offered to the Virgin on the Assumption). But a carnal link unites the Armenians to Christianity: "Whoever believed that Christianity was only a garment for us will know that he will not be able to tear it off us, just like our skin..." declared Vartan Mamikonian on June 2, 451, while haranguing his troops at Avaraïr! Christianity was grafted onto a rich national history and the graft took so well that Armenia has remained resolutely Christian. A particular Christianity, based on a national, apostolic and autocephalous Church, recognizing only the authority of its supreme leader, the catholicos, whose long lineage was inaugurated by Saint Gregory the Illuminator. For in 451, the Armenians, busy at Avaraïr, had deserted another battlefield, theological: absent from the Council of Chalcedon, where the theologians gathered by Byzantium defined the nature of Christ (a human nature and a divine nature united, not confused), the Armenian Church challenged its conclusions in 552, at the Council of Dvin, and was placed among the non-Chalcedonian Churches known as monophysites, and therefore heretical. If at Avaraïr, the Armenians had united against paganism, at Dvin, they affirmed their singularity in the Christian world, behind an independent Church and its catholicos, seated at Etchmiadzine. But at what price! This was to earn Armenia a fatal isolation in the face of Byzantium's efforts to assimilate the Armenians, and then the Arabs in the 7th century, and the Turks in the 11th century, who put an end to an Armenian royalty that had shone for two centuries in Ani, and whose partial rebirth in the north, with the Zakarids (12th-14th centuries), covered Armenia with its most beautiful buildings.
A faith that moves mountains
Animated by this faith that carried their mountains, the Armenians, fleeing from the Turks, masters of most of Armenia, recreated in the south, in Cilicia, a kingdom that prospered from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, with the providential support of the Crusades. After the disappearance of the royalty, under the blows of the Mongols, it is the church which, during the centuries of Persian and Ottoman domination, will be the ferment of a national awakening, preparing the conditions of a rebirth when the Armenian question, in the XIXth century, draws the attention of the Powers to the fate of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. And when the genocide fell on the country in 1915, it was still around their Church, which sounded the tocsin in May 1918, that the Armenians gathered to defend Russian Armenia against the Turks and to lay the foundations of a 1st Republic. Sovietization could not break this powerful bond. The Soviet regime waged a ferocious war against the clergy, a proxy for feudalism, and for 70 years tried to eradicate this Christian identity, which was reduced to a docile official Church and to the intimacy of the home, where a faith was passed on, of which the diaspora became the pious guardian. The Brezhnevian period nevertheless allowed for a revaluation of the Christian heritage, which was returned to worship after independence in 1991, designating Armenia as a living centre of Eastern Christianity. Although not very practising, Armenians are very attached to their Church, as they showed in 2001 by celebrating the 1700th anniversary of their conversion with pomp and circumstance, and also to their churches, which are one with the landscape. The church (yéguéghétsi) is the house of God, but also the second home of every Armenian, who considers it a place of worship as well as the expression of a national genius of which his small country was the matrix. A precious and fragile heritage, which Armenians feel all the more obliged to preserve and pass on as it was almost wiped out after the genocide of 1915 in western Armenia (eastern Turkey), where only a few churches remain, and as it is still threatened today in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the defeated Armenians in 2020 had to hand over to the Azeris the keys to the medieval monastery of Dadivank and the town of Shushi, with its Ghazantchetchots cathedral, already damaged during the war, whose fate worries the Armenians who have not forgotten the destruction by the Azeri army in the 2000s of the khatchkars of the old Armenian cemetery of Djuga, in Nakhchivan.
A living home of Eastern Christianity
Today's Armenia represents only one tenth of historical Armenia. But it is there that Christian Armenia was born, whose high places, which are so many places of pilgrimage, given over to the devotion of the faithful, retrace its genesis, at the foot of Ararat, like the Holy See of Etchmiadzine, Khor Virap, the "deep pit" where Saint Gregory was thrown, or the mausoleum of Mesrob Machtotz, in Ochagan, and so many other monasteries and churches testifying to the splendour of Ani, the capital "with a thousand and one churches", whose ruins, in Turkey, are visible from Armenia. If the cities have not survived the hazards of history, 4,000 buildings, mostly religious, attest to this artistic genius, exalting in the stone of the churches or the illuminations of the manuscripts, of which the Matenadaran-Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan is the sanctuary, a Christian culture born of the encounter between East and West. For Armenia is a unique world where East and West meet. In these biblical landscapes with their ochre tones, in these steppes reminiscent of Central Asia, on these high stony plateaus beaten by the winds that have erased the ancient camel tracks to which the ruins of the caravanserai bear witness, one looks in vain for the East of the Thousand and One Nights. Despite centuries of Muslim domination, mosques and minarets are absent from a landscape studded with churches and monasteries, or these "cross-stones" (khatchkars), scattered across the fields, major lapidary testimonies of Armenian identity. In symbiosis with nature, these monasteries with their characteristic conical dome, cut into the blue sky at the top of a ridge, like Tatev, or blending into the sides of the mountains, like Noravank, or nestled in an oasis of greenery at the bottom of a gorge, like Geghard, echo this little-known Christian East, with its ancient liturgy and its rites sometimes influenced by paganism. And suddenly, at the bend of an arid steppe, one enters a dark and humid valley, covered with forests, with a false air of French soil, where some church, Haghartzine for example, with lines so familiar that Western specialists wanted to see the beginnings of Romanesque art there. But a detail on a facade betrays the influence of Persia, and an air of folklore, accompanied by the smell of a skewer, thanks to a festival encountered on the way, is enough to bring us back to this very particular East. In Yerevan itself, if the fashions coming from the West seduce the youth, the nonchalance and the phlegm, more oriental than Mediterranean, of a population which invades the café terraces with the beautiful days, remind us, the nonchalance and phlegm, more oriental than Mediterranean, of a population that invades the café terraces with the arrival of the summer, remind us, as much as the earthenware of the superb Persian mosque in the capital, that this country, which takes us to the sources of Christianity under the tutelary silhouette of Ararat, whose snows are said to contain the remains of Noah's Ark, is situated at the gates of Iran.
