Our churches wear the same face our village lives do, plain, bare, and weathered. If a handsome temple has come down from the old forefathers, stone-built and solid, that is a stroke of luck for the villagers. Some villages have a monastery right beside them. In the district of Rshtunik there is the monastery of Narek,1 among the villages of Timar there is the famous monastery of the Holy Mother of God,2 and there are others elsewhere. Monasteries like these serve the nearby villages as church and house of prayer, and that too is a great comfort.
But as a rule the village churches of the land of Vaspurakan are built of earth and timber. The walls go up in unfired brick, and the ceiling and roof are covered over with earth. The sanctuary and the altar are the only parts that amount to anything, and only then if they happen to be built of stone and lime. Don't be surprised that the villagers' churches are the wooden ones. What should surprise you far more is that in a city as famous as Van the churches are almost all timber too. Only a few have buildings old and stately enough to deserve the name, like the church of Surb Poghos in the middle of the city.
In the Aygestan,3 the church of Ayr-Haruyts had a fine old building. A few years ago, while they were renovating the church's timber porch, they ran the ancient building and the porch together. They wanted their church to look like the churches of Bolis,4 on the theory that the churches of Bolis preserve the ancient form and figure of the true Armenian temples. It is a pity, a thousand pities. What is left of those ancient temples is being pulled down one after another, churches are going up in foreign shapes, and altars are being fitted out with clumsy, tasteless khachkals, the carved cross-stands.
But enough of that, Tornik. Let me draw you a picture of our own village church. If the picture puts it in front of your eyes, that is enough.
Our village church is earth and timber like the rest, and a few years ago it was patched up, though just barely. Look at it. The altar is plain and unornamented, made of wood, with one roughly cut khachkal on it. The vem, the altar-stone, and the steps of the candle-stand are draped with a shabby, soot-blackened cloth. At the Liturgy two candles are lit, hardly more. The rest of the time a wooden three-legged lamp-stand does the work, with an earthen lamp on top, thick with oil and soot. And look how shapeless and crude the image of the Lord above the altar is. On the floor of the church and around the altar there is nothing but rush matting. Village churches mostly have no gallery, so the men stand in front and the women behind.
Never mind the shabbiness of the building. It means nothing before the universal glory of God, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth.5 Now for the moral picture. We have one old priest, and he can barely get himself to church, shaking, propped on his staff. His eyes went dim long ago, like the patriarch Isaac's,6 but he has much of the church's office by heart, and he reads it. He is a good priest, God-fearing, and the people love him. We had another priest too, decently schooled, quick, hardworking. But he grew rich, left the village, and went to the city. It seems growing rich is not a very good thing for a village priest, because money pushes him toward an easy life. When a man is ordained priest of a village church, he binds himself to it by written vow. And yet men like that find ways to break the vow, offering hollow, groundless excuses. Still, to speak straight and judge fairly, the village priests are often in the right themselves, when the people begrudge their spiritual officer the dues of his ministry, dues appointed by the holy fathers of the early church.
The proof is in front of us in our own day. The priests, like the people, are going into exile for bread, leaving village and church orphaned while they drift for years in a foreign country. You should see them, Tornik. They wander through the graveyards of Bolis and wait there, hoping for a funeral, or hoping some pandukht, some man in exile for his bread, will come and have a grave blessed for his dead.
So the priest gives up shepherding the village's living people, because he cannot make a living from them, and goes looking for his family's bread among the graves of the dead. Blessed be the memory of the departed, who supply the priest's bread out of their graves. The graves of the dead have a fruitfulness of their own, there where men have fallen asleep in the Lord, in faith and in the name of Christ.
It seems to me, Tornik, that the leaders of the nation count the village people a no-people. They do not deserve a decent church. They do not deserve an educated, respectable priest for a shepherd. School, learning and education are held to be more than they need. They are not lucky enough to hear a vardapet7 preach even a few times a year. The village church lies far from the feet of the diocesan visitation. In short, they are cut off from every spiritual comfort. No one could describe how little their condition counts. Everything is concentrated in the cities, where the Prelate's see is set for the whole diocese. You would think the Prelate was the townsfolk's private monopoly, or a shepherd they had hired, since he attends to the townsfolk and no one else. City sheep are the only sheep he has to pasture, and the village sheep out on the plain can be left to the wolves. The Prelate sees a villager's face on one occasion only, when the man comes before him with a petition and a pleading look. The easy life and the love of glory have quenched the care and the zeal of our spiritual shepherds, and I think the cause of it is the townsfolk and the life of the city.
One slender consolation is left to the village people, the monasteries, above all in the province of Vaspurakan. The monastery vardapets come out from time to time to visit the villages of the diocese. They come to collect the monastery's dues and fruit-tithe, true enough. But there are hardworking monks among them who do more than discharge the duty of the visit and give the people some spiritual comfort. They also settle any number of odd village matters that have come up, and now and then they act as peacemakers and judges in the quarrels and disputes. The pity is that monks that conscientious are very rare.
This lesson could open a very wide subject for me. But Papik is a layman and a worker of the soil, and I have no right to step outside the round of my farming lessons. Spiritual business must be left to the spiritual men. They are the people's physicians. Can they not cure their own sickness? Let them think about it, speak, write, and prescribe the medicine and the cure.
Now, Tornik, let me move on and talk about how the village people might at least make some small progress, and improve their condition enough to keep pace with the times.
Notes
- Narekavank, the monastery of Rshtunik on the southern shore of Lake Van, famous as the house of the poet St. Grigor Narekatsi. ↩
- Timar, the district along the northeastern shore of Lake Van, across from the isle of Lim. ↩
- Aygestan, "the garden-land," the orchard quarter of the city of Van. ↩
- Bolis, that is, Constantinople. ↩
- Isaiah 66:1. ↩
- Genesis 27:1. ↩
- A vardapet is a celibate priest-doctor of the Armenian Church, licensed to preach. ↩