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What is being done to Armenian monuments in Artsakh now is not new and it is not vandalism. Seda Parsamyan traces the demolition policy of the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and puts the legal question directly: when a state sets out to erase a people's churches, at what point does that become cultural genocide? She works through how the concept has been defined, redefined and quietly narrowed by people who would rather it did not apply. The frame she builds is the one now being reached for over Artsakh.

Mass Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage during the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896)

Parsamyan, Seda A. · 2023 · International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5–34 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0043

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Topic:Gregory the Illuminator

Showing 3 of 3 matching publications (200 total) · catalogue updated 2026-07-22

Journal ArticleOpen Access

Prerequisites for the Emergence and Formation of Independent Theological Thought in the Armenian Church

Sahakyan, Fr. Movses (Davit), 2025

Fundamental Armenology, Issue 1(21) 2025, Religion (National Academy of Sciences of RA / All Armenian Foundation Financing Armenological Studies); ISSN 1829-4618

Christian faith is one of the cornerstones of Armenian identity, and it finds its distinctive expression in Armenian theological thought. Fr. Movses Sahakyan takes the early period, from the Church's apostolic foundation to the beginning of the sixth century, tracing the mission of Sts Thaddeus and Bartholomew, the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, and the invention of the Armenian alphabet and its effect on Armenian Christian thought. He works through the universal and local ecclesiastical challenges of the era, the Nicene Creed and the successive councils, to show how period authors and events crystallized a distinctly Armenian theology, one that answered both internal religious needs and developments in global Christianity.

Armenian Apostolic Church early Armenian theology Gregory the Illuminator Mesrop Mashtots Nicene Creed

English

Journal ArticlePaywalled

Saint Grégoire l'Illuminateur dans l'église de Tigran Honenc' (Saint Gregory the Illuminator in the Church of Tigran Honents)

Rapti, Ioanna, 2025

Revue des Études Arméniennes, Vol. 43 (2025), pp. 93–129 (Peeters); DOI 10.2143/REA.43.0.3295020

Rapti gives a narratological reading of the St Gregory the Illuminator fresco cycle in the thirteenth-century church at Ani founded by the wealthy citizen Tigran Honents. She analyses how the compositions are arranged, how the cycle is structured, and how the episodes vary in size, all in service of constructing Gregory's sanctity. Four phases emerge: the torture; the imprisonment in the pit and the escape; the vision and acclamation, paralleled with the miracle of St Nino; and Gregory's ministry, fulfilled in his ascetic death. Because the cycle builds to a climax around the church door, she argues it is not a plodding transposition of Agathangelos into pictures but a creative appropriation of the hagiographic tradition of the founders of Caucasian Christianity.

Gregory the Illuminator Armenian hagiography Ani Tigran Honents church Agathangelos

French

Journal ArticlePaywalled

L'épître 17/77 de Grigor Magistros: Une description de la cathédrale Sainte-Sophie de Constantinople? (Grigor Magistros's Letter 17/77: A Description of Hagia Sophia?)

Arevshatyan, Anna S., 2025

Revue des Études Arméniennes, Vol. 43 (2025), pp. 247–256 (Peeters); DOI 10.2143/REA.43.0.3295025

In a letter written to his son-in-law for the feast of the Inauguration of the Church, Grigor Magistros recalls the Illuminator's vision of an angel commanding him to found a martyrium. That site, mentioned by Agathangelos, is not precisely known, and Magistros almost certainly never saw it. Arevshatyan therefore proposes that his description is modelled on a building he had seen: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then the principal church of the Christian world. She adds that a miniature in a Matenadaran manuscript containing Magistros's complete works shows him standing beside a magnificent church, possibly alluding to the poetic contest at Hagia Sophia in which the Armenian scholar bested an Arab poet by versifying the whole Bible.

Grigor Magistros Armenian epistolography Gregory the Illuminator Hagia Sophia Matenadaran manuscripts

French

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