John Paul labours in Noah’s vineyard

THIS YEAR, 2001, is the 1700^th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of the world’s first Christian nation, Armenia. It is fitting, and cause for unrestrained joy, that Pope John Paul should have decided to go there to celebrate the event. His visit in September follows a number of meetings between successive popes and holders of the post of Katholikos, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. The purpose of these meetings has been to mark the settling of differences between the Catholic and Armenian Churches over the nature of Christ, which have strained relations ever since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD.

The Pope and the Katholikos

For their most recent meeting, Katholikos Karekin II spent three days in Rome in November 2000, the visit culminating in a ceremony in St. Peter’s during which the Pope handed over a relic of Armenia’s great Saint Gregory the Illuminator, a thigh-bone which had been preserved in a gold-framed glass reliquary in a convent in Naples for the past five centuries.
St. Gregory was accustomed to imprisonment. King Tiridates III, who ruled Armenia at the beginning of the fourth century AD, by kind permission of the Roman emperor Diocletian, kept him confined in a well full of reptiles, until he (Tiridates) was converted to Christianity along with his people (as was the habit of the time). Gregory then built the holy monastery of Etchmiadzin, which has been ever since the see of the Armenian Katholikos, directly above the well in which he had been imprisoned.
Previous contacts between the Catholic and Armenian Churches were in 1970, when Paul VI welcomed Katholikos Vasken I, in 1996, when John Paul II and Karekin I had a first shot at settling differences, and in 1999, when Karekin I came to Rome for an Armenian exhibition. A planned visit by the Pope to Armenia in 2000 had to be cancelled because of the sudden death of Karekin I in 1999.
All the exchanges between the two Churches have been marked by a quite unprecedented degree of personal friendship and shared experience – both John Paul and the Karekins, I and II, have known what it is like to live under the communist yoke, and come from countries well versed in tragedies of war and slaughter. Observers in St Peter’s last November commented on the warmth and friendliness emanating from the two Church leaders as they rode on the Pope’s mobile platform into the basilica, the Pope in his white cassock and the Katholikos in what appeared to be a hooded black monk’s habit.
In a joint statement issued by the two Christian leaders during Karekin’s visit, it was noted that the Churches already had much in common – true sacraments: above all – by apostolic succession of bishops – the priesthood and the Eucharist. The Pope and the Katholikos prayed for full and visible communion between us. What mainly divided the Armenian Apostolic Church, an Orthodox Church in all but name, from other Orthodox (and Catholic) churches was the issue of ‘monophysitism’. The Church leaders at Chalcedon affirmed the formula of One Person in Two Natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly and inseparably united. Unfortunately, the Armenians were not there, and when they heard of what is called the ‘Definition of Chalcedon’ they rejected. Ever since, they have been in communion only with other monophysite churches in Egypt, Syria and Ethiopia.
In 1996 the Pope and Karekin I agreed that there was no reason for their christological dispute to continue: the theological dialogue between them had gone behind the respective formulations of the controversy, they said, and shown that they shared a common understanding about Christ. If these reports of reconciliation are true it is to be hoped that what the historian Norman Davies calls the seemingly incurable habit of christological hair-splitting will soon cease.

Noah’s legacy

It is said that Armenia was discovered by Noah, whose ark is believed to have grounded on the slopes of Mount Ararat. We know from Genesis that one of his first actions on disembarking was to plant a vineyard, and ever since Armenia has excelled in the making and drinking of wine and especially, brandy. Noah is reputed to have been buried in Nakhichevan (Noahville). Many centuries later, the country reappears in Assyrian inscriptions as the kingdom of Urartu which became one of the most powerful states of the region. In the sixth century B.C. we hear of it as a satrapy of the Persian emperor Darius, but with Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persians at Arbela in 331 B.C., it passed to Macedonian suzerainty. Throughout its history, in fact, it has been passed from hand to hand between the great empires of the world – Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Russians and, most recently, Soviets. The repeated process of foreign occupation and domination has ensured that, in spite of frequent massacres and natural calamities, such as the terrible earthquake of 1988 which cost nearly 30,000 lives, an enormous diaspora of Armenians has been built up all over the world: the population of the country is estimated to be about four million, but Armenians abroad number well above five million.

Frequent deportations

This huge diaspora is partly due to the dispersal or deportation of a large part of the population on at least two occasions. In 1064, Armenia and Georgia were overrun by the Seljuks, bringing to an end the small Armenian kingdom of the Bagratids, a princely family that also held sway over Georgia. The capital of the Bagratid kingdom was at Ani, and the civilisation that blossomed and flourished there was perhaps the highest point of Armenian art and architecture. But the Seljuks sacked the cities and put the population to the sword, causing them to flee en masse. Ani, a city of magnificent palaces and churches, has remained a ghost-town ever since.
The people fled to a new and far-off country, Cilicia in Anatolia, where they established a new capital, Sis, a new kingdom and a new Katholikosate. The fact of a separate second Katholikosate, now based in Antelias, Lebanon, would seem to have all the potential for division and disruption, and it is true that there have been tensions, most recently in 1933 over the question of the Church’s relations with the Soviet state. There has been greater co-operation between Etchmiadzin and Cilicia since the fall of communism, the earthquake and the Nagorno-Karabagh struggle, but what really brought the two katholikosates together was the elevation of the Cilician patriarch, Karekin I, to be supreme patriarch and Katholikos of all Armenians in 1994.

The Armenian holocaust

No punishment or cruelty inflicted on the Armenian people by Seljuks, Mamelukes, Mongols or Persians can compare with what the Ottoman Turks did. The first round of what has been called the Armenian massacres took place between 1894 and 1896 at the time of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The whole Armenian population of 2.5 million was then under the rule of the Ottoman emperor. Many of these were in the Anatolian province of Cilicia to which their forefathers had fled several centuries earlier. With encouragement from Russia, which had territorial aspirations in the area, the Armenians were beginning to demand some autonomy and, at least, some relief from the very heavy taxes which they, as Christians in a Muslim country, were unfairly expected to pay. The Turkish reaction was to burn their villages and kill their inhabitants, forcing thousands to leave their homes, possessions and families. Two years later, in 1896, Armenians in Istanbul seized the Ottoman Bank there as a way of drawing attention to their plight, and once again the Turks replied with wholesale massacres and burning of Armenian properties. It is estimated that up to 80,000 Armenians were killed in these outbreaks.
But that was trifling in comparison with the much worse second phase of what later came to be called ‘the Armenian genocide’ (a term that only came into being in 1944). It took place in 1915 during the First World War, when Turkey was an ally of the Germans. Russia was still seeking to extend its influence in the Transcaucasian area, and reports began to circulate that Armenians were being secretly recruited to fight with Russia against Turkey and her German allies. Armenians were already a suspect minority because of their claims to autonomy and reluctance to pay Turkish taxes, and this was enough to convince the Young Turks who, having disposed of Abdul Hamid II, were then running the government. What they decided on was the wholesale deportation of Armenians from eastern Anatolia, where they were most numerous; some two to three million people were affected. The evacuation was not achieved by putting them on buses or trains, but by assembling them, men, women and children, young and old, able and disabled, the sick and the lame, in their villages or towns, and forcing them to walk, or in many cases, stagger, for up to two months in the merciless summer sun in the direction of the Syrian desert, one of the furthest points of the Ottoman empire. In such situations, figures have very little meaning, but it has been estimated that of the two million who began the death marches, less than a quarter survived. Most died through starvation or exhaustion along the way, but it is reckoned that one third of those who died were massacred either by their guards or by hostile mobs who abused, tormented and assaulted them in the towns and villages through which they passed. The Armenian poet Atom Ergoyan describes what was apparently a customary torture, drenching Armenian women in kerosene, then making them dance as the flames contorted their bodies.
Turkish governments have repeatedly denied the reports of mass deportation, genocide or massacres, and have refused absolutely to consider taking responsibility or making reparation for the frightful sufferings of a whole nation. The only memorials to the estimated one-and-a-half million dead of 1885 and 1915 stand on a hillside outside Erivan. It is as though the world does not want to know about them. Hitler is said to have remarked, when ordering the massacre of Poles in 1939: I have sent my Death’s Head units with the order to kill Polish men, women and children. Only in such a way will we get the lebensraum that we need. Who, after all, now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?
However, cities of the Middle East – Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo and Jerusalem, for example – remember, since many of the descendants of the thousands who survived the death-marches ended up there, and have since remained. In the desert, there are whole villages almost entirely inhabited by Armenians, still speaking their own language, whose parents or grandparents survived the death marches and settled where they halted or dropped. A Syrian nonagerian spoke some years ago of seeing the hordes of Armenians dragging themselves slowly along the desert tracks, and of their plaintive lament when any stranger passed: Jawaan, jawaanî (hungry).

Under the Soviet yoke

After the armistice in November 1918, Armenia declared independence from Turkey, but within two years found itself divided between Turkish and Russian forces. In 1922 it acceded to the Soviet Union. Throughout the period of communist rule, the Armenian Church was subjected to the normal round of disparagement and ridicule, but perhaps because it was Orthodox, escaped the worst excesses of atheistic barbarism. The Katholikos Vasken I was asked to address the first session of the new parliament of an independent Armenia in 1992: so overcome by emotion was he that he could do no more than ask the deputies to say the Lord’s Prayer with him.

The Nagorno issue

Armenia’s development as an independent state has been delayed by the dispute with the neighbouring Muslim republic of Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. This enclave in Azerbaijan, which the Armenians claim was arbitrarily handed over to Azerbaijan in 1922, is almost entirely populated by Armenians, and the Armenian people have long felt it should be theirs. Trouble broke out seriously in 1992 when Armenian forces invaded Azerbaijan, forming a land-bridge from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. By the end of 1992, the whole of the enclave was in Armenian hands, and in the next two years they captured the surrounding mountains as well. Fighting is still going on, rather sporadically, and no one imagines the affair has ended, particularly since Turkey has backed Azerbaijan’s claims that they have been robbed and that Armenia’s statistics on population are exaggerated. But for the moment the situation is quieter.
Armenia is a living testimony to the durability and capacity for survival of a people, language and religion. The three go together, and each plays an essential role in determining the country’s identity. When one considers the horrors that have befallen their restricted numbers, one can only wonder that in spite of such disasters, the Armenians have managed to remain a united nation. In this the Armenian Church, independent of both Rome and Byzantium, has played a vital part: it is what has bound the nation together in its work of tending Noah’s vineyard. It is just the sort of situation in which Pope John Paul should feel at home: he will give strength to Armenia, just as Armenia will to him.