Etchmiadzin, 1915 and the Church as a Nation

The Mother See at Etchmiadzin is said to stand where Gregory the Illuminator saw Christ strike the ground with a golden hammer, and it has been the seat of the Catholicos for most of the period since. Its authority is complicated by a second see, the Catholicosate of Cilicia at Antelias in Lebanon, which was reconstituted by survivors of the genocide and which administers dioceses in the Middle East and parts of the diaspora; relations between the two were poisoned during the Cold War, when Etchmiadzin operated under Soviet control, and have been repaired only partially.

The genocide of 1915 is inseparable from Armenian religion because it destroyed the church of historic Armenia: bishops and priests were killed with their communities, thousands of churches and monasteries in Anatolia were seized, converted or left to collapse, and the cathedral at Ani and the church of the Holy Cross on Akhtamar stand in Turkey as ruins and a museum.

The annual commemoration on 24 April is a religious observance as much as a national one, and in 2015 the church canonised the victims collectively, an act without close precedent in scale. The constitution recognises the exclusive mission of the Apostolic Church as the national church, which grants it access to schools and public ceremony and has drawn complaints from evangelical and Jehovah's Witness minorities.