Unleavened Bread and Unmixed Wine in the Eucharist

The Quinisext Council, meeting in the domed hall of the Byzantine imperial palace in 692 and commonly called Trullo after that hall, devoted one of its 102 canons to a single region's liturgical habit. Canon 32 states plainly that in Armenia the wine offered on the altar goes unmixed with water, names the apostle James, the Lord's own brother, and Basil of Caesarea as authorities for the mixed chalice, and threatens deposition against any bishop or presbyter who omits the water, calling the wine-only offering an imperfect showing forth of the mystery. A collected modern study of the council notes that Trullo is a council the Armenian Church, like Rome, never recognized as ecumenical, so a decree binding within Constantinople's own communion was aimed at a practice its authors could not actually compel anyone outside it to change. The canon did what canons do: it named the dissenting usage, supplied a rationale, and set a penalty, and none of the three moved Armenia's own altar. The bread itself became a separate target only later: the term azymite, first leveled by Byzantine polemicists in the eleventh century, accused the Latin Church of a related but distinct fault, using unleavened bread at all, a charge Trullo's own canon does not raise, since Constantinople's dispute with Rome over unleavened bread developed independently and further into the schism era. Armenia has always used both practices, unmixed wine and unleavened bread, together, but the historical record shows the two entered controversy on different timelines and through different opponents rather than as one combined objection raised on a single occasion.

The Armenian Church traces its founding to the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and its own historian Malachia Ormanian, writing at the start of the twentieth century in a survey of the church's doctrine and liturgy, addressed the wine question directly rather than letting outsiders define it. Ormanian argued that no real ground exists for treating the unmixed chalice as a coded rejection of Christ's two natures, since ordinary Armenian households already drank their wine unmixed, and a church that grew out of that domestic habit had no reason to introduce water at the altar that nobody added at the table. The bread itself, called nshkhar, is unleavened and stamped before baking with an image of the crucifixion; in the Patarag, the Armenian Divine Liturgy whose chant tradition the composer and priest Komitas spent his life collecting and restoring, the consecrated bread is dipped into the wine and given to the faithful together by intinction rather than in the separate actions common elsewhere. What outside observers read across seven centuries as a theological signal, the church that actually practices it has always described as an inherited housekeeping detail carried into the sanctuary unchanged.