Dvin

Dvin was founded in the fourth century by the Arsacid king Khosrov, who moved the royal seat there from Artashat, and it remained the political centre of Armenia for some six hundred years under a succession of overlords. After the partition of the country the Persian governor sat there, and so, from the fifth century, did the catholicos, so that the secular and the ecclesiastical heads of Armenia occupied one town. Under Arab rule it was the seat of the emirate and a manufacturing and trading centre known for textiles and for carpets that reached Baghdad. Earthquake and repeated sacking ended it: the shock of 893 is recorded as killing a large part of the population, and the Mongol capture of 1236 finished what was left.

The site lies in Ararat province beside the villages of Hnaberd and Verin Artashat, and excavation has traced the citadel, the cathedral rebuilt several times on one footprint, and the palace of the catholicos. Nothing stands above ground to tell a visitor what the place was, which is part of why its councils are far better remembered than its buildings, and why it appears in this atlas as a city that has to be reconstructed from documents rather than seen. The cathedral at the centre of the mound is the reason the excavation matters to this atlas rather than only to Armenian archaeology: it was rebuilt at least three times on one footprint, and the changes in plan track the councils, since a church that has just rejected an imperial definition builds differently from one that has not.

The first council of Dvin, in 506, accepted the Henotikon, the imperial formula of union that avoided the language of Chalcedon rather than confronting it, and at that point the Armenian position was one held by a great many eastern Christians. The second, traditionally dated to 554 or 555, went further, condemning the teaching associated with Nestorius and rejecting the Definition of Chalcedon outright, and it introduced the distinct Armenian era of reckoning that dates from 552. The third, at the beginning of the seventh century, ended communion with the Georgian Church, whose catholicos Kirion had aligned himself with Constantinople, and that break has never been healed. The effect of the three together was to place the Armenian Church among the non-Chalcedonian or Oriental Orthodox communions, alongside the Copts, the Syriac Orthodox and the Ethiopians.

Whether the difference between the Armenian formula and the Chalcedonian one was ever a difference about Christ, rather than about the Greek words for nature and person and about who was entitled to impose them, has been argued for fifteen hundred years. A series of joint declarations signed since the 1970s state that the two sides profess the same faith in different terms while remaining separate churches, which is an agreement about language and not yet about communion.