Bagratid Armenian Christianity

After two centuries under Arab governors, an Armenian kingdom was restored under the Bagratid dynasty in the 880s, and with it came a burst of church building and writing. The catholicos — the head of the Armenian church — moved his seat to the royal capital of Ani, whose cathedral, finished around 1001 by the architect Trdat, still stands roofless on the plain. Trdat was regarded well enough that he was called to Constantinople to rebuild the dome of Hagia Sophia after an earthquake brought it down. The period's greatest voice, though, was not an architect but a monk. Gregory of Narek wrote a long sequence of prayers, the Book of Lamentations, of such raw self-accusation and longing that Armenians for a thousand years afterwards kept a copy in the house and read it over the sick. The kingdom ended in 1045, when Byzantium annexed Ani; the Seljuk Turks took the city twenty years after that.