The Global Church Era · 1915-present · Anatolia -> Armenia & worldwide diaspora
The Armenian Church after the Genocide (Medz Yeghern)
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About This Movement
In 1915 the Armenian population of Anatolia was destroyed, and the church went with the people — clergy killed, dioceses emptied, whole regions left without a parish. What survived did so by moving. Grigoris Balakian, a priest who lived through it, wrote his account in 1922. The Holy See of Cilicia relocated to Antelias in Lebanon in 1930. Etchmiadzin, the mother see, continued inside the Soviet Union under severe constraint; Catholicos Khoren I was killed in 1938. In the Cold War the two sees divided along the politics of the diaspora, a division dated to 1956 whose records both sides kept. After 1991 the church in Armenia was re-established in a country of its own again. On 23 April 2015, at Etchmiadzin, the church canonized the victims of the genocide — roughly one and a half million people, in what is by most accounts the largest canonization in Christian history.
Sources
- Survivor testimony: Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha (1922; ET 2009); Zoryan Institute and USC Shoah Foundation Armenian oral-history collections; diaspora parish survivor records (primary) — These survivor testimonies are treated with the same trauma-informed care given to accounts of the Sayfo.
- The church's institutional record through catastrophe: Holy See of Cilicia to Antelias (1930); Etchmiadzin under Soviet rule (Khoren I killed 1938); the Cold-War diaspora split between the sees (both sides' records); post-1991 re-establishment (primary) — Records from both sides of the diaspora split are included here.
- The 2015 canonization of the genocide's victims (23 Apr 2015, Etchmiadzin) - the church's own canonization rite and documents (primary)
- Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (I.B. Tauris, 2011); Ronald Grigor Suny, 'They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else' (Princeton, 2015) (secondary) — These are the two standard scholarly works on the genocide.
- CHC vol. 9; Hratch Tchilingirian's church-and-diaspora sociology (reference)