Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral: 1,700 seats built for 1,700 years of Armenian Christianity

In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, the Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator was built between 1996-97 and 2001. The foundation stone was laid on 7 April 1997 by Catholicos Karekin I, and the consecration, on 23 September 2001, was performed by his successor Karekin II. The project, by architect Stepan Kyurkchyan, was originally conceived by Catholicos Vazgen I to commemorate 1,700 years since the adoption of Christianity as Armenia’s state religion, traditionally dated to 301 AD, although some historians place the conversion closer to 314, partly because 301 would fall in the middle of the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman emperor Diocletian, a coincidence that would complicate the dependence of the Armenian king Tiridates III on Rome. Tradition, more hagiographic than historically documented, tells that Gregory the Illuminator, imprisoned for years in a pit at Khor Virap, converted the king after healing him from an illness. The building, in orange tufa stone from Ani, reaches a height to the cross given as between 54 and 60 metres depending on the source, and includes, besides the main church, the chapels of Saint Tiridates the King and Saint Ashkhen the Queen. The central nave symbolically seats one thousand seven hundred worshippers, while the two chapels seat one hundred fifty each. Funding was split among several diaspora donors. The main church was funded by the siblings Richard Alexander Manoogian and Louise Manoogian Simone, of the Masco family of Detroit, with a donation of approximately two million dollars in memory of their parents. The two chapels were funded by Nazar and Artemis Nazarian, and by Kevork and Linda Kevorkian. The bell tower, with more than thirty arches, was funded by the Argentine-Armenian entrepreneur Eduardo Eurnekian, whose contribution concerned only that structure, not the whole complex. Pope John Paul II visited this cathedral on 26 September 2001, according to a primary Vatican document, for an ecumenical celebration attended by Armenian bishops and the president of the republic, venerating a relic of Saint Gregory the Illuminator that came from the Armenian community of Naples and reached Armenia around 2000, although the exact sequence of its transfer between Naples, Rome, and Yerevan cannot be fully reconstructed from the sources consulted. The Armenian Apostolic Church belongs to the family of Oriental Orthodox Churches, distinct from both Byzantine Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, having rejected the Christology of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 and formalized the separation at the Council of Dvin in 610. It is recognized by the Armenian constitution as the “national church” and has played a role of cultural continuity after the Armenian genocide, culminating in the mass canonization of the victims on 23 April 2015, the largest canonization ceremony in history according to concurring sources. With the historic mother cathedral of Etchmiadzin periodically under restoration, this cathedral today hosts patriarchal liturgies and major ordinations, according to the church’s official website.