A Liturgy Between Two Worlds

Armenian Christianity was born bilingual. The missionaries who evangelised the country came from the Greek-speaking Cappadocian church to the west and the Syriac-speaking church to the south, and for a century the scriptures and the liturgy lived in both borrowed tongues. The alphabet Mesrop Mashtots devised around 405 changed that permanently: within a generation the Bible, the fathers and the service books existed in Armenian, and the church acquired a liturgical language it has never abandoned.

The rite that crystallised shows its double parentage. Its structure and much of its euchology align with the Greek tradition of Cappadocia and Jerusalem, while older Syriac elements persist beneath, and scholars read the Armenian books as precious witnesses to early stages of both neighbouring rites. History added a third layer.

During the era of the Crusades the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia stood in close alliance with the Latin West, and usages such as the reading of the last gospel and certain vestments entered Armenian practice from the Roman Rite, borrowings the church kept even after the political alliance dissolved. The result is a liturgy that cannot be filed under any of the usual families without remainder: an independent rite, the possession of a single people, that remembers in its own texts most of the liturgical history of the Christian East.