The Surb Patarag and Its Distinctives

The Armenian eucharist is called the Surb Patarag, the holy offering, and among the historic liturgies it is instantly recognisable by three usages. The bread is unleavened, as in the Latin West but against the practice of the whole Christian East. The wine is offered unmixed, with no water added to the chalice, a usage the Armenians have maintained since antiquity and defended in centuries of polemic, since the mingled chalice elsewhere symbolised the union of Christ's divinity and humanity and the Armenian usage was read by opponents through the lens of the Chalcedonian disputes. And where the other Eastern rites keep a shelf of alternative anaphoras, Armenian practice settled on a single eucharistic prayer for ordinary use, the anaphora attributed to Athanasius.

The celebration itself is sung throughout, in a chant tradition with its own modal system and, since the nineteenth century, a widely used polyphonic setting by the composer Makar Yekmalian and later one drawing on Komitas. The sanctuary is closed not by an iconostasis but by a curtain, drawn at the most solemn moments and throughout Lent. The calendar keeps old ground the rest of Christendom abandoned: the Armenian church never adopted the separate feast of Christmas on the twenty-fifth of December, and celebrates the nativity and baptism of Christ together at Theophany on the sixth of January, the ancient usage preserved by one church alone.