Armenia's political capital has moved many times across its history, from Vagharshapat itself to Dvin, and later to Yerevan, and Armenian sovereignty has been interrupted for centuries at a stretch under Persian, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, Russian and Soviet rule. Echmiadzin's seat as the Mother See of the Armenian Apostolic Church has, by contrast, remained continuously in the same place through nearly all of that political upheaval, surviving as the Church's recognized spiritual center even when Armenian statehood itself did not exist, including through seven decades of Soviet religious suppression when the Catholicosate operated under severe restriction but was never formally abolished.
That continuity gives Echmiadzin a role distinct from a merely religious capital: for long stretches of Armenian history when no independent Armenian state existed at all, the Catholicosate at Echmiadzin functioned as one of the few institutions capable of representing Armenian identity and continuity to the outside world, a role that ties the site's religious authority directly to national survival in a way not every church's central see is called on to carry. Dvin, this heading's other Armenian city, held political and at times ecclesiastical authority of its own, but it was Echmiadzin's seat, not any political capital's, that proved durable across every regime change that followed.