Armenian Rite

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.

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.