Coronation of Ashot I Bagratuni (August 26, 885)

After 457 years, the Kingdom of Armenia was restored in 885 under the Bagratuni (also called Bagratid) dynasty. The Bagratunis had been one of the powerful noble families under the Arshakuni (Arsacid) dynasty, holding the titles of aspet (horse-master) and takatir (coronant of the king).

In the eighth century, under Arab domination, the Bagratunis rose to power after the Mamikonian family lost its preeminence in successive rebellions against foreign rule. During the rebellion of 852-855, Prince of Princes Sembat Bagratuni was imprisoned by the Arab general Bugha and refused to renege his faith. His refusal led to his martyrdom, for which he later received the surname “Confessor.” Ashot, one of his seven children, became his successor as sparapet (general-in-chief). He was thirty-five-years-old. He was married to princess Katranide and had seven children himself.

Ashot strengthened the unity of Armenia, intervening to solve conflicts between princely houses, and established kinship relations between the Bagratuni, Artzruni (in Vaspurakan), and Siuni (in Siunik) families, arranging the marriages of his three daughters with prominent members of the last two families. In 862 Ashot, who ruled over the province of Ayrarat (the plain of Ararat), received the title of Prince of Prince from the Arab caliphate and ceded the position of sparapet to his brother Abas. He was allowed by the caliphate, then in a weakened situation, to become the tax collector for the entire Arab province of Arminiya, which encompassed Armenia, Iberia (Georgia), and Caucasian Albania (now Azerbaijan). This recognition of his position, concentrating the military and economic power of the region, gradually turned the Arab rule into an administrative formality.

The support of other Armenian princes helped Ashot wage war against the Arab emirs in Armenia. He neutralized a conspiracy by the ostikan of Arminiya, the legal representative of the caliphate, and expelled him from Armenia in 877. On the other hand, Emperor Basil I of Byzantium (867-886, of Armenian origin) asked the Armenian prince to crown him as representative of an ancient lineage of coronants and to sign a treaty. Before him, Patriarch Photius had made a proposal for church unity in 862. However, the religious assembly of Shirakavan, gathered in 869, rejected the Patriarch’s proposal, but not the political and military alliance with Byzantium.

At the same time, Ashot also fortified the links with Iberia and Albania, where branches of the Bagratunis had taken an important role among the nobility. The demands of Armenian princes and the Catholicos to recognize Ashot as king were finally met by Caliph al-Mutamid, who decided to send a crown to Ashot in 885 with the aim of getting Armenians out of the Byzantine orbit. On August 26, 885, Catholicos Gevorg II Garnetsi (877-897) consecrated Ashot I as King of Armenia in the fortress of Bagaran, Ashot’s residence and new capital of the country. The new king had also received a crown from Emperor Basil I, which ensured international recognition. The restoration of the Armenian monarchy was accompanied by economic and urban growth and a revival of arts and religion, as well as territorial enlargement. Ashot I restored the court system existing in the Arshakuni period, with some modifications. In 887 he crowned the first King of Eastern Georgia, Atrnerseh IV Bagratuni (Bagrationi, 887-923).

In 890, on his way of return from a trip to Constantinople, Ashot died on the road. He was buried in Bagaran. He was succeeded by his son Sembat I (890-914).

Death of Catholicos Mateos I (August 22, 1865)

The Armenian Church had two Catholicoi called Mateos in the nineteenth and twentieth century, who also were Patriarchs of Constantinople at first, and lived and worked in difficult circumstances both in the Ottoman and the Russian empires.

Mateos Chuhadjian was born in Constantinople in 1802 and consecrated archimandrite in 1826. He was one of the best prepared and well-versed ecclesiastics of his time. Following instructions of Patriarch Stepanos Aghavni (1831-1839 and 1840-1841), he collaborated with writer Krikor Peshdimaljian and published a voluminous Synaxarion in 1831. (The Synaxarion-- in Armenian, Haysmavurk --is the compilation of the lives of saints arranged by the order of their anniversaries.) During his life, he would publish a dozen works of religious studies and theology, some of them polemical. 

He was named primate of the diocese of Brusa in 1835 and consecrated bishop three years later. In 1841 he became primate of Smyrna and in July 1844, at the age of forty-two, he became Patriarch of Constantinople. 

The relations between the Catholicosate of All Armenians and the Patriarchate had become frozen in 1828, when the dioceses under jurisdiction of the latter had stopped remembering the name of the Catholicos. In his first Holy Mass, celebrated on July 23, 1844, he remembered the name of Catholics Nerses V Ashtaraketsi. Patriarch Mateos worked towards restoring the relations between both sees. By mutual agreement, the two sees decided to maintain direct relations. The Patriarch of Constantinople was recognized as vicar, legate, and treasurer of Holy Etchmiadzin, that is, the only representative, and the activities and fundraising by other legates was forbidden. The boundaries of the diocesan divisions were also established and clarified.

During the four-year mandate of Patriarch Mateos, the simmering conflict between the Armenian Church and the few hundred followers of Protestantism exploded. Despite the assurances of Protestant leadership, as James L. Barton wrote in 1908, that the American missionaries’ “supreme endeavor was to help the Armenians and the Greeks work out a quiet but genuine reform in their respective churches,” their mission was characterized as an attack on the “Mother Church.” On June 21, 1846 the Patriarch issued an encyclical of perpetual excommunication and anathema against all Protestants, and four days later, a constitution was drawn up for the forthcoming Armenian Evangelical Church, which began on July 1.  

The Patriarch reopened the Lyceum of Scutari (1845), which had been converted into a military hospital by decision of the Ottoman government four years before. He also founded schools in Samatia, Smyrna, and other places. During his tenure, 25 schools and many printing houses functioned in Constantinople, several periodicals appeared, and various cultural societies were founded. He also ensured that promising young people were sent to Europe to pursue higher education.

He also formed the two administrative bodies of self-government for Western Armenians, the Religious Assembly (14 members) and the Supreme Assembly (20 members), which became the grounds for the preparation of the National Constitution fifteen years later. However, his activities were met with resistance by the amiras (the upper class magnates), and their pressure forced him to resign from his position in September 1848. It is interesting that, after his resignation from the highest position of the Armenian Church in the Ottoman Empire, he became the primate of the diocese of Nicomedia (Ismit) in 1853-1854, and abbot of the convent of Armash in 1855, when he was also designated chairman of the Religious Assembly.

After the death of Nerses V, the National Representative Assembly gathered in Holy Etchmiadzin decided to strengthen the links between Etchmiadzin and Constantinople and elect any Western Armenian ecclesiastic. The election fell on Archbishop Mateos Chuhajian, who was elected on May 17, 1858, and consecrated on August 15, 1859. 

During his six-year tenure, Catholicos Mateos I was again in conflict with Protestantism, this time in the diocese of Shamakha (current Azerbaijan), and his confrontational position ended with the incorporation of the few hundred Armenian Protestants to the Lutheran Church, the only one recognized in the Russian Empire, in 1866.

Tombstone of Catholicos Mateos I

He tried to reform the Holy See and regulate monastic life. He paid attention to education and in 1861 he approved the statutes of the Nersisian School of Tiflis (founded by his predecessor Nerses V in 1824), and established the programs and organizational rules of the parochial and diocesan schools, and at the same time incorporated many laymen in the school boards. He put in order the library of the Holy See and the first complete catalogue of manuscripts appeared in 1863. 

Catholicos Mateos I passed away on August 22, 1865 in Vagharshapat, and was interred in the narthex (gavit) of the nearby monastery of Surp Gayane.

Death of Jean Carzou (August 12, 2000)

Carzou was the most famous Armenian painter in France with a unique style of painting.

He was born Karnig Zouloumian on January 1, 1907, in Aleppo (Syria), then part of the Ottoman Empire. He first studied at the school of the Marist Fathers and then, when he moved to Cairo in 1919, he went to the Kaloustian School. His brilliant academic performance earned him a scholarship and he moved to Paris in 1924, after graduation, to study architecture.

He graduated from the School of Architecture in 1929. He created his name from the first syllables of his name and surname, to which he added the French name Jean, but he always kept close to his Armenian roots and Armenian life. However, he abandoned architecture for the fine artist. He started working as a theater decorator but quickly realized he preferred drawing and painting. He worked as a street artist to support himself, and his sketches of politicians and public figures found their way into Parisian newspapers.

Cannes, Le Suquet

In 1930 Carzou had his first exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Independants, which he would continue annually for more than six decades, until 1992. In the 1930s he also participated in the exhibitions of the Union of Armenian Artists “Ani.” He had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Contemporaine in Paris, and from then on he would have more than a hundred personal exhibitions in France and abroad (Belgium, Germany, Lebanon, Cairo, Switzerland, England, and the United States). In 1966 he had his first personal exhibition in Yerevan, followed by a second exhibition in 1983 and a posthumous one in 2007. Following their trip to Armenia in 1966, his wife Nan Carzou would write a celebrated travelogue, Voyage en Arménie (Travel in Armenia), and his son Jean-Marie Carzou, a journalist, would produce the first comprehensive account about the Armenian Genocide in French, Arménie 1915: un genocide exemplaire (Armenia 1915: An Exemplary Genocide), in 1975. In 1980 he was awarded the “Martiros Sarian” prize in Armenia.

Carzou started working in stage designing for the Opera de Paris for several operas and ballets during the 1950s. His designs of settings and costumes made him known to the general public. In 1957 he created his famous antiwar series “The Apolcalypse.” In the 1950s and 1960s he also created book illustrations with his line drawings and engravings (Andre Maurois’ France, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Albert Camus’ Notebooks, Edgar A. Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue ), and his sharp graphic style became extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, he earned the coveted Hallmark prize in 1949, and became Knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1956 and Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters two years later. In 1955 the art magazine Connaissance des Arts rated him as one of the ten most important painters of his generation.

L'Apocalypse

Near the age of seventy, Carzou became the first living artist to have his work, “Distant Princess,” appear on a French postal stamp in 1976, and the following year he was elected a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts, succeeding painter Jean Boucheaud. In 1977 he was also awarded the National Order of Merit. However, he garnered a great deal of hostility from the art world with a statement that Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne were symbols of the “decadence in painting.”

After a long career as a painter, illustrator, and stage designer, in 1991 he finished the design of a chapel in Manosque (Alpes of Haute-Provence) with more than 600 square meters of paintings of a huge Apocalypse, which was not a literal illustration of St. John’s book of Revelation, but the depiction of the “climate of our times.” The chapel later became the headquarters of the Carzou Foundation.

The prolific French-Armenian artist lost his wife in 1978. He passed away near his son on August 12, 2000, in Perigueux, at the age of ninety-three.  

Death of Enver Pasha (August 4, 1922)

Anyone who is aware of the history of the Armenian Genocide has heard the name of Enver Pasha as one of its key executors.

Unlike its mastermind, Talaat, Ismail Enver Pasha was a military officer, born in Constantinople on November 22, 1881. He studied in different military schools and graduated in 1903 with distinction. In 1906 he was sent to the Third Army, stationed in Salonica. He became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) during his service.

When the Young Turk coup broke out in June 1908, Enver became one of its military leaders. He was actively involved in the suppression of the attempt of countercoup of April 1909, which tried to restore Abdul Hamid’s absolute powers. Afterwards, he was sent to Berlin as a military attaché, where he strengthened the ties between German and Ottoman military.

During the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, Enver left Berlin and organized the defense of Libya, where he was appointed governor of Benghazi. He was called back to Constantinople when the First Balkan War started in October 1912 and ascended to the grade of lieutenant colonel. In the same year, the CUP fell from government and was replaced by the Liberal Union party. However, the severe Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War weakened the government and Enver organized a coup in January 1913. The power returned to the CUP and the triumvirate formed by Enver, Talaat, and Jemal Pasha took charge until the end of World War I. Enver became Minister of War and married into the royal family. When in June 1913 the Second Balkan War broke out, he reversed some of the losses by recapturing Adrianople (nowadays Edirne) from the Bulgarians. 

Enver was an architect of the Ottoman-German alliance in World War I, expecting a quick victory that would benefit the empire. He assumed command of the Ottoman forces in the Caucasus. Pursuing his quest for a Pan-Turkic empire stretching to Central Asia, he wanted to force the Russians out and take back Kars and Batum, which had been ceded after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. His offensive in the thick of winter ended with a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish in December 1914 – January 1915 and tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers dying in the subsequent retreat. On his return to Constantinople, Enver blamed his failure on his Armenian soldiers, although in January 1915 an Armenian soldier had carried him through battle lines on his back and saved his life, and a letter written by Enver himself to the Prelate of Konia, Bishop Karekin Khachadourian, praised the Armenians for their bravery and faithfulness in February 1915.

Enver played a major role in the Armenian Genocide. He took the first steps by ordering the Armenian recruits in the Ottoman army to be disarmed and reassigned to labor battalions before their summary executions. These instructions were explained on the basis of accusations of treasonous activity, but the defeat of his army only provided the pretext for escalating a campaign of extermination that was also unleashed against the civilian population with the use of the secret paramilitary Special Organization ( Teshkilât-i-Mahsusa ) to systematically massacre deported Armenians.

After the collapse of the Russian front in 1918, the Ottoman armies advanced into the Caucasus. The Third Army, commanded by Vehib Pasha, entered the territory of Eastern Armenia, and was halted at the battles of Sardarabad, Bash Aparan, and Gharakilise in May 1918. A new military force called the Army of Islam, commanded by Enver’s half-brother Nuri, advanced towards the territory of today’s Azerbaijan and, in combination with the Tatars (Azerbaijanis), occupied Baku on September 15, organizing a massacre of the local Armenian population.

However, the Ottoman Empire was faced with defeat. Enver was dismissed from his ministerial position in October 1918, and a month later he fled into exile together with other CUP members. Tried in absentia by a postwar courts-martial for crimes of “plunging the country into war without a legitimate reason, forced deportation of Armenians, and leaving the country without permission,” he was condemned to death in July 1919.

Enver first went to Germany, and shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Moscow trying to build a German-Soviet alliance. He went to Baku in September 1920 and took part in the Congress of Eastern Peoples. In July 1921 he tried to return to Turkey, but Mustafa Kemal did not want him among his forces, as he explicitly rejected Enver’s Pan-Turkic ideas. He traveled to Moscow where he managed to win the trust of the Soviet authorities. In November 1921 he was sent by Lenin to Bukhara, in Turkestan, to help suppress a revolt against the local Bolshevik regime. Instead, along with a small number of followers, he defected to the rebels and united their different groups under his own command to fight against the Red Army.

On August 4, 1922, a cavalry brigade of the Red Army under the command of Hakob Melkumian (known in Russian sources as Yakov Melkumov) launched a surprise attack over Enver’s headquarters near the village of Ab-i-Derya. The attack ended with Enver’s death. There are different versions. According to Melkumov’s memoirs, Enver managed to escape on horseback and hid for several days in the village of Chaghan. After the hideout was located, the Soviet troops stormed the village and Enver was killed by Melkumov himself in the ensuing combat.



Enver’s body was buried near Ab-i-Derya. As it happened with Talaat in 1943, the remains of this executioner of the Armenian people were brought to Turkey in 1996 and reburied at the Monument of Liberty cemetery in Shishli, Istanbul. 

Death of A. Amatuni (July 28, 1938)

He was simply known as “Amatuni” when he briefly showed up at the top echelons of Soviet Armenia in the 1930s, but his name became infamous for those who are acquainted with the horrors of Stalinism.

As an irony of history, his actual name was Amatuni Vardapetian, so he descended from a doctor of the Church. There were several Bolshevik militants whose last names show a religious connection, and they would become its greatest persecutors.

Amatuni was born on October 24, 1900, in Elizavetpol (Gandzak, nowadays Ganja), in the region of Lower Gharabagh. His biography is relatively sketchy. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1919, and probably at this time he adopted his first name as his last name.

After working in some positions of leadership within the Communist Youth, Amatuni studied at the Institute of Red Professorship in Moscow (1926-1928) and then returned to Armenia, where he was head of the department of propaganda of the Central Committee of the local Communist Party, then secretary of the provincial committee of Yerevan and of the Central Committee itself. He later moved on and from 1931-1935 he worked in Tbilisi and Baku in similar positions.

Meanwhile, the death of veteran Bolshevik Sergei Kirov, assassinated in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in December 1934, was a signal for the repression of the following years, as it was ascribed to a mythical “right-Trotskyite” center. The latter supposedly responded to Lev Trotsky, who had been expelled from the Soviet Union following his defeat in the power struggle with Stalin. A special committee created during the 20 ^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 noted in its report that from 1935-1940 a total of 1,635,000 people had been arrested for anti-Soviet activities, of which 688,503 were shot to death. Almost ninety percent of those arrests happened in the period 1937-1938.

 

Amatuni, a henchman of Stalin’s right hand in the Caucasus, Laurenti Beria, was sent back to Armenia as second secretary of the Central Committee from 1935-1936. The repression started in Armenia with the arrest of Nersik Stepanian, director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, in May 1936. Stepanian was charged as the leader of the “right-Trotskyite” center, which supposedly aimed at ending the Soviet rule in Armenia, separating the country from the Soviet Union, and declaring independence, and shot in July 1937. On July 9, Aghasi Khanjian, first secretary of the Central Committee, was summoned to Tiflis for a meeting with Beria and committed “suicide” (many decades later, it was found out that he had been murdered by Beria himself). On the day of his burial, July 12, there was a meeting of the “party active,” where 23 participants declared that Khanjian was a traitor, chauvinist, sponsor of anti-revolutionary elements, and so on and so forth. He was replaced with Amatuni, who unleashed a series of arrests of party members, intellectuals, clergymen, members of the military, et cetera, with false charges orchestrated by Khachik Mughdusi (Astvatzatrian), Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs.

 

This first wave of repression, which lasted until September 1937, included many former party leaders in Soviet Armenia and even many veterans of the sovietization period in 1920-1921. Many famous writers, like Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts, Gurgen Mahari, Vahan Totoventz, Zabel Essayan, and others were also among those who were summarily condemned to death and shot, died in prison, or were sent to exile in Siberia.

 

The repressors soon became the repressed. The second wave would start with the plenary session of the Central Committee on 20-22 September 1937, with the leading participation of Beria from Tiflis, and Georgi Malenkov and Anastas Mikoyan from Moscow. Amatuni, who had been hailed on September 5 in the party newspaper Khorhrdayin Hayastan as the one who had helped disclose the “wreckers,” was accused of having become the new leader of the “right Trotskyite center” and arrested during the plenary, together with Stepan Akopov, second secretary of the Central Committee, and Mughdusi. He was replaced with Beria’s protégé Grigori Arutiunov, who would last until the death of Stalin and the fall of Beria in 1953.

Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) from 1936-1938, addressed a letter marked “secret” to Stalin on September 22, 1937. He wrote: “Comrade Mikoyan asks to allow shooting a supplement of 700 people with the goal of cleaning Armenia from anti-Soviet elements . . . I suggest to shoot 1,500 people, for a total of 2,000 people including the previously approved number.”  

From 1937-1938, a total of 8,104 people became victim of the repression, including former members of the three Armenian parties (Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Hunchakian Party, and Ramgavar Azadagan Party), and of Socialist parties. The list shows that 3,729 were indicted for anti-Soviet activities, 1,333 for A.R.F. activities, 508 for anti-revolutionary activities, 109 for being Trotskyites, and 9 for chauvinist activities. Almost sixty per cent of the victims of repression (4,530 people) were shot.

Seventy-one of the 106 participants in the “party active” meeting of July 12, 1936, were subsequently liquidated, as well as many executors and witnesses of the crimes committed from 1936-1937. Among them was Amatuni, who was shot in Moscow on July 28, 1938.

Death of Zabel Asadour (July 19, 1934)

Zabel Asadour, also known by the pen name Sibil, was one of the few Armenian public women who reached recognition in her lifetime as a writer, but more importantly, as an educator and spokesperson for women.

She was born Zabel Khanjian on October 8, 1863 in Scutari, an Armenian-populated district of Constantinople. She received her education at the Armenian schools of the area and graduated from the Scutari Lyceum in 1879. Together with her eight classmates and with the guidance of her mother and aunt, she was among the founders of the Nation-Devoted Armenian Women Society (Azkanuver Hayoohyats Unkerootyoon), an organization that supported the construction, maintenance, and operation of a network for schools for Armenian girls in the Ottoman provinces. In the second session of the Society, young Zabel showed her maturity, when she declared: “Let’s work to avoid being in debt with the nation and humankind, to make our sisters in the provinces get the light of education, to have the female gender have a place in humankind… Many people say and will say that you cannot succeed, however, which big work has succeeded in its first attempt; if we do not succeed, at least we will have set the foundations and someone else will perfect it…”

In 1882 she married lawyer Garabed Donelian, with whom she had a daughter. From 1882-1889, they lived in Bilejik, Brusa, and Ankara. Khanjian worked as a teacher and opened schools, while contributing poetry and articles to the Armenian press in Constantinople under the synonyms of Anahid and Sibil, which she would finally adopt. After 1889 she returned to the Ottoman capital. In 1891 she serialized in the newspaper Arevelk her novel The Heart of a Girl, where she espoused her progressive views about the advancement of Armenian women.

Sibil co-edited the Masis journal with writers Krikor Zohrab and Hrant Asadour (1862-1928) from 1892 onward. She also wrote for other periodicals contributing literary works (poems, short stories, plays) and essays on women issues, education, and literature. In 1894 the Women Society was shut down by the Ottoman government, and it would only reopen in 1908, after the Young Turk revolution and the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution. Meanwhile, in the 1890s Zabel Donelian and Hrant Asadour had started a romantic liaison that would find its culmination after the death of Garabed Donelian in 1901 and their marriage in the same year. Sibil would have a daughter from her second marriage. In 1902 she collected her romantic poems in a volume entitled Reflections. She was also an accomplished translator of French poetry.

For the next decades, she continued her educational work as a teacher in the Esayan and Getronagan schools, as well as the Hamazkyats School and local British and French schools. Among her students were famed art historian Sirarpie Der Nersessian, journalist and feminist writer Haiganush Mark, actor Vahram Papazian, and many other important names of Armenian culture.

Together with her husband, an expert of the Armenian language, she wrote grammar and language readers that went through many reprints and remained in use in Armenian schools for many decades. In her twilight years, she collected her short stories in a volume, Souls of Women, published in 1926. Her seventieth birthday was marked with great pomp in Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Paris and Plovdiv (Bulgaria) in 1933.

Zabel Asadour passed away on July 19, 1934, in Istanbul, and was buried at the Armenian cemetery of Shishli. 

Death of St. Nerses Lambronatsi (July 14, 1198)

St. Nerses Lambronatsi is remembered as one of the most significant figures in Armenian ecclesiastical and literary history for his relatively short, but prolific life during the time of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia.

He was born in 1153 in the fortress of Lambron. His baptismal name was Smpad. He was son of Oshin II, the lord of Lambron, from the Hetumian family, and nephew of Catholicos Nerses IV Shnorhali (1166–1173). His mother Shahandukht, from the Pahlavuni family, was a descendant of St. Gregory the Illuminator. He received his early education at the monastery of Skevra, which was continued at the superior school of Hromkla, the seat of the Catholicosate of All Armenians, under the supervision of his uncle Nerses and his successor Grigor III Tgha (1173-1193). Ordained in 1169 at the age of 16 by his uncle, who gave him his own name, he was elevated to episcopacy and consecrated Archbishop of Tarsus in 1175, at the age of twenty-two.

Nerses Lambronatsi was well versed in sacred and profane sciences and had an excellent knowledge of Greek, Latin, Syriac, and probably Coptic. He preferred to lead a life of meditation and solitude, and since he did not feel ready to take upon his administrative duties, he visited the monasteries in the region of Antioch to get acquainted with monastic life among non-Armenians and to satisfy his scholarly appetite. During this period, he translated The Rule of St. Benedict, The Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, and the Book of Revelation (1179).

Nerses contributed to the promotion of literacy, helped schools and libraries, monasteries and churches, and made a substantial donation towards the purchase and copy of manuscripts. He ordered or personally copied many ancient Armenian manuscripts, including the oldest and best extant copy of Gregory of Narek’s Book of Tragedy, which he ordered in 1173.

Returning to his pastoral duties, Nerses became a champion of the cause of Church unity. By unity he did not mean absorption of one Church by the other, and he remained a staunch defender of the Christological position of the Armenian Church. He has been regarded as a forerunner of the current ecumenical movement. In 1179 he attended the Council of Hromkla, where he may have delivered his address on unity, the Synodal Discourse, considered a masterpiece of eloquence and style. He was a first-rate orator, and his other speeches, homilies, panegyrics, and orations have literary merit. In 1195 he wrote Letter to King Levon, a spirited piece of polemical literature, where he rejected the accusations of having taken a pro-Byzantine position.

Nerses Lambronatsi is one of the most prolific writers in Armenian literature, and famous as a writer and translator. His Commentary on the Mystery of the Mass is still one of the best commentaries on the Eucharist in the Armenian Church. He also wrote other interpretive works, including commentaries on Cyril of Jerusalem’s various writings and others on the Psalms, the books of Solomon, the Book of Daniel, the Gospel of Matthew, et cetera, and a biography in verse of his uncle St. Nerses Shnorhali.

Lambronatsi was also interested in ecclesiastic and secular law. The lack of a written code of civil law led him to translate various legal works from Greek and Syriac that were used until the adoption of the Code of Law of Mekhitar Gosh. A multifaceted author, he also wrote the letter and music of twenty-three liturgical hymns ( sharagan ).

The union of the Armenian and Greek Churches was decided upon but never consummated due to the death of Emperor Manuel I Comnenus in 1180. Manuel's successors abandoned the negotiations and persecuted the Armenians. However, Levon II, Prince of Cilicia, made a last effort in 1197. He sent an embassy to Constantinople led by Nerses, which engaged in discussions on religious questions with Emperor Alexius III Angelus and Patriarch George II, without success.

Prince Levon wanted to secure the title of king for himself and sought the support of Pope Celestine III and of Emperor Henry VI of the Holy Roman Empire. The Pope sent Conrad, Archbishop of Mainz, to Tarsus, where Levon was crowned king on January 6, 1198.

Six months later, on July 14, 1198, Nerses Lambronatsi, who had spent his last years at the court as secretary, palace counsel, and translator, suddenly passed away in the monastery of Skevra while he was giving a sermon and was buried there. He was later canonized by the Armenian Church.

His students dedicated songs to him and wrote biographical sketches of his life. One of those students, Grigor Skevratsi, characterized his teacher in the following terms: “He emanated like a source, advanced like a river, and expanded like a sea.”