Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, Kumkapı, Türkiye Ermenileri Patriklığı/Surp Asvadzadzin Patriarchal Church

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There was no Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople in Byzantine times. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had rendered heretical the miaphysite belief of the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian among others). Miaphysitism means that the divinity and the humanity of Christ are united in one nature as opposed to the Dyophysite position of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (and the Romans at this time) which held that the divine and the human represented two natures of Jesus Christ in the one person. Trivial to some, but a vital theological point that led to a major separation of the church.

After his 1453 conquest of Constantinople, Fatih Sultan Mehmet asked the Armenian community to establish a church. According to the Millet system, religious groups had a certain degree of self-rule under the Ottoman Empire. In 1461, Hovakim I became the first Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople. The Patriarchate was in charge of all Armenians, including the Catholics as well as, for a while, the Syriac Orthodox Church. The Ottomans were only interested in administrative practicality. Interestingly, it was the Turkish Foreign Minister who visited the Patriarchate in 2012 ^[2] to hear allegations of discrimination against Armenians. This seems to be a remnant of the Millet system in which religious and ethnic minorities are dealt with as something other than Turks although the party line is that all citizens of Turkey are Turks and that foreigners are things that are firmly outside the borders.

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The Patriarchate moved to its current, rather nice, site at Kumkapı (41.004613,28.960948) in 1641. Patriarch Madteos III was exiled for protesting to Sultan AbdulHamid about the appropriately named Hamidian massacres of 1895. Armenian patriarchs have had rather a melancholy time ever since. There is a lot more detail on the Patriarchate website ^[4]. The Patriarchate does not permit photography on the grounds of its churches.

The Mother See of the Armenian Church is in Echmiadzin (Vagharsharpat), not too far from Yerevan.

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