Armenian Saint George

Saint George is an important patron saint not only of Georgians but also of Armenians. What is more, his body was also buried in an Armenian church, in Mughni, from where it – or at least his skull – was transferred in the 13th century to the church of the Armenian monastery of St. George of Mughni in Tbilisi. True, the saint’s body is also venerated in the church of Lydda in the Holy Land, as well as many of his relics in many other churches, but the important thing for the Armenians was that they could be proud owners of it. Just like one of the bodies of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle is kept in an Armenian church in Iran, while the other lies in Rome, on Tiber Island.

The Church of St. George of Mughni in Tbilisi at the end of the 19th century. Photo by Dmitry Yermakov

Saint George also watches over, together with his two fellow saintly knights, Saint Theodore and Saint Sarkis, one of the most famous Armenian monasteries, the church of Akhtamar on the island of Lake Van, which was the seat of the Armenian archbishop from its foundation until 1915. Although, as I wrote, Saint George only begins to be seated on horseback in 10th-century Georgia to knock down the enemy – first the Christian-persecuting emperor and only later the man-eating dragon –, nevertheless, the earliest example of this representation is visible on the northern outer wall of the Armenian church in Akhtamar, built between 915 and 921.

And Saint George also protects the gate of a third Armenian monastery, the famous Msho Arakelots, that is, the Church of the Holy Apostles in Mush. According to tradition, the monastery was founded in 312 by Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the apostle who converted the Armenians, and it housed the relics of three apostles – Saints Peter, Paul and Andrew –, hence its name. The landowners of the area, the ancient Armenian aristocrat Tornikian family, rebuilt the monastery in 1125. Its gate, an outstanding piece of medieval Armenian art, was also built around that time, and according to its inscription, it was carved by Toros, Grikor and Ghugas in 1134.

The frame of the two-meter-high door is decorated with human and animal figures, and its two panels with geometric and palmette motifs. These motifs obviously come from Armenian manuscript art. Since the Armenians, as Monophysites, considered it theologically problematic to publicly depict people, their figurative art flourished only in the hidden pages of manuscripts, and thence it spread in exceptional times to public surfaces, icons, wood and stone carvings, as I will discuss it in another post. Good examples of this are the fantasy animals of this door frame, whose typical habitat is the margins of manuscripts.

Roughly in the middle of the upper frame Saint George rides, knocking down a coiling dragon. His name was also carved to the right of his head, so he could be distinguished from other knight saints, Theodore, Sarkis or Demeter: ՍԲ Գ[ե]ՈՐԳ, Sb. G[e]org. A bloody battle scene takes place around him. To the left, an Armenian soldier blows a trumpet, and one mounted soldier gallops after another, whom he impales with his sword. To the right stands a soldier on horseback, representing the army from which the victorious soldier has galloped forth.

The victorious soldier is David of Sassoun (Davit Sasunc’i), and this scene is one of the highlights of the popular 8th-century Armenian heroic epic about him. In the epic, the 7th-century Arab conquerors reach Lake Van, but the king of the Armenian province of Vaspurakan repulses them after a difficult struggle. David of Sassoun plays a decisive role in this, as he personally kills the Egyptian Sultan Melik, the leader of the Arabs. In addition to David’s bravery, the heavens also contributed to this victory over the pagans. This is symbolized by the figure of St. George, integrated into the battle scene – or rather projected into a transcendent commentary layer before the scene – which promises similar help in similar distressed situations of the Armenians.

The Msho Arakelots monastery was also rebuilt in such a circumstance. In 1064, the Seljuk Turks captured the Armenian Bagratuni kingdom, on whose territory they established several emirates. One of these, Shah-Armenia, lay north of Lake Van. Its center was Ahlat, which still boasts a field of thousands of beautiful gravestones made by Armenian stonemasons for the Muslims. The Christian landowners were not driven out until later, and they tried to counter the growing islamization by founding monasteries and churches. Among them were the Tornikian branch of the Mamikonian clan, which has played a glorious role in the protection of the Armenian people and religion for a thousand years. They were the lords of the local town of Taron, now Muş. In 1125 they renovated and enlarged the monastery of Msho Arakelots, founded in 312. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the monastery became one of the prominent centers of Armenian culture and education. This is where the gigantic illustrated manuscript of the “Sermons of Mush” comes from, which after an adventurous career is now preserved in the Yerevan Manuscript Museum. And it is no coincidence that the wooden gate commissioned by them in 1134 was also decorated with motifs of the self-defense of the Armenian nation, David of Sassoun and Saint George.

Colophon of the Sermons of Mush. The manuscript weighing 28 kg was written between 1200 and 1202 on the skin of 600 calves in the monastery of Avag near Erzincan, destroyed in 1915. It was written by Vardan Karnetsi and illustrated by the monk Stepanos on the commission of a certain merchant Astavtsur. Astavtsur died a year later, during the Mongol invasion, and the manuscript was stolen by the Turkish judge of the city of Ahlat, who offered it for purchase. The monks of Msho Arakelots monastery collected the negotiated purchase price of 4,000 silver (approx. 20 kg of pure silver) from the Armenian faithful, and they added the story of the acquisition to the purchased manuscript. In 1915, after the Turkish looting of the monastery, two fleeing Armenian women came here to spend the night and found the manuscript. They cut it in half and each took a half with them. One of them soon reached Etchmiadzin, where he gave her half to the monastery. The other, however, soon died while fleeing in Erzincan, but before that she buried the other half of the manuscript in the garden of the local monastery. There it was found by Nikolai de Goberti, an officer of the advancing Russian army, who took it to Tbilisi and donated it to the local Armenian museum. The two manuscripts met only fourteen years later in Etchmiadzin. Today it is kept in the Matenadaran Manuscript Museum in Yerevan, but seventeen pages went to the Armenian monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice, and one to the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

The cemetery of Msho Arakelots monastery before 1915. From an 1953 Mechitarist publication in Vienna

In 1915, the frontal attack against the Armenians also began on St. George’s Day. That night, the Ottoman authorities arrested almost three hundred leading Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, thereby preventing the central coordination of any Armenian resistance. Most of those arrested were later killed.

The monastery of Msho Arakelots was occupied by the Turkish army in May 1915. The monks and Abbot Yovhannes Vardapet Muratian were massacred and the monastery was massacred and burned. The buildings that were still almost intact in 1960 were blown up by the then governor of Muş. Today, only the remains of the central part of the main church dedicated to Saint Thaddeus, the first apostle of Armenia, stand on the barren hillside near Muş, with no road leading to it. The monastery lives only in the memories of the refugees, as in Vigen Galstyan’s story, where Aunt Angin after long prompting tells in an unemotional voice her whole life:

“…she spoke of a prosperous family living in a large village next to Mush not far from Lake Van in a stone house with two floors where five siblings grew up playing in an olive grove after coming back from school that taught arithmetic and needlework to prepare girls as clever housekeepers much like the mother who wove carpets and organized large feasts when the family went to Msho Arakelots monastery during festivals where the villagers sang and danced together until one day in 1915 they packed whatever they could in a cart and fled under the cover of the night from the Turkish army that chased them over the rocky mountains where Angin’s mother had to leave her newborn under a rock so they wouldn’t get caught and somehow reached Baghdad to find shelter in date palm orchards in which two of the boys died from fever before the father took them on the road again with other survivors shuffling from Iraq to Iran until their caravan arrived in Soviet Armenia in 1922 to rebuild their shattered lives on the other side of the Holy Mountain…”

The remains of the Church of Saint Thaddeus of Msho Arakelots today

The monastery of Aghtamar was also raided in May 1915 by the Turkish army and Kurdish marauders. The monks were slaughtered. From then on, the island was used as a military firing range, during which the external reliefs and the internal frescoes were seriously damaged. In 1951, only Yaşar Kemal, the Kurdish-Turkish writer nominated for Nobel Prize, was able to prevent the demolition of the church, then in preparation. Then in 2010, the Turkish state restored the church in a grand manner, emphasizing the ethnic and religious tolerance of the Turks and their respect for monuments, which, in addition to the thousands of destroyed Armenian, Greek and Syriac villages and churches, can also be abundantly witnessed in our former Hungarian villages. The tendentious nature of the restoration has been denounced by several Armenian and Turkish sources. Many reliefs had to be carved anew, but the bullet-shattered faces of Saint George and his fellow knights still illustrate the special treatment of Armenian monuments.

The skull relic of Saint George disappeared from the Church of Mughni Saint George in Tbilisi in 1921, after the entry of the bolsheviks. But the Armenians of Tbilisi still revered the church, and after the independence of Georgia, when the Georgian Church claimed all churches of Tbilisi, they refused to give it up. The church was ravaged by vandals in the early 2000s, and its dome was struck by lightning in 2009. Still it stands there split open, like a skull cut in two by a sword, and a forest of sumac trees oozes from its crack.

After the destruction of Msho Arakelots monastery, the door was noticed by German archeologists who, as allies with the Ottoman empire, were still present in the country. They asked for permission to transport the door to Berlin, just as thirty years later the Christian neighbors of the deported Jews ask for permission to take over their pianos. However, the door only reached Bitlis – in Armenian, Baghesh. The offensive of the Russian army reached the city, and the Turkish soldiers who had looted the monastery fled from them. The door left in the city along with the booty was found by the outstanding Armenian historian and archaeologist Smbat Ter-Avetisian, who accompanied the Russian army to save the Armenian cultural heritage that had not yet been destroyed. He transported it to Tbilisi for a future Armenian museum, and from there it went in 1925 to Yerevan, where this museum was actually established.

“He saved others, but he could not save himself”, they mock Jesus hanging on the wood of the cross in the Gospel. Saint George, triumphantly enthroned on the wooden gate of Msho Arakelots, could not save others, but he could save himself. The door is still standing today in the Western Armenian section of the Yerevan History Museum.