When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, Dec. 31, the current millennium will finally come to a close and a new one begin -- an event widely celebrated a year early, when people around the world welcomed in 2000.

But the arrival of Jan.1 will also have a specific meaning within the history of Christianity, for 2001 will mark 1,700 years since the faith's establishment in Armenia. Given that Armenian communities can be found worldwide these days, the celebration will not be confined to Armenia alone.

"This is an occasion for the Armenians to remember the past and, while remembering the past, create a vision for the future," said Archbishop Khajag Barsamian, head of the [Eastern ] Diocese of the Armenian Church in America, whose headquarters are in Manhattan.

"One thing is very obvious," the archbishop added in a recent telephone interview. "For 1,700 years, enlightened by the faith St. Gregory brought to Armenia, we are able not only to survive but also to have revival."

St. Gregory the Illuminator was the early Christian missionary who endured prolonged brutal imprisonment and then emerged sufficiently unshaken to convert the Armenian king in A.D. 301; the king proclaimed Christianity the state religion. That was a conversion to which Armenians can point with great pride, because it preceded by more than decade the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, a crucial event in the development of the faith.

As the archbishop noted, survival has been a pressing issue for Armenians throughout their history, especially in the 20th century. During World War I, hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in what was then the Ottoman Empire (now mostly Turkey) were killed by government soldiers or died of starvation when forcibly removed from their villages. For more than seven decades after the war, Armenia endured as a state within the Soviet Union; it finally emerged independent in 1991.

Recalling the events of World War I as they affected his own family, Archbishop Barsamian said his grandmother, then a young woman three months pregnant, became a widow when her husband was taken away, along with other men from their area, never to be seen again.

"Can you imagine a young newly wedded girl, having all the dreams of the future, and then everything got dark?" the archbishop said.

But when he was growing up, he added, "I did not see any bitterness in her."

"Just the faith, and in this profound faith there was this continuing life."

"This is what we are celebrating," the archbishop said. "And there is power there. And that power is the power of God through human beginnings."

The interview with Archbishop Barsamian took place before he departed for Armenia, accompanied by two college-age parishioners representing the faithful in the United States. In Armenia, the three of them will join similar delegations from dioceses around the world for a ceremony led by His Holiness Karekin II, the supreme patriarch and Catholicos of the Armenian Orthodox Church.

Tomorrow the catholicos will go to Khor Virab, where St. Gregory was imprisoned, and light a torch at midnight. Then he will travel in procession to Etchmiadzin, the center of the Armenian Church, for a ceremony in which he will light a lantern on an altar, and that light will be shared with the delegations from around the world, each of which will have brought its own lantern. After a civic ceremony in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, the delegations will return home, where a second set of religious ceremonies will be held; in a symbolic act of spreading St. Gregory's light -- the message of conversion and faith -- throughout the Armenian diaspora.

In New York, the ceremony will take place at St. Vartan Cathedral, on Second Avenue at 34th Street, on Sunday, Jan. 7.

"There will be a special service with young people from each of our parishes," Archbishop Barsamian said.

At its conclusion, a lantern will be given to representatives from each parish, a young man and a young woman, who will take it back to their home church. In those churches, the light will be available to the families of parishioners who want to light their own lanterns and take them home.

"I hope and I pray," the archbishop said, "that this whole celebration will create a new era in the life of the Armenian people."

The New York Times
December 30, 2000