Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

Thus it was that when five or six years later the missionaries of the Board went to reside at Constantinople, there to urge upon the people individual examination of the Bible, their access to Armenians was easy. They found a strong group in the Armenian Church who were already exercised with this question, although it was pathetically evident that they had no idea that any other branch of the Christian Church was equally interested in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is noteworthy that all the first converts under the labors of the missionaries at Constantinople and many of the later ones received their first impulse towards evangelical Christianity from the school of Peshtimiljian, and that, perhaps, before a missionary had reached Constantinople.

An impressive ceremony in the Armenian Patriarchal Church in Constantinople, held in September, 1833, was part of the fruits of this remarkable movement. It was the first ordination of Armenian priests under the new rule. Fifteen young men, who had completed their studies in the school, were then solemnly set apart for the priest’s office, and the missionaries were specially invited to be present at the ceremony. One of the men ordained on that day, the Rev. Kevork Ardzrouni, had been brought into such relations to the missionaries, that after his ordination Dr. Goodell and Dr. Dwight could call upon him in his cell of retirement. As they were leaving, Der Kevork asked an interest in their prayers. It surely was not without significance in the after life of this priest that there, at the threshold of his church service, he received the benediction of that holy servant of God, Rev. William Goodell, who solemnly invoked upon him the descent of the Holy Spirit as they stood together in the cloisters of the Armenian Patriarchate.

Der Kevork’s name appears repeatedly in all the early records of the mission at Constantinople. His early history was inseparably linked with the history of the founding of the mission. He himself, full of years and of good works, died at Constantinople in January 1984, at the age of one hundred and seven. From the first Der Kevork was prominent among the fifteen priests, ordained on that great day in 1833, as a man of learning and of piety. During five or six years after his ordination he was one of the principal teachers in a great Armenian school in Hasskeuy, the religious influence of which he at least helped to make as pure and as strong as that of the mission school. He also spent much time at that early day in visiting from house to house among the people, reading the Scriptures, and exhorting the people to obey the gospel message. Wherever he was there was a quiet but powerful influence for the spread of evangelical ideas.

Armenian Peasant Women Weaving Turkish Carpets.

Then came the reaction against the evangelicals. The more ignorant and bigoted of the clergy looked with terror upon the influx of light among the common people. It seemed to promise only harm to ecclesiastics who had not, and cared not to have, spiritual understanding of the priestly duty. The reactionary party gained the control of the church, they secured the imprisonment and banishment of the evangelical leaders in the Armenian Church, and the excommunication and cruel persecution of all among the laity who persisted in claiming the right to read the Bible and to judge by it of the value of the usages of the ancient church. Der Kevork was one of the pious priests imprisoned in 1839 and banished to a remote part of Asia Minor. The whole hope of reform in the Armenian Church seemed to be destroyed. The Sultan made a proclamation against the Protestants as enemies of the peace of the empire; the ecclesiastics, citing the fact that Dr. Hamlin did not make the sign of the cross or fast, officially asked for his expulsion from Bebek; the American Episcopal missionary added fuel to the flame by translating into Armenian, for the edification of the reactionary party among the clergy, passages from the Missionary Herald, which he claimed showed a purpose to break up the church, and in print and in speech he denounced the missionaries of the Board as infidels and “radicals.” All these circumstances had their influence upon the mind of Der Kevork, and by the time this terrible persecution had led in 1846 to the organization of a separate evangelical church at Constantinople, Der Kevork had decided to make his peace with his own church and to break off relations with the missionaries. In doing this he did violence to his conscience. But his hope that still he might be able to aid in reforming his church from within, offers sufficient justification for charity towards this pious priest.

It was long before Der Kevork ventured to renew intimate relations with the missionaries and the evangelical Armenians. I can remember, forty years ago, being taken by my father to see Der Kevork in his home in Hasskeuy. There was evident constraint in their conversation, but the old affection of twenty years before still existed. And when the old man—for his beard even then was white as snow—laid his hand on my head and said, “God bless you, my son, and make you a good man!” it was like a blessing from a man of God.

As the conscience of the venerable priest more and more resumed its sway over his life he became more and more earnest in teaching evangelical truth. His great age made it necessary some time ago for him to commit the principal part of his parish duties to an assistant, happily a kindred spirit. But his influence in the Armenian Church, especially during the last fifteen years, has been thoroughly and penetratingly the influence of a simple and pure-minded Gospel Christian. He had a standing order in the Bible House for all new religious publications, and to the day of his death he loved to talk with missionaries and pastors of the evangelical church upon the things of the kingdom. His last sermon was preached at Easter, 1892, when he was carried in a chair to the church which he had served for more than half a century. There, supported by loving arms, he preached a most powerful discourse upon the duty of Bible study and of conformity of life thereto in pure and spiritual piety and devotion to Christ.

The public life of this aged priest of the Gregorian Armenian Church corresponded with the whole period of the existence of the American Board’s mission among the Armenians. His spiritual life was largely determined by the influence of the fathers of that mission, and the outcome of his work was essentially on the same lines as the work of the mission. It is, then, a suggestive token of the great change which God had already effected in the Armenian Church that Protestants and Armenians joined in mourning his loss, and that both honored in him the same traits of character: a hearty love for the simple gospel and a life conformed to the life of Jesus Christ.