FOOTNOTES:
[85] The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, vol. iv. of the Royal Geographical Society’s Supplementary Papers, John Murray, 1890.
[86] In his valuable book Transcaucasia and Ararat (1877), Mr. James Bryce, M.P., gives the meaning as ‘The Only-Begotten descended.’
[87] A few years after, when Sir R. Ker Porter was on the same route, he wrote: ‘This was the spot where our apostolic countryman, Henry Martyn, faint with fever and fatigue, alighted to bathe on his way to Tokat.’ There, too, Sir Robert was of opinion, Xenophon and the Ten Thousand Greeks crossed the Araxes 2,300 years ago.
CHAPTER XIV
THE TWO RESTING-PLACES—TOKAT AND BREAGE
The Armenians were a comparatively strong community in Tokat, where they formed a third of the population, for whom there were seven churches and thirty priests. Henry Martyn was known as a friend of this, the oldest church in Asia. He had sought out their priests and families all over Persia and the Araxes valley, and ministered to many of this oppressed people. The two servants with whom he had journeyed as far as Tokat were Armenians, and he especially trusted Sergius, whom he had engaged at Etchmiatzin, as one about to visit Constantinople, and not unfamiliar with the route. The body of the wearied traveller to the city of the Great King was laid to rest in the extensive cemetery of the church of Karasoon Manoog. Later research revealed the fact that the body was buried in simple and reverent Oriental fashion—not in a coffin, but in such a white winding-sheet as that which for forty hours enwrapped the Crucified. The story afterwards went that the chaplain-missionary of the East India Company was carried to the tomb with all the honours of an Armenian archbishop. That is most probable, for the Armenian clergy of Calcutta, Bushire, and Shiraz always gave him priestly honours during life. The other tradition—that his burial was hardly decent—has arisen from the circumstances that attended the search for his grave and the removal of his dust to the American Mission Cemetery forty years afterwards.
