Armenia is overwhelmingly Christian, with more than nine in ten people identifying with the Armenian Apostolic Church, which the country adopted as its state religion in the year 301 — the first state anywhere to do so. Smaller communities include Armenian Catholics, Armenian Evangelicals, Russian Molokans, Jehovah's Witnesses and a Yazidi minority of tens of thousands who are Armenia's largest ethnic minority and who built one of the world's largest Yazidi temples on the Ararat plain in 2019.
What the Year 301 Actually Means
The traditional date for the conversion of the Kingdom of Armenia under King Tiridates III is 301. Some historians argue for 314, after Constantine's Edict of Milan had made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire, which would make the Armenian decision less startlingly early but still the first adoption of Christianity as an official state religion rather than a tolerated one.
Either way, the significance is the same. Armenia was a buffer kingdom between Rome and Sasanian Persia, and choosing Christianity was a geopolitical act as much as a spiritual one: it aligned the kingdom away from Zoroastrian Persia at a moment when both empires were competing for its loyalty. That pattern — religion as the marker of which way Armenia faces — recurs for the next seventeen centuries.
Gregory, the Pit, and the Mountain
The conversion narrative centres on Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian nobleman who refused to participate in pagan sacrifice and was thrown by Tiridates into a pit at Artashat, where he is said to have survived for thirteen years on food lowered by a sympathetic widow. When the king fell ill — in the traditional account, driven mad and transformed into a boar — Gregory was released, healed him, and the kingdom converted.
The pit is at Khor Virap, whose name means deep dungeon, and the monastery built over it sits on the plain directly below Mount Ararat. Visitors can still climb down a ladder into the chamber. The view is the reason the site is on every Armenian tourist poster: Ararat, the mountain of the flood narrative and the central symbol of Armenian identity, rises across the closed border inside Turkey. It appears on the national coat of arms of a country that cannot reach it.
Why Armenians Are Not Eastern Orthodox
The Armenian Apostolic Church belongs to Oriental Orthodoxy, alongside the Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac and Malankara churches. It is not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia and Georgia, and the split is nearly sixteen centuries old.
The cause was the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which defined Christ as existing in two natures, divine and human. The Armenian church did not accept that formulation, holding instead to a single united nature — the position usually called miaphysite. Armenian bishops were not at Chalcedon: in that same year they were fighting the Battle of Avarayr against a Sasanian attempt to impose Zoroastrianism, a defeat that is nonetheless commemorated as the moment Armenian Christianity proved it would not be extinguished.
The practical differences a visitor notices are small — Armenian churches use unleavened bread in communion and do not mix water into the wine — but the ecclesiastical separation is real, and it means Armenia's Christianity has always stood slightly apart from both Byzantium and Rome.
An Alphabet Created to Translate the Bible
Around 405, the monk and scholar Mesrop Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet, and the first text rendered into it was the Bible. The alphabet was created explicitly so that scripture and liturgy could exist in Armenian rather than Greek or Syriac, and it is still in use, largely unchanged, 1,600 years later.
This fused language and faith in a way that mattered enormously later. Armenians scattered across empires kept a distinct written culture that was inseparable from their church, and the church became the institution that carried national identity through centuries without a state. Mashtots is buried at Oshakan, and the Matenadaran in Yerevan holds tens of thousands of manuscripts produced by the tradition he started.
Two Catholicoi, One Church
The Apostolic Church has its Mother See at Holy Etchmiadzin in Vagharshapat, west of Yerevan, where the cathedral is among the oldest in the world and where the Catholicos of All Armenians resides. Etchmiadzin means the descent of the Only-Begotten, after a vision in which Christ indicated where the church should be built.
There is also a second hierarchy: the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, now seated at Antelias in Lebanon, which descends from the medieval Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and relocated after the genocide. It has jurisdiction over dioceses in Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Iran and parts of the diaspora. The two sees are in communion and the division is jurisdictional rather than doctrinal, though relations have been strained at points during the twentieth century, particularly over Cold War alignment within diaspora communities.
Separate from both are the Armenian Catholic Church, in communion with Rome and administered from Bzoummar in Lebanon, whose Mekhitarist monks on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice preserved a major scholarly tradition, and the Armenian Evangelical Church, founded in Constantinople in 1846 under American Protestant missionary influence.
Khachkars, and the Monasteries That Hold Them
The distinctive Armenian religious artefact is the khachkar, a stone slab carved with a cross set among interlacing vegetal ornament, no two alike. They were raised as memorials, as thanks for a safe return, and to mark graves, and the craft of making them is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.
The largest surviving field of them was at Julfa in Nakhchivan, where thousands stood; it was destroyed in the 1990s and 2000s, an act documented by satellite imagery and widely condemned. Inside Armenia the great monastic sites remain: Geghard, partly cut into the rock of a gorge and named for the lance said to have pierced Christ; Tatev, reached by the world's longest reversible cable car; Noravank, in a canyon of red cliffs; Haghpat and Sanahin, both UNESCO-listed.
1915, and Religion as the Marker of Who Was Killed
The genocide carried out by the Ottoman authorities from 1915 killed around a million and a half Armenians and emptied historic Armenian regions of Anatolia. Religion was the operative category: Armenians were an Ottoman millet defined by their church, and conversion to Islam was in some cases the mechanism by which individuals, particularly women and children, survived.
The church lost its clergy, its properties and most of its historic sees in the space of a few years. It also became, for the survivors and their descendants, the principal institution of the diaspora — the Armenian church in Beirut, Aleppo, Marseille, Buenos Aires or Los Angeles served as school, meeting hall and archive as much as place of worship. Tsitsernakaberd, the genocide memorial in Yerevan, is not a religious building, but the annual commemoration on 24 April is conducted with the church at its centre.
Seventy Years of Soviet Management
Soviet rule brought confiscation, closure and the arrest of clergy. The Catholicos Khoren I died in 1938 in circumstances the church regards as murder, and the see stood vacant until 1945, when Stalin permitted an election as part of the wartime relaxation toward religion and an effort to draw diaspora Armenians toward the Soviet Union.
What the Soviet period could not remove was the identification of Armenian nationality with the Apostolic Church, and religious practice returned quickly after 1991. Church attendance in Armenia is nonetheless modest by the standards of that identification: large majorities call themselves Apostolic, far smaller numbers attend regularly, and the church functions for many as a marker of belonging rather than a weekly obligation.
The Yazidis of the Ararat Plain
Armenia's largest ethnic minority are the Yazidis, most of whose ancestors fled Ottoman persecution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and settled in the villages of the Aragatsotn and Armavir provinces. They number in the tens of thousands.
Yazidism is a monotheistic religion centred on Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, with roots that draw on ancient Iranian tradition; it is transmitted only by birth and does not accept converts. In 2019 the Quba Mere Diwane temple opened at Aknalich, with seven domes representing seven angels, and is described as among the largest Yazidi temples in the world. Its construction, funded by a Yazidi businessman, followed the Islamic State genocide against Yazidis in Iraq in 2014, and it gave the community a major religious centre outside its traditional heartland in Sinjar.
A Constitution That Names One Church
Armenian law guarantees freedom of religion while giving the Apostolic Church a recognised special status as the national church. In practice this produces recurring friction with smaller groups: Jehovah's Witnesses fought a long battle over conscientious objection to military service that reached the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled against Armenia in 2011 and prompted the creation of a genuine civilian alternative service.
Evangelical and charismatic churches have grown, and are frequently described in public debate as sects, a term the Apostolic Church has not discouraged. Relations between the church hierarchy and the political leadership have also been openly strained in recent years, a departure from a period when the two were closely aligned. A broader account sits in our Armenia country guide. The terrain that kept these communities distinct is described in our guide to the Caucasus mountains, and the classification puzzle is taken up in which continent Armenia belongs to.
