Armenia, Georgia: the Age of Breakability

The Times of Israel

May 29 2026

This year marks 108 years since the first independence of Armenia in 1918, and more than three decades since the rebirth of Armenian and Georgian sovereignty after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet these anniversaries are not merely political commemorations. They open a wider question concerning memory, continuity, and the survival of ancient civilizations in a world entering what might be called an age of breakability.

The Caucasus has never been a simple geographical frontier. Armenia and Georgia stood for centuries at the meeting point of worlds: Semitic, Persian, Byzantine, Turkic, Slavic, and Mediterranean. Their Churches belong among the oldest living Christian traditions on earth. Georgia approaches the commemoration of seventeen centuries of ecclesial continuity linked to Saint Nino and the Christianization of the ancient Iberian kingdom. Armenia became the first kingdom to adopt Christianity officially in the early fourth century through the witness of Saint Gregorios the Illuminator and older apostolic traditions associated with Thaddaeus and Bartholomew. Both peoples transformed faith into alphabet, rich chant, architecture, monasticism, exceptional manuscript culture, pilgrimage, and collective memory.

Yet neither Armenia nor Georgia can be understood solely through national history. Their deeper horizon remains connected to Jerusalem, Antioch, Sinai, Cappadocia, and the wider Christian East.

In Jerusalem, Armenians maintained one of the oldest uninterrupted Christian presences. Their Patriarchate survived conquests, schisms, massacres, imperial rivalries, demographic collapses, and repeated political upheavals. Armenian communities spread not only across the Middle East and Europe, but also toward Persia, India, Ethiopia, Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean basin. Dispersion itself became one of the forms of Armenian endurance.

The Georgians followed another path. Medieval Georgian Christianity once occupied a remarkable place in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Georgian monasteries, inscriptions, manuscripts, and monastic communities formed part of the spiritual fabric of the city. Over centuries, however, this presence diminished dramatically through invasions, imperial domination, poverty, fragmentation, confiscations, and historical displacement. Today, traces remain more than institutions. Stones, fragments of frescoes, scattered manuscripts, forgotten place names, and memories bear witness to a civilization that once flourished visibly in the sacred geography of Christianity.

Some peoples survive by dispersing everywhere. Others survive by becoming almost invisible.

Jerusalem itself still carries these fractured continuities physically. The Armenian Patriarchate remains anchored around Saint James Convent, with its immense manuscript collections, liturgical memory, and difficult balance between rootedness and dispersion. One still encounters there seminarians from the Caucasus, from Arab countries, from old diasporas now reduced or threatened, and increasingly from the Republic of Armenia itself. Some arrive speaking Arabic, others Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, English, or French. The Armenian presence survives not as folklore but as a demanding form of continuity lived under pressure.

Years ago, the burial of Patriarch Torkom Manoogian near Mount Zion revealed something of this deeper reality. He had been born in the Syrian desert while his parents fled the genocide of 1915. The child of refugees eventually became Patriarch of Jerusalem. Such destinies say more than abstract geopolitical analyses. They reveal how survival in the Christian East often passed through exile, displacement, memory, and stubborn fidelity to liturgy and place.

The Caucasus itself carries an even older symbolic resonance. According to biblical memory, somewhere in those mountain regions Noah and his “living families” emerged after the Flood. The Ark came to rest not in an imperial center, but in the mountains. Humanity began again there in fragility rather than triumph.

This image matters today.

The Ark is not a symbol of domination. It is a symbol of preservation through catastrophe. Noah survives not alone, but together with families, memory, creatures, and covenant. The first task after the Flood is not conquest but relearning how to inhabit the earth without destroying it again.

This is perhaps why Armenia and Georgia continue to possess significance beyond their size or political weight. They represent ancient forms of continuity maintained through liturgy, language, ritual, sacred time, and collective memory rather than uninterrupted power.

The breakability of civilizations did not begin with our toptech era. The Caucasus and the Christian East already endured earlier floods of destruction. The Seyfo/ܣܝܦܐ – the annihilation and deportation of Armenians, Assyrians, Syriacs, and Pontic Greeks during the collapse of the Ottoman world – shattered ancient continuities that had survived for centuries. Entire landscapes of monasteries, villages, dialects, pilgrimages, and local coexistence disappeared. Recognition remains incomplete, fragmented by geopolitics and selective memory. Yet without confronting these ruptures honestly, contemporary discussions about coexistence, Christianity, or regional stability remain fragile and unconvincing.

Nor were the ancient Churches of the Caucasus protected by Christian solidarity alone. Armenians and Georgians often found themselves marginalized between larger ecclesiastical and imperial forces – Greek, Latin, Russian, Persian, Ottoman, Soviet. Jerusalem itself preserves traces of these asymmetries. The Armenians maintained a remarkable continuity through stubborn institutional endurance, while much of the once-vast Georgian monastic presence faded into fragments, ruins, and scattered manuscripts. Christian history in the East was never purely harmonious. It survived through friction as much as through communion.

The local Churches of Jerusalem also continue, consciously or unconsciously, to live beneath older legal and political structures inherited from the Ottoman world. The Islamic Decree of Omar (647) still hovers over many realities of the Holy Land. Historical layers rarely disappear; they sediment and continue acting beneath modern political surfaces. Christians, Muslims, and Jews remain marked by decisions and balances that were established centuries ago and never entirely dissolved.

The same ambiguity marks relations with modern Israel. The State of Israel became responsible for the Christian Holy Places after 1948 and especially after 1967, yet relations between the Churches and the Jewish State remain deeply complex. Many local Churches had not anticipated the return of Jewish sovereignty or the rebirth of  free Hebrew public life. At the same time, Israelis themselves often remain cautious regarding the recognition of the Armenian genocide, partly because of geopolitical calculations and partly because the Shoah occupies such a singular place in Jewish historical consciousness. Beneath official diplomacy, older fears, theological suspicions, memories of supersession, and unresolved historical tensions continue to shape attitudes on all sides.

The former Ottoman space itself seems today to quake, shake, and quiver once again. From the Caucasus to the Levant, from Anatolia to Mesopotamia, older imperial landscapes continue to fragment and recombine. The same territories repeatedly become zones of unresolved memory, demographic shifts, religious tension, and geopolitical transition. Beneath diplomatic language and technological modernity, older historical energies remain active.

This also explains why memory itself has become embattled. Different peoples increasingly struggle not only over territory, but over recognition, legitimacy, and inherited suffering. Forms of “superseding” persist in political, national, and even religious narratives. One memory tends to absorb or eclipse another. Victims compete symbolically. Historical traumas become instruments of legitimacy. The inability to recognize the suffering of others without relativizing or appropriating it reveals another dimension of breakability: the weakening of shared moral language itself.

At present, however, the entire world seems to be entering a wider period of breakability.

Climate itself becomes unstable. Economies loosen. Alliances fracture. Wars become hybrid and permanent. Identities grow fluid. Mental life becomes fragmented under technological pressure. Family structures weaken. Relationships become provisional. Even the human body increasingly appears as something editable, transformable, technologically extendable, exo-robotable.

Breakability is not simply collapse. It is the progressive weakening of binding structures. Many things continue to exist outwardly while losing inner coherence.

States become breakable. Institutions become breakable. Cultures become breakable. Faith communities become breakable. Even memory itself risks becoming breakable.

Yet the roots of breakability are deeper still. Humanity continuously dreams of unity, peace, oneness, reconciliation, and universal fraternity while remaining trapped inside recurring movements of jealousy, rivalry, seizure, domination, imitation, exclusion, and fear. History repeatedly reveals this paradox. Human beings seek communion while simultaneously destroying the very structures that make coexistence possible.

The biblical narratives themselves already carry this tension: Cain and Abel, Babel, Joseph and his brothers, kingdoms splitting apart, disciples quarreling while proclaiming love, empires devouring one another while invoking civilization and order. The Flood belongs to this same tragic anthropology.

The Caucasus also belongs to a much older geography of movement. Like Ukraine and the great Eurasian threshold zones, it long served as both cradle and corridor — a space through which peoples, languages, armies, merchants, monks, refugees, and civilizations continuously passed. Ancient migrations, imperial expansions, deportations, and modern displacements all left their marks there. These regions were never completely fixed worlds. They were zones of transition where humanity repeatedly learned, often painfully, how to coexist, separate, merge, survive, and begin again.

This dimension may become even more significant in the coming decades. Climate instability, war, economic fracture, demographic shifts, and new migratory pressures are likely to transform Eurasian and Mediterranean realities profoundly. The Caucasus may once again become a region where the future shape of coexistence is tested under pressure. In that sense, the mountains of Noah remain not only a memory of survival, but also a threshold toward uncertain new beginnings.

In such a world, Armenia and Georgia acquire a significance that goes beyond geopolitics or religious nostalgia. Their importance does not lie in perfection, purity, or uninterrupted victory. Both civilizations were wounded. Both knew corruption, internal fractures, foreign domination, historical failures, and painful compromises. Yet something deeper continued to pass through them.

Several modern Orthodox and Jewish thinkers already perceived aspects of this growing civilizational instability. Father Alexander Schmemann warned repeatedly that modern humanity was losing the capacity to perceive the world sacramentally. Bread, time, body, language, and even creation itself gradually ceased to be received as gift and presence, becoming instead objects of use, consumption, and management.

In Jewish thought, Abraham Joshua Heschel similarly warned against the collapse of awe and reverence in technological civilization, while Yeshayahu Leibowitz insisted, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century, that neither religion nor civilization could be confused with moral innocence or historical guarantees. In different ways, all perceived that modern societies risk preserving external sophistication while losing the inner structures that bind human beings to reverence, responsibility, memory, and transcendence.

Faith is not merely identity, ideology, inherited custom, or emotional affirmation. Faith is also Presence. And presence requires reverence.

A society may survive disagreement, poverty, and even defeat. But when presence itself ceases to be respected – human presence, sacred presence, historical presence, embodied presence – everything gradually becomes interchangeable and disposable.

This is increasingly visible today. Human beings are treated as flows and statistics. Cultures become consumable contents. Religions become identity labels or political instruments. Relationships become temporary breakable negotiations. Historical memory becomes editable narrative. Sacred places become tourism or real estate. Even war is transformed into distant technological management.

Against this background, Armenia and Georgia still preserve another anthropology inherited from older Christianity and older civilizations of the Near East.

The liturgy embodies this. So do monasteries carved into mountains, manuscripts copied through centuries of invasion, chants transmitted orally across generations, pilgrimages maintained despite poverty and danger, and alphabets created in order to translate sacred words of revelation, prayer and knowledge into the language of a people.

The Caucasus reminds us that continuity is not maintained by force alone. It survives through rituals of presence.

This reflection acquires particular meaning near Eastern Pentecost.

Pentecost is not merely emotional enthusiasm or collective exaltation. It is the descent of Presence into fragile flesh, fragile languages, fragile peoples, and fragile communities. The Spirit does not abolish difference. It inhabits it.

Perhaps this is why the older Christian civilizations of the Caucasus still matter today. Not because they offer political solutions, nor because they embody some romantic lost world, but because they reveal another way of enduring historical fracture without entirely dissolving.

Armenia and Georgia show that truth does not survive through domination alone. It survives through wounded continuity.

Their existence itself becomes testimony that authentic continuity is born not from possession or total control, but from fidelity carried through rupture.

After the Flood, Noah receives no empire. He receives a covenant.

Perhaps, in our own age of breakability, this distinction matters more than ever.