Armenia’s Unbroken Courage

In mid-September, I joined a lunch with the leaders of a village in Syunik, southern Armenia. The president of neighboring Azerbaijan has been threatening for several years to “return” this region to its “ancient” mother. (Azerbaijan was founded in 1918.) In practice, this would mean doing what Azerbaijan has already done to multiple regions of historic Armenia: expelling their Christian residents, bulldozing their churches and cemeteries, and filling them with Muslims and mosques. During the lunch, I asked the wiry sixty-year-old village leader of Svarants what he and his fellow Armenians would do if the Azeris attacked. Without hesitation, he smiled and said, “We will fight.”

Before my trip, I had no idea that for 96 percent of Armenians in the land today, Christianity is integral to their personal and national identity. They are proud that their country was the first Christian nation (a.d. 301), and that, for 1,700 years, they have shed their blood for that Christian identity against Sasanian Persians, Byzantine Romans, Abbasid Arabs, and Seljuk and Ottoman Muslims. As I heard from this southern Armenian village leader, most are willing to die for their country and Christian faith, which they consider inextricably connected.

In Turkey, mention of the Armenian Genocide—the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks from 1915 through 1923—can land one in jail or worse. This is one of several reasons why Turkey is among the world’s worst jailers of journalists. But the reality is that this ethnic cleansing is ongoing. Islamic Azerbaijan has been seizing piece after piece of Armenian territory, killing over ten thousand Armenians in several wars and attacks and erasing Christian culture.

Armenia was once ten times larger. Five hundred years before Christ, Persian emperors Darius and Xerxes wrote of “Armina.” Under King Tigranes II in the time of Pompey and Caesar, the Armenian Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean.

According to Eusebius’s fourth-century Church History, the apostle Jude Thaddeus brought the gospel to Edessa on the border of Armenia. More than two centuries later, St. Gregory the Illuminator, after suffering years in a dark pit, healed King Tiridates of Armenia of mental illness. This inspired the king to Christianize his kingdom.

Before the Turkish slaughters of Armenians began in the 1890s, Turkey was among the most Christianized countries in the Middle East. Records reveal that Armenian Christians numbered 2.4 million. Thousands of churches dotted the land, with Christians making up half the population of some provinces. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was becoming the “sick man of Europe,” Sultan Abdul Hamid II used Kurdish soldiers to massacre up to 200,000 Christians, mostly Armenians. According to contemporary accounts, Muslim Turkish men and women cheered as they burned churches full of Christians, taunting them with the cry, “Where is your Jesus now? Why does he not save you?” Armenian and other Christians were called “dogs,” “pigs,” and “gâvurlar”—infidels.

This pattern continued after the beginning of the more systematic genocide in 1915. In Armenia: A Very Brief History, British historian Christopher J. Walker reports that Germany secretly agreed with Turkish leaders that if they joined the Central Powers in World War I, Germany “would facilitate ease of passage for the Turks eastwards into Russian Transcaucasia on the grounds of ethnicity. In other words, they would help the Turks impose Turkism on the Russian province, and suppress or annihilate the Armenians.”

The Armenian Genocide was overwhelmingly successful. By the 1920s, Turkey’s once-vast population of Christians had dwindled to about 2 percent. Patrick Johnstone’s Operation World designated Turkey as the largest unevangelized nation in the world before the 1980s.

Since the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) that killed four hundred and drove 120,000 Armenians from their historic homes, Azerbaijani leaders with Turkish support have kept calling ancient Armenian lands “historical Azerbaijani lands.” They have seized pockets of land within internationally recognized Armenian borders, violating ceasefire agreements with deadly results.

But if ethnic cleansing is unending, so is the advance of God’s kingdom. Armenians continue to identify as Christians and show their willingness to die to defend that identity. And under the radar, Jacob Pursley reports, Turkish Christian leaders are meeting with Armenian Christian leaders, and miracles of repentance and forgiveness are unfolding.

In one such meeting, a Turkish pastor worried that his confession of his forefathers’ “savagery and genocide” would be met with anger by Armenian pastors. He imagined that if he were an Armenian, he might not be able to forgive a Turk. Yet when he approached what looked like a “very proud” Armenian leader and started reciting a memorized introduction, the Armenian man immediately hugged him. The Turkish pastor wept. He saw that his Armenian “brother was already prepared to forgive.”

Armenia is willing to die for its faith. It also demonstrates what Solzhenitsyn and Kierkegaard both considered the rarest virtue in modernity—courage.

—