"It is uniquely in its liturgy," Bishop Michael Daniel Findikyan writes, "that a Christian community's particular experience of the Christian faith--in other words, its distinctive witness to Christ's Gospel--is to be found. This is particularly relevant to Eastern Christian communities and is certainly true for the ancient Christian faith of the Armenian people (2006, 56). The embodied, sensorial experience of liturgy makes a particular Christian community present in a specific place. It also presents the fullest expression of that community's theology. This paper explores a handful of Armenian Apostolic Christian liturgical services that focus on blessings of fields, crops, and cultivated land in order to argue that they connect community and land in a distinctive liturgical vision that is both ecological and indigenous.
Recently, scholarship on Armenians has turned to the discourse of global indigeneity, in particular with regards to the treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire that culminated in Genocide (see Watenpaugh 2022) or with respect to Armenians in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), including cultural heritage preservation (see Maghakyan 2022). Always a political moniker, both the appropriateness and the usefulness of treating Armenians as indigenous to the Armenian Highland that now includes parts of Turkey and Azerbaijan remains a contested issue within Armenian Studies. As with questions of indigeneity more broadly, many of debates over an Armenian indigenous status revolve around questions of the relationship of a particular group of people to land and place.
For that reason, there is a strong connection in the literature on religion and ecology, or religions and the environment, between different indigenous religions (always taken in the singular, with the utility of an overarching category of "indigenous religion" deeply questionable, as Alles notes in "The Study of Indigenous Religions"), the history of the environmental movement in the United States, and any development of a "green theology." That is, as Winona LaDuke puts it, "Indigenous peoples are place-based societies, and at the center of those places are the most sacred of our sites, where we affirm our relationships" (2017, 73). Indigeneity, when defined even in part as a connection to place or land, is thus intimately connected with ecological concerns.
Armenian liturgical services, such as the "Blessing of the Fields" known as Antasdan, conducted several times a year but most closely associated with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September, make this link between community and place explicit. During the service, the priest blesses, in turn, each of the four corners of the world. Each cardinal direction is associated with a specific blessing. The blessing for the south invokes the protection of fields (cultivated lands) and asks for a fruitful harvest year. Crucially, the blessing of the "natural world" here is not wilderness, but a cultivated place. In other words, a place that the community has a profound connection to.
Other Armenian liturgical services such as the "Blessing of the Grapes" in August focus even more closely on the harvest itself, though the fields and the hands that collect the fruit are also mentioned. Finally, there are aspects of Armenian liturgical life that make an argument for "the cleansing of the whole earth" (see Guroian 1991). Authors writing about the Eastern Orthodox tradition have likewise articulated this more "cosmic" liturgical ecology (see, for instance, Munteanu 2010). While this connection between liturgy and ecology is important, the present paper sets it aside to focus on more concrete liturgical instances of placemaking.
Notably, as with Antasdan and the Blessing of the Grapes, these instances of liturgical placemaking point to cultivated lands and emphasize the human relationship to God's creation. Hence, this form of liturgical ecology is as reminiscent of LaDuke's description of sacred place as it is of the cosmic liturgical implications of some Eastern Orthodox ecotheology. In other words, these liturgical expressions connect more developed discussions of Eastern Orthodox ecotheology to the discourse on global indigeneity and sacred place.
With a final brief example from contemporary Turkey and the last remaining "Armenian village" of Vakifli, the paper argues that the liturgical practice of the Armenian Apostolic Church can, in the instances described, function as an indigenous ecotheology. It does so, the paper suggests, in ways that can advance discussions both of ecotheology and global indigeneity.
Works Cited
Alles, Gregory D. 2023. "The Study of Indigenous Religion." In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.
Findikyan, Michael Daniel. 2006. "Eastern Liturgy in the West: The Case of the Armenian Church." Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Colloquium: Music, Worship Arts 8:55-65.
Guroian, Vigen. 1991. "Cleansers of the Whole Earth: The Ecological Spirituality of the Armenian Church," Greek Orthodox Theological Review 36:263-76.
LaDuke, Winona. 2017. "In the Time of the Sacred Places." In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, edited by John Hart, 71-84.
Maghakyan, Simon. 2022. "Is Indigeneity Discourse Productive for the Cause of Preserving Armenian Cultural Heritage?" Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies 29:85-95.
Munteanu, Daniel. 2010. "Cosmic Liturgy: The Theological Dignity of Creation as a Basis of an Orthodox Ecotheology." International Journal of Public Theology 4(3): 332-344.
Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022. "Kill the Indian/Armenian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children, and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide." Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies 29:35-67.
Armenian liturgical services, such as the "Blessing of the Fields," make a link between community and place explicit. The embodied, sensorial experience of liturgy makes a particular Christian community present in a specific place. It also presents the fullest expression of that community's theology. This paper explores a handful of Armenian Apostolic Christian liturgical services that focus on blessings of fields, crops, and cultivated land in order to argue that they connect community and land in a distinctive liturgical vision that is both ecological and indigenous. The paper argues that the liturgical practice of the Armenian Apostolic Church can, in the instances described, function as an indigenous ecotheology. It does so, the paper suggests, in ways that can advance discussions both of ecotheology and global indigeneity.