them: a cross, this emblem, their crozier and vardapet's staff. While they celebrate servers stand around holding these.[1] Armenians have no liturgical colours, except black for funerals.
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FIG. 18. — ARMENIAN BISHOP AND VARDAPET.
4. The Calendar, Books and Services
The Armenians have a national reckoning from Haik (B.C. 2492), and a disused ecclesiastical reckoning. They now all use the Julian Calendar, like the Orthodox. The salient fact in their year is that they have no Christmas,[2] or, rather, that they keep the memory of our Lord's birth with the other manifestations on the Epiphany (Hainuthiun, January 6). There is no great mystery about this. Christmas (December 25) is in origin a Western feast, which was not introduced into the East till the 4th century.[3] Armenia is the one country where it was never introduced. Now this unique peculiarity has become a kind of national privilege of which Armenians are proud, whereas their opponents have sometimes counted it among their heresies. Both points of view seem equally absurd. Most of their feasts are dated, not by a day of the month, but by a day of a week after a certain Sunday dependent on Easter, which greatly simplifies the calendar. They distinguish "Feasts of the Lord"[4] (Epiphany, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Transfiguration on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost, falling-asleep of the Holy Theotókos on the nearest Sunday to August 15, Candlemas on February 14,[5] Lady Day on April 7,[6] the Birth of the Holy Virgin, her Presentation
- ↑ For the emblem of the late Katholikos see Lynch: Armenia, i. 252.
- ↑ This is unique among old Churches now.
- ↑ Cf. Kellner: Heortologie (Freiburg, 1901), pp. 82-86.
- ↑ In which those of the blessed Virgin are included.
- ↑ Quite rightly; forty days after their Christmas-Epiphany.
- ↑ The same idea; nine months before January 6.
