large minority; they are said to number nearly forty-six thousand in the Turkish Empire.[1] The Anglicans have formed a small sect around Aintab. It had a schismatical bishop named Meguerditsh, who was admitted to inter-communion by the Anglican-Lutheran bishop in Jerusalem, Samuel Gobat, in 1865. They have a mutilated version of the Book of Common Prayer in Armeno-Turkish (Turkish in Armenian letters). Meguerditsh died in 1904 and left only a priest and a deacon to carry on his sect.[2] There is also a small group of Armenians at Egin on the upper Euphrates who are Orthodox.[3]
A greater event to Armenians was the Russian-Turkish War of 1828. In this story the Russian Government behaved as it always does. Until the Armenians were in its power it made all kinds of fair promises ; when it got them it persecuted them. Russia was anxious to get them to help her against Turkey. So she promised everything. If only she could conquer Transcaucasus, the Armenians would be under a Christian Emperor, under the great protector of all Eastern Christians. It is the old myth of the Czar-liberator, believed with childlike confidence, till he does liberate. The Czar Nicholas I (1825-1855) in the "Polojenye" law of 1836[4] made the most definite promises of toleration, non-interference in their Church, which he shamelessly broke later. The Armenians, loathing the Turkish tyrant, guilelessly believed him. They thought a Christian Czar, even if a Chalcedonian, would treat them at least better then the Moslem. So they rose for Russia in 1828-1829 and rejoiced when the Peace of 1829 gave their new friends the greater part of Transcaucasia (p. 390). They were mistaken. By this conquest Russia obtained not only a large Armenian population but the holy place Etshmiadzin, the seat of the Katholikos. It is true the Russian
- ↑ So Petermann-Gelzer in the Prot. Realencyklopädie (1897), ii. 90. Many Armenians study at the American Protestant (Congregationalist) Robert College, founded in 1863, on the Bosphorus, at Rumili Hisar.
- ↑ An account of these "Anglican Armenians" by the Anglican chaplain at Beirut (the Rev. J. T. Parfit), will be found in Archdeacon Dowling: The Armenian Church (S.P.C.K., 1910), pp. 144-148.
- ↑ Dowling: op. cit. p. 18.
- ↑ See H. F. B. Lynch: Armenia, Travels and Studies (2 vols., Longmans, 1901), i. 229, seq.
