Saint Gregory The Illuminator Cathedral
Modern mother cathedral of the Armenian Church, holding relics of the saint who converted the nation in the year three hundred one.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral in Yerevan starts with a building finished in 2001 that still holds something genuinely ancient: bone fragments carried from a church in Naples, believed to belong to a man imprisoned in a pit some seventeen hundred years ago. It retells that imprisonment, of a nobleman named Gregory thrown into a narrow shaft near ancient Artaxata by King Tiridates the Third after the king learned whose son he was, and kept alive for over a decade by a widow lowering bread through the opening. Meanwhile Tiridates himself was unraveling, and nobody at court agreed on whether it was guilt or a curse.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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