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.
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.
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