3 - Cold War, Bottom-up: The 1956 Catholicos Election

Summary

Introduction

In 1952, Catholicos Karekin I (Hovsepian) passed away. As the highest figure in the Armenian Apostolic Church of the Cilician See, headquartered in Antelias, near Beirut, he headed one of the most powerful, and independent, ecclesiastic units in the Orthodox Armenian world. For four years, Karekin's seat remained vacant. The Cilician See repeatedly postponed electing the next catholicos. Internal disagreements irked it, and it did not wish to aggravate relations with the Echmiadzin See. Headquartered in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), that capital see was independent from and equal to the Cilician See, which saw it as Moscow's long arm. Finally, in early 1956, Antelias decided to go through with the catholicos election. The run-up to that event was dramatic. On 3 February, Vasken I (born Levon Garabed Baljian, 1908–1994), the catholicos of the Echmiadzin See, visited Lebanon in a rather undisguised attempt to influence the election outcome. To no avail: On 20 February, the Cilician See's bishops chose as new catholicos an outspoken critic of communism and the USSR, Zareh I (born Simon Payaslian). He did not lose time to condemn what he considered ‘organised attempts by Soviet authorities to use the Echmiadzin See as an instrument to control the Armenian communities of the Diaspora’. In effect, his election officially positioned the Cilician See against the Echmiadzin See, the ASSR and the USSR. Chaos ensued. In Beirut, supporters and opponents of Zareh clashed. Pro-Western Lebanese President Camille Chamoun (1900–1987; r. 1952–1958), who had taken a vivid interest in the election and met with all parties concerned, ordered government troops to secure Armenian neighbourhoods in Beirut. A month later, the ach, a solid gold mould of the right arm of St Gregory who is credited with converting the pagan Armenians to Christianity in 301, along with a few other relics were stolen from the Cilician See's monastery complex in Antelias: an act universally seen as an attempt to embarrass the Cilician See and to torpedo Zareh's ordination. In September, Zareh was ordained anyway. And the following year, the relic was ‘found’ in Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem and returned in triumph to Beirut.