This week the Armenian Church marked the annual feast day of Abraham and Khoren: a pair of saintly figures from the 5th century. Though they emerged from the aftermath of the Vartanantz War, most people have never heard their story. Yet it is one of the most moving portrayals of the Christian spirit you will ever encounter.
Abraham and Khoren were students of Ghevont, Hovsep, and the other Armenian priests prominent in the Vartanantz War. These were the priests who, with Vartan and others, led the rebellion against the Persian Empire and its attempt to enforce the Zoroastrian religion on the Armenians. After the defeat at Avarayr, however, the priests were condemned by a Persian tribunal, exiled from their homeland, and martyred for their defiant faith in Christ.
The Persians stopped short of killing the students Abraham and Khoren; but they subjected them to the most brutal beatings and physical mutilation, and exiled them to the Assyrian desert. But there, the two were embraced by the local Christians as holy Armenian “confessors”: men who had gladly accepted torture for the sake of Christ—but whose suffering fell short of death, as their martyred masters had endured. Abraham and Khoren became known for their acts of charity and benevolence, for the compassion they showed to the poor and needy—even in spite of the horrific physical burdens they themselves carried.
After years of such service, and the death of Khoren, it became possible at last for Abraham to return to Armenia. But he was reluctant to do so. The moving conclusion of Abraham’s story is told by Yeghishe Vartabed, in his great history of the Vartanantz War.
What follows is the story of Abraham’s decision, and his final years, from Chapter 7 of Yeghishe’s chronicle The Armenian War, retold here by Christopher Hagop Zakian.
The Homecoming of Abraham the Confessor
After Khoren died, a victim of the scorching desert wind, Abraham continued his saintly vocation. He had completed ten years of service, when his benefactors and his beneficiaries all pleaded with him to return, at long last, to Armenia. At first, Abraham was hesitant to take up the journey, after so many years away from home. Certainly, a part of him was ashamed to be seen again by those who remembered him when he had a straight back, smooth skin, and an unblemished face. But there was a deeper shame he carried within him, too, embodied in the question that had plagued his heart all these years: Why had he survived? How could he face his countrymen, alive—when he and they knew that others had made the supreme sacrifice, to die as martyrs?
The Christian leaders of Shapur, who respected Abraham and knew his story, saw his hesitancy and tried to reason with him. “We know,” they said, “that when the monks of Armenia see you, they will remember the legions of warriors who fell in defense of our faith, and they will say: ‘They all died for our sake, shedding their blood as a sacrifice for God.’ When the people see you, they will remember the holy priests who were slain in foreign lands, to satisfy the wrath of a godless king. And perhaps they will also remember the Armenian nobles and knights who, even now, live in bondage? Perhaps they will ask God to deliver them from captivity, and let them return to their native land”….
Abraham pondered these words, and the greater purpose they foretold. By returning to Armenia, his own people might see in him the great heroes who had fallen to the sword as martyrs. And they might see, too, the terrible cost borne by those who had defied worldly power, to stand resolutely with the Truth of Christ.
He wondered: “Could this be the reason God refused my willing sacrifice?” At long last, he had an answer to the question that had been gnawing at his conscience.
And so, with a peaceful spirit, Abraham the Confessor consented to undertake the journey to his homeland. Travel was arduous, and took him through many locales, and among many different peoples. Yet wherever he went, the surrounding countryside was blessed. It was true, as he had been promised, that those who looked upon Abraham saw in him the martyrs, confessors, and prisoners who had sacrificed for the Christian faith. Children and youths, elderly men, princes and even kings felt their hearts magnified, purified, ennobled, when they were in his presence. Village churches gave him a hero’s welcome, and adorned the long-neglected shrines of their native martyrs, as if they had been discovered anew.
Near the end of his journey, Abraham arrived at the edge of the place where it had all started: the plain of Avarayr. The better part of a generation had passed since that landscape had been a scene of violence and slaughter. Now, all traces of the great battle were gone. The remains of the rival camps; military earthworks and fortifications; the light tracks of swift horses; the ponderous footprints of war elephants; the heaps of Persian and Armenian dead; indeed, every sign that a desperate war had once been fought by three hundred and sixty-six thousand men—all of it had been erased by Time. The stories Abraham had heard from veterans of Avarayr, or from priests who had witnessed and survived the carnage, seemed impossible to imagine, as he looked over a tranquil field bedecked with flowers as far as the eye could see. He had to remind himself that those flowers had been watered, not by rain from the sky, but by the spilt blood of martyrs; the soil nourishing them had been sown with the bones of Armenian heroes.
With such thoughts in mind, the confessor walked out onto the battle site, treading carefully with his weary feet. With every step, it was as if he could feel the spirits of martyred heroes rising from the earth, joining their lost vitality with his own, bringing life to the whole land once more. For a long time, he made delicate strides over the great expanse of the field, always conscious of the precious relics that lay buried below the earth’s surface; conscious, too, that each step brought him closer to home.
On the day he crossed the frontier into Armenia, an enormous crowd was waiting to greet him. Men and women, old and young, nobles and peasants alike all rushed forward and fell to their knees before him, clinging to Abraham’s hands and feet. “Orhnyal eh Asdvadz!” they cried in their native tongue: “Blessed is God—who sent us this angel to deliver the good news of the Resurrection, so that we may inherit the Kingdom of Heaven!” They hailed him as the incarnation of the martyrs, the hope of the captives, the restorer of peace to their land. “You come as the spokesman of the dead,” they proclaimed. “So speak to us now; and in your voice we will hear the silent blessing of the saints.”
Abraham never ceased to be astonished that his broken, battered form could inspire such hope among his countrymen. Yet he understood perfectly what they saw in him. For if God had led him, of all people, back to Armenia, then clearly the Lord would open the same path for all His children who longed to return home. For some, like the nakharars still held in Persian bondage, that homecoming would be a physical return to the land of their ancestors. For others—the downhearted, grieving, and weary—the home they sought was a place of spiritual rest, in that eternal Kingdom promised by the Lord Jesus Christ. Mercifully, when the people set their eyes on Abraham’s ugliness, what they beheld in their hearts was the beauty of Heaven.
The blessed confessor was welcomed in the same manner—with love and admiration—wherever he went in Armenia. But when it came time to settle in one spot, he chose a secluded place, away from the crowds, where he could live out his days in godly austerity. He set up a hermitage in Hayots Dzor—the “Valley of the Armenians,” not too far from the Koshab River—and took up residence with three holy brothers. In every outward respect, the life he led was a simple one, built around habits of virtue. He ate sparingly, and was indifferent to possessions. He greeted each new day with mildness and humility, performing every sacred act of worship, and ending every night in a prayerful vigil. Praise for the Lord was always on his lips.
For the land of Armenia, he was a source of healing, and many of its people—those who had been hurt, or who had suffered affliction—quietly sought him out, and found their health and faith restored. Foreigners, too, traveled long distances to visit Abraham in his cramped hermit’s cell, and the Greeks in particular blessed Armenia for his sake. His living example gave inspiration to the faithful, and put to shame every act of vice. He became a terror to demons, and a companion to angels.
In the fullness of time, he replaced all the physical needs of his body with spiritual things, until the corruptible world no longer held any claim on him, and Abraham the Confessor was transferred peacefully from Earth to Heaven.
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By Christopher H. Zakian, from a forthcoming book retelling Yeghishe’s epic history of the Vartanantz war.
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