This week the Armenian Church honors three saints: St. Hripsime, St. Gayane, and St. Gregory the Illuminator. The stories of these saints are intertwined, each telling a part of the larger tale about Armenia’s conversion to Christianity. Perhaps this is why these feasts fall in the same week–and why the series concludes on Sunday with the Feast of Holy Etchmiadzin. Below is a brief retelling of these saintly lives, as told in Fr. Krikor Maksoudian’s book “The Holy Feasts of Saint Gregory the Illuminator.”
In order to preserve their virtue, St. Hripsime and St. Gayane both refused the physical advances of Armenia’s pagan King Drtad, who had become enflamed by their beauty and purity. They were tortured and eventually killed on the king’s orders; but even so, the women never lost their Christian faith. In his book, Fr. Maksoudian observes how “Armenian women over the centuries looked up to [St. Hripsime] as the embodiment of female modesty and chastity” for continuously living by Christian ideals.
St. Gregory was also tortured by King Drtad. Enraged by Gregory’s unshakeable Christian beliefs, the king sent Gregory to a pit where “lead was melted [and] poured over [Gregory’s] entire body, so that his flesh was completely burned.” Yet Gregory did not fear torture or death, because he “believed in eternal life through Christ.” Incredibly, Gregory endured life in the pit for 13 years, beginning sometime after A.D. 293.
Years had passed since Gregory’s transference to the pit when King Drtad martyred Hripsime and Gayane. As a result, Drtad “fell into deep grief for six days” and was “stricken with a strange sickness”; he is said to have “raved like a beast, and [acted] like a wild pig [where] he began to graze grass.”
At the same time, King Drtad’s sister Khosrovitukhd began having a recurring dream where she saw “a man in the likeness of light” who told her that there was one person who could cure her brother: namely, the imprisoned Gregory. She ordered that Gregory be released from the pit; he was immediately given clothes and taken to the outskirts of the city where Drtad had been staying. Gregory prayed to God, and the mad king was finally cured. Drtad then begged forgiveness for the martyrs, and started listening attentively to Gregory’s Christian teachings.
Soon, Gregory had many followers. In A.D. 301, Drtad accepted baptism, and Armenia became the world’s first Christian nation—an event the Armenian Church celebrates through the Feast of Holy Etchmiadzin, held on the Sunday following the feast honoring St. Gregory’s deliverance from the pit.
This week, try to think about St. Hripsime, St. Gayane, and St. Gregory, and the lessons you can take from their stories: lessons about keeping faith in times of adversity; about hope emerging from trial and tribulation; and about God’s power to transform the life of an individual, a family—or even an entire nation.
—Written by Melanie Panosian, who served as a summer intern in the Diocesan Communications Department.