Heritage Calendar

Because the Christian calendar was laid over an older one. Few Armenian feast days hold the two layers as plainly as Trndez: above is a Christian commemoration with a precise place in the liturgical year, below is an older fire ritual whose embers the new feast never wholly put out. Scholarship on Armenian religion finds that the folk rituals kept on these days preserve aspects of an ancient Zoroastrian celebration that the Church absorbed into the Christian calendar rather than suppressing. The bonfire, the water, the new-year gathering — these are survivals, not borrowings.¹1“Modern Armenian folk rituals on the holidays of Ascension and the Presentation of the Lord to the Temple… reveal aspects of… the ancient celebration of the Zoroastrian feast of Athrakana.” — James R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia, Harvard Iranian Series 5 (Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 10.

Trndez is the worked example. In the Church its name is Tearndarach — “to go out to meet the Lord” — the feast of the Presentation of the Lord to the Temple, kept on 14 February, forty days after the 6 January Nativity-Theophany, with a bonfire on the eve of 13 February. (In the Western calendar the same Presentation feast is Candlemas, on 2 February.) The fire is the part that predates the Christian dedication: the scholar James Russell roots it in Ahekan, the ninth month of the old Armenian calendar — the fire-month — a feast “still solemnized by the Armenians under the new name of Tearn and araj… on the evening of 13 February.” The full account is in the reading below.²2“Originally, the feast was celebrated in Ahekan, the ninth month, corresponding to Atar… is still solemnized by the Armenians under the new name of Tearn and araj… on the evening of 13 February.” — James R. Russell, “Armenia and Iran iii. Armenian Religion,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.³3“the priest lights a candle from the Holy Altar, and distributes the flame to all present.” / “…the blessing of newlywed couples, as well as offering prayers for the crops and fertility of the fields.” — Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church in Georgia, “Tiarn'ndaraj.”

Navasard — also called Amanor, “the New Year” — was the great feast of the pre-Christian Armenian calendar: the turning of the year, kept as a public festival. Its New-Year deity was Vanatur, a name read as “the Hospitable,” whose temple stood at the sanctuary of Bagavan in the district of Bagrevand, where the pilgrimage converged — the ethnographic record relates that a King Tigran built a guest-house for the gathered pilgrims. The feast was also bound to the cult of Anahit, the most-venerated goddess of pre-Christian Armenia, whose votive adornment survives in a single museum object: a late-Hellenistic bronze head from Satala, now in the British Museum, its eyes once inlaid with precious stones or glass paste.⁴4Amanor / Navasard as a major feast of the pagan period; its deity Vanatur (“the Hospitable”), cult site Bagavan in Bagrevand, where a King Tigran built a pilgrim guest-house. — S. Mkrtchyan, Festivals: Armenian Folk Rituals, Customs, Beliefs (NAS RA ethnography, 2010).⁵5Late-Hellenistic (c. 200–100 BC) bronze head of Anahita, found at Satala (1872), British Museum no. 1873,0820.1 — the eyes inlaid with precious stones or glass paste, the lips perhaps coated with a copper veneer. — British Museum collection.

A note on scope belongs in any honest calendar. The popular accounts attached to these feasts run ahead of the graded record, and the readings below are careful to separate the two. Trndez is widely explained as “the birthday of the sun-god Mihr,” read as a solar feast in Christian dress: the Armenian month-names do preserve the memory of Mihr and the Mihragan festival, but no verified source dates the feast to a birthday of any god — Russell roots the fire feast in the Ahekan fire-month and ties Mihragan to a different day. Likewise, the popular fixing of Navasard to 1 Navasard / 11 August, tied to the heliacal rising of the Orion (“Hayk”) constellation, comes from archaeoastronomical work that is not among this pillar's graded sources, and is left aside rather than asserted. We publish the calendar layer by layer, and only what the record carries.⁶6“the twenty-first day of Mehekan, Greater Mihragan in the Zoroastrian calendar, is devoted to St. George.” / “Mihr, whose name is a Mid. Ir. form of Av. Mithra, had a temple in the Armenian town of Bagayarich.” — James R. Russell, “Armenia and Iran iii,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.