Etchmiadzin's Line: A Church That Kept the Family for a Century

The Armenian Apostolic Church Gregory founded kept his own bloodline at its head for more than a hundred years after his death. Gregory consecrated his two sons, Vrtanes and Aristakes, as bishops, and the office of Catholicos, supreme head of the Armenian Church, descended through his direct male descendants, known to history as the Gregorids, with only occasional interruption from the early fourth century until the death of Sahak the First in 437 or 439, after which the hereditary line ended and passed, through Sahak's daughter's marriage, into an unrelated family. The Armenian Church's own calendar still names four of these direct descendants among its saints, Gregory's sons Aristakes and Vrtanes and his grandsons Grigoris and Husik, an institutional memory of the family line kept alongside Gregory's own feast. Etchmiadzin, the cathedral Gregory is said to have been shown in a vision, its very name recording the descent of the Only Begotten to mark the spot, has remained the seat of the Catholicosate through all the political upheavals separating fourth century Armenia from the present, standing today as the oldest cathedral built by a state acting as a Christian state anywhere in the world. The Catholicos of All Armenians continues to sit there, the current holder of an office Gregory's own sons and grandsons once filled by inheritance, giving the Armenian Church an unusually direct, traceable line of institutional continuity back to its own founding conversion.