St. Vrtanes I

Saint Vrtanes I was a catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the fourth century and a son of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the missionary credited in Armenian tradition with the conversion of King Tiridates III and the establishment of Christianity in the Armenian kingdom. The history attributed to Agathangelos holds that Gregory’s sons were raised as Christians in Caesarea of Cappadocia while their father endured long imprisonment in Armenia. Vrtanes’s younger brother Aristakes, who had taken up a celibate monastic life, was designated by Gregory as his successor and represented Armenia at the Council of Nicaea in 325. After Aristakes was killed by a hostile local dynast, Vrtanes succeeded him as chief bishop. Conventional lists of the catholicoi date his tenure from about 333 until about 341.

Unlike his brother, Vrtanes belonged to the married higher clergy that characterized the early Gregorid catholicosate. Armenian historical tradition names two sons: Husik, who followed his father as catholicos, and Grigoris, who was sent as bishop to evangelize Caucasian Albania and the Mazkutk (Maskut) and was martyred in the course of that mission. In this period the office remained a hereditary dignity of Gregory’s house and was still closely associated with the older religious center of Ashtishat in the province of Taron, rather than with a single later patriarchal city.

The fifth-century Epic Histories (Buzandaran Patmutiwnk) associated with Faustus of Byzantium portray Vrtanes as a figure of personal holiness who worked to consolidate Christian order while pagan cults and noble resistance had not disappeared. That work recounts a plot against his life at the church of Ashtishat, where armed opponents surrounded the building but were prevented from killing him by a miraculous intervention. His catholicosate coincided with the reigns of Khosrov III Kotak and Tiran (Tigranes). He is linked with the continued organization of the church in Armenia and with the northern mission that cost Grigoris his life.

Vrtanes died in the mid-fourth century, traditionally in 341, and was succeeded by his son Husik I. Later Armenian tradition numbered him among the sainted catholicoi of the Gregorid line and associated the burial of Gregory and several of his descendants with Tordan in the district of Daranaghik. No contemporary record preserves his year of birth, the name of his wife, or a detailed administrative archive; the surviving picture of his life depends on later Armenian ecclesiastical histories that mix historical memory with hagiography. He is venerated as a saint in the Armenian Apostolic Church.