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Tuesday 2004-05-25 - Tabriz, Iran
A hard-to-find church
We take the city bus to the center of Tabriz again, and go looking for the Armenian Maryam church, near the bazaar according to our little map. We can’t find it, and when we are obviously looking around us, an older man spots us and guides us there: he guessed what we were looking for because he himself is an Armenian. The church is in the block where we were looking, but with no obvious entrance: you have to go into an alley, then turn right into another alley, then knock on an iron gate.
We’re let into the courtyard by a friendly old man, but alas the church itself, dating back to 1782, is closed, and only opened for religious holidays. He tells us a little about Armenians in Iran: they’re only a very small minority with about 250,000 people in all. Here in Tabriz there are 4 churches, and they even have an Armenian school where the children learn Armenian (which has its own script), Farsi (written in Arabic script) and English (written in Roman script). They also used to have their own newspaper here (there’s a remnant of the printing press in the garden) but now there’s an Armenian newspaper only in Tehrān. Many of the Armenians here live in the flats around the church; the buildings are owned by the church.
