Christianity in Iran

Christianity reached the Iranian world early, through Mesopotamia and along the trade routes. Under the Parthians and the Sasanians a church took shape that used Syriac, a form of Aramaic, and in 410 its bishops met in council at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital. Christians suffered harsh persecution under Shapur II in the fourth century, yet the Church of the East went on to send missions across Central Asia to China, where a stele erected at Xi’an in 781 records its arrival. Today two ancient peoples carry most of Iran’s Christian heritage: Armenians and Assyrians.

The Armenians

Armenians, Hay in their own language, belong mostly to the Armenian Apostolic Church, which traces its foundation to the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew. In 1604 and 1605 Shah Abbas I deported thousands of Armenians from Julfa on the Aras river and settled them across the Zayandeh Rud from Isfahan in a new town, New Julfa (Jolfa). They became the merchants of the Safavid silk trade and built more than a dozen churches. The greatest is the Holy Saviour Cathedral, known as Vank, ‘the monastery’, completed in the 1660s. Outside it looks like a Persian building, with a brick dome; inside, every surface is covered with paintings of the Bible and of the martyrdom of St Gregory, set against gilded Persian floral patterns.

In the far north-west, the monastery of St Thaddeus, Qareh Kelisa, ‘the black church’, stands in the hills of West Azerbaijan near Chaldoran. Armenians honour it as the burial place of the apostle Thaddeus. Each summer thousands of pilgrims gather there for his feast, camping on the hillsides for days of liturgy, music and food. Together with St Stephanos near Jolfa and the chapel of Dzordzor, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 as the Armenian Monastic Ensembles of Iran. In Tehran, St Sarkis Cathedral and Armenian clubs, schools and newspapers keep the community’s life going.

The Assyrians

Assyrians, Suraye or Atoraye, speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and belong chiefly to the Assyrian Church of the East or the Chaldean Catholic Church. Their old heartland in Iran is the plain of Urmia, where the church of St Mary is held by local tradition to be among the oldest in the world. Many moved to Tehran in the twentieth century, and many more live in the diaspora, from Chicago to Sydney. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran recognises Christians as a religious minority, with two reserved seats in parliament for Armenians and one shared by Assyrians and Chaldeans.

Converts

Alongside these old churches are Iranians who have converted to Christianity, many of them meeting in house churches. Their position is different. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented arrests and prison sentences for converts and house-church members, and restrictions on church services in Persian. Most Armenian and Assyrian worship continues in the community’s own languages, as it has for centuries.