Surp Hreşdagabet: The Armenian Church of the Holy Archangels
Why is it significant?
Slip through the gate on this narrow lane and you are suddenly in a courtyard that feels like a village: a church, a few trees, a bench, a cat or two, and the noise of Balat strangely far away. This is Surp Hreşdagabet, the Church of the Holy Archangels.
Key Facts
| Place | Surp Hreşdagabet: The Armenian Church of the Holy Archangels |
|---|---|
| Address | Kamış Sokak, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.03390, 28.94570 |
| Part of Walk | Neighbours of the Golden Horn: Fener, Balat and Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Bulgarian Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Slip through the gate on this narrow lane and you are suddenly in a courtyard that feels like a village: a church, a few trees, a bench, a cat or two, and the noise of Balat strangely far away. This is Surp Hreşdagabet, the Church of the Holy Archangels.
It is one of the oldest Armenian churches in Istanbul. The site held a Byzantine Greek church before it passed to the Armenian community in the seventeenth century, and the building you see is a nineteenth-century rebuilding after the fires that kept sweeping these lanes. Armenians had lived in the city since Byzantine times, and tradition dates their patriarchate here to 1461, when Mehmed the Conqueror gave the community its own religious head, just as he had done for the Greeks.
The treasure of this church lies underneath it. Below the church runs an ayazma, a holy spring, believed to heal. What surprises visitors is who comes for it: Armenians and Greeks, but also Muslim neighbours, who light a candle, take a sip of the water and make a wish, especially on feast days. In this city, faith has always had porous borders... a saint's spring does not ask for your passport.
This community carries a heavy history too. On the 24th of April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian writers, doctors, clergy and politicians in Istanbul and deported them to the interior; most never came back. Armenians around the world remember that date every year as the beginning of the deportations and massacres of 1915. The Armenians of Istanbul today are a community of some tens of thousands, still the largest Christian community in Turkey, with their own schools, newspapers and patriarch.
And yet the candles here are still lit, and the spring still runs. Now leave the courtyard and follow Ayvansaray Caddesi north-west, parallel to the water, for about ten minutes, to the place where the land walls come down to the Golden Horn. There, in a quiet garden, is a tiny church that once guarded the most precious relic of Constantinople.