Armenian

Egypt's Armenians are a Christian community of generations, most of them Egyptian citizens, whose families came as merchants and officials under Muhammad Ali and as survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide; Nubar Pasha, Egypt's first prime minister, was Armenian, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union was founded in Cairo in 1906. About 6,000 remain, down from some 40,000 before the 1950s nationalizations drove families abroad, and they speak Western Armenian at home and Arabic outside it. Life centres on Apostolic, Catholic and Evangelical churches in Cairo and Alexandria, the Kalousdian-Nubarian school in Heliopolis, sports and cultural clubs and the newspapers Housaper and Arev. Armenian jewellers are still a byword in Cairo, and khorovats grilled meat with lavash bread is served at community feasts.

Armenians are Iran's oldest and largest Christian community, native to the country's northwest for millennia and reshaped in 1604-05 when Shah Abbas I resettled Armenians from Julfa on the Aras River in New Julfa, a purpose-built quarter of Isfahan. Today roughly 40,000 to 70,000 remain, about three-quarters of them in Tehran, down from 200,000 or more before 1979 as families have left for the United States and Armenia. They speak a distinctive Iranian dialect of Eastern Armenian, run their own schools, sports clubs and the daily newspaper Alik, and hold two reserved seats in parliament. The Armenian Apostolic Church may worship freely in Armenian but may not hold services in Persian or receive Muslim converts. Each July thousands of pilgrims gather at the black-stone Monastery of Saint Thaddeus near the Turkish border, the largest Christian gathering in the country.

Iraq's Armenians are mostly descendants of survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who fled south from Anatolia, joining a much older merchant colony in Basra. Before 2003 there were perhaps 20,000; violence and emigration have reduced them to between 5,000 and 10,000, with the Baghdad community shrinking from thousands to a few hundred families and Mosul's almost disappearing. The Kurdistan Region has become their refuge: about 3,000 live in Zakho, Duhok, Erbil and the farming villages of Avzrog and Havresk, where many speak Kurdish at home and sermons are preached in Kurdish or Arabic. They belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, and in 2024 a century-old Armenian church in Zakho was restored and reopened.

Armenians have lived in Jerusalem since the fourth century, and their patriarchate, founded in 638, still governs a walled Armenian Quarter that covers about a sixth of the Old City. Most of today's Jerusalem Armenians descend from survivors of the 1915 genocide who were sheltered in the St James monastery, and they are known for the hand-painted Armenian ceramics sold across the city and for the photographers who documented the Holy Land from the 1850s. Haifa and Jaffa have smaller communities, now made up largely of families from Soviet Armenia who arrived after 1990 with Jewish spouses or relatives. The Jerusalem community, many of whom hold residency but not citizenship, has spent recent years fighting a 2021 lease that would hand a quarter of the Armenian Quarter to a developer.

Armenians in Jordan are the descendants of survivors of the 1915 genocide who settled in Ma'an, Karak and Amman, joined after 1948 by Armenians from Jerusalem, and today number about 3,000 to 5,000. They are Jordan's largest non-Arab Christian community, belonging mostly to the Armenian Apostolic Church under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Their quarter on Jabal al-Ashrafieh, one of Amman's highest hills, holds St. Thaddeus church, an Armenian Catholic church, Armenian schools and scout and sports clubs, and each April the community marks the genocide. Once about 10,000 strong, the community has shrunk as families emigrated to Australia, Canada and the United States.

Lebanon's Armenians descend from survivors of the 1915 genocide who were settled on the marshland of Bourj Hammoud east of Beirut, and from the villagers of Musa Dagh who founded Anjar in the Bekaa in 1939 when Alexandretta passed to Turkey. They became citizens in 1924 and are the one Christian community in Lebanon that is not Arab: they speak Western Armenian at home and keep about a dozen Armenian schools, three daily newspapers and Haigazian University, the only Armenian university outside Armenia. The Catholicosate of Cilicia, one of the two supreme sees of the Armenian Apostolic Church, has its seat at Antelias, and the community holds six seats in parliament. Bourj Hammoud's narrow streets of jewellers, shoemakers and leather workshops are still called Little Armenia, though the civil war, the 2019 financial collapse and the 2020 port explosion have sent many families to Armenia, Canada, France and the United States.

Syria's Armenians descend mostly from survivors of the 1915 genocide, whose death marches ended in the desert around Deir ez-Zor, and from refugees who left Cilicia and Alexandretta between 1921 and 1939; an older community had lived in Aleppo since the Middle Ages. Aleppo became the largest Armenian city in the Arab world, with its own quarters, a dozen schools, the Forty Martyrs Cathedral and a weekly paper, while Kessab, a pine-forested mountain town on the Turkish border, has been Armenian for centuries. They speak Western Armenian at home and Arabic in public, and belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church with Catholic and Evangelical minorities. About 100,000 before 2011, the community has shrunk to perhaps a fifth of that through emigration to Armenia, Lebanon and the West, and Armenian schools now take Arab Christian pupils to stay open.

The Armenians of Istanbul are the last organised remnant of a people who lived across Anatolia for some 2,500 years and numbered close to two million before the genocide of 1915-1923. Today about 50,000 to 70,000 Armenian citizens remain, almost all in Istanbul, around the Patriarchate in Kumkapı, in Kurtuluş, Feriköy, Şişli, Bakırköy and Yeşilköy, and on the Princes' Islands in summer; they are joined by thousands of women from the Republic of Armenia who work as carers and domestic staff. As one of three minorities recognised by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne they run their own churches, 16 schools, two hospitals and the bilingual weekly Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was murdered in 2007. Western Armenian, the language of the Ottoman Armenians, is spoken by a shrinking share of the young. In Hatay the village of Vakıflı, at the foot of Musa Dağ, is the only Armenian village left in the country, its church rebuilt after the 2023 earthquakes.

Kuwait's Armenians are descendants of genocide survivors who had rebuilt their lives in Syria, Lebanon and Iran and then came to Kuwait from the late 1940s as engineers, contractors and skilled craftsmen during the oil boom. They grew to about 12,000 by the mid-1980s, fell to roughly 500 after the 1990 Iraqi invasion, and have slowly rebuilt to around 5,000. The community gathers around the Sts Vartanantz Church in Salmiya, seat of the Armenian Apostolic prelacy for the whole Gulf, and the Armenian School, which has taught children from kindergarten to grade 12 in Armenian since 1960. As one of the few Christian peoples in Kuwait with their own church, school and clubs, they keep a distinct language, liturgy and social life within a Muslim society.

Qatar's Armenians are a small community of professionals, mostly descendants of genocide survivors who had settled in Lebanon and Syria, joined since the 1990s by Armenians from Armenia, Iran and Russia. They numbered about 170 when they first organised in 2004 and about 700 by 2009, and Armenia opened an embassy in Doha in 2019. As Armenian Apostolic Christians without a church of their own, they gather for Christmas and Easter liturgies in the Coptic church of Doha, led by clergy visiting from the Gulf prelacy, and volunteer parents run the Mesrobian Saturday school so that children who speak English and Arabic better than Armenian still learn their language. The Emir granted land for an Armenian church in 2011, and the head of their church, Catholicos Aram I, visited the community again in 2024.

Armenians in the Emirates, perhaps 6,000 to 10,000 people, are a Christian community that began in the 1960s with engineers, managers, jewellers and traders whose families had survived the genocide and settled in Lebanon and Syria, joined in the last fifteen years by newcomers from Armenia, Iran and Russia. On land granted by the rulers of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi they built the St Gregory the Illuminator church in Sharjah (1998) and the Holy Martyrs church in Abu Dhabi (2014), and a third church is rising in Dubai. Each complex houses a one-day-a-week school, where some 280 children, many of them from mixed marriages, learn Western Armenian, history and the faith from volunteer teachers. The established Lebanese and Syrian Armenian families run the church and school life, while many newcomers from Armenia keep apart from it.