Syrian and Armenian Christianity in Northern Macedonia from the Middle of the Eighth to the Middle of the Ninth Century

Abstract

Syrian and Armenian influence has been felt in the Old Bulgarian culture by different scholars, such as archaeologists and architecture historians as well as historians of the earliest Bulgarian writing and manuscripts. Some of them, looking for a possible source of this influence, pointed to resettling a large Syrian and Armenian population from the former Roman Armenia's lands in the Caliphate to northern Macedonia in the 750s. An exhaustive overview of the literary sources related to this resettlement (in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian) demonstrates that took place a translatio urbis of Theodosiopolis/Karin (modern Erzurum) together with a great part of Christian population of the Great Armenia and Melitene. The immigrants created new cities where preserved and developed their local cults, including the famous cult of the Fifteen Martyrs of Theodosiopolis/Strumica.

Keywords

• Northern Macedonia
• Early Slavic Christianity
• Hagiography
• Strumica
• Syrian Christianity
• Armenian Christianity
• Baptism of Bulgaria