Pre-modern inter-confessional relations in the Ottoman and Safavid realms were often tense among Eastern Christians, shaped by the presence of Muslims and by Catholic influences. From the late seventeenth century onward, some ‘reform-minded’ Armenians began to question established ecclesial practices, echoing Protestant ideas. One such complaint targeted the practice of the Holy Kiss during the Divine Liturgy in the Armenian Church, exchanged together with an embrace. This issue became a subject of debate among Armenians in Constantinople resonating across the empire and beyond its borders for more than a century, and prompting responses not only in polemical and apologetical writings but also in sermons delivered through preaching.

Against this backdrop, the lecture focuses on the Sermon Concerning Greeting by the eighteenth-century Armenian theologian and Catholicos of All Armenians in Ejmiatsin Simēon Erevants’i (1764–1780). Preserved in his Sermon Book, which contains an unusual range of preaching topics and a brief manual for preachers, this sermon mirrors intricate intra-communal debates over orthopraxy. A towering figure in Armenian Apostolic Church confession-building, a skilled preacher, and a frequent traveler to Ottoman lands, Simēon was well aware of the controversy surrounding the Holy Kiss in both Ottoman and Safavid contexts and addressed it indirectly in this sermon. By placing the Sermon Concerning Greeting in its historical and intellectual context, the lecture shows how communal debates shaped the pastoral agenda behind the creation of a new Sermon Book to preserve communal identity in times of controversy and change. Meanwhile, it demonstrates how this sermon explained orthodox practice and communicated it to ordinary believers, with Simēon emerging as a mediator between learned theological discourse and practical guidance for everyday conduct.

Anna Ohanjanyan holds a PhD in Historical Theology and Religious Studies. She is Head of the Department for the Study of Armenian Sources of the 15th–19th Centuries at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts ‘Matenadaran’ (Armenia) and an Associate Professor at Yerevan State University. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Central European University in Budapest within the ERC project OTTOCONFESSION, under the supervision of Prof. Tijana Krstić, as well as at the New Europe College (Institute for Advanced Study) in Bucharest. She is the author of the monographs The Book “Key of Truth” and Its Historiographical Significance (Yerevan: YSU Press, 2015) and Tōnapatchar (The Causes of Feast Days): Introduction and Text, Part I (Etchmiadzin: Holy Etchmiadzin Press, 2016). She is currently preparing for publication a new monograph titled Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy in Armenian Polemical Literature in the Ottoman and Safavid Contexts (17th–18th Centuries).