Khor Virap - Culture

Culture

Celebration

The anniversary of the deliverance of Gregory is also celebrated in the Illuminator’s cathedral built in Erivan. On New Year's Day, light is brought from Khor Virap as a religious celebration. In a recent event, Catholicos Garegin II climbed down the same deep prison pit where the first Catholicos Grigor had passed many agonizing years, and came out of the pit by holding a lighted candle as symbol of the light that illuminated Armenians several centuries ago. As a pilgrimage centre, people visit Khor Virap for baptism or subsequent to a wedding to perform a matagh animal sacrifice.

Tourism

The monastery attracts a very large number of tourists and there are a number of souvenir kiosks here. Of interest for visitors is the releasing of doves from Khor Virap with the hope they will fly to Mount Ararat.

In the mid-1990s, young volunteers for the Canadian Youth Mission to Armenia, CYMA, helped renovate/restore the cathedral.

Read more about this topic:  Khor Virap

Famous quotes containing the word culture:

    Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.
    Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)

    I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and culture of their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.
    John Dewey (1859–1952)

    Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.
    Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)