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St. Mary at Kharput
#1
Shlama,

I've found references to a couple of very ancient churches. One is St. Mary of Kharput....

The priest informed me that the Church was built originally by the Apostle Adi, or Thaddeus, and that it was afterwards enriched by the munificence of the pious to an incredible degree, its vaulted ceiling being lined with plates of gold. When Timourleng invaded these countries, so went on the story of the priest, he discovered the Church from the summit of a rock which rises (like that on which the citadel stands) on the opposite side of the ravine, to the East. The robber chieftain sent and pillaged it, carrying away all its vessels and stores of silver and gold. He then filled it with straw and attempted to set it on fire, but he succeeded only in blackening its walls. I found no inscriptions about the Church, (the priest said they were all obliterated by the fire,) excepting one in Syriac on a slab in the pavement, and this was hardly legible. It was doubtless a grave-stone ; the priest knew not of whom, but the woman said it covered the remains of one Helena, who erected the present building on the site of the Church built by the Apostle (Narrative of a visit to the Syrian (Jacobite) church of Mesopotamia: with statements and reflections upon the present state of Christianity in Turkey and the character and prospects of the eastern churches)

St. Mary of Urmia is the other one....

Arthur John Maclean and William Henry Browne write, ?It is said to have been built by the Magi, and to contain the tomb of one of them.? In The Catholicos of the East and his People: being the impressions of five years' work in the "Archbishop of Caterbury's Assyrian mission," an account of the religious and secular life and opinions of the Eastern Syrian Christians of Kurdistan and Northern Persia (known also as Nestorians) , London : S.P.C.K. ; New York : E. & J.B. Young. This point is also supported by Dr. Abraham Yohannan (1916) in The Death of a Nation, or, The Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians, New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, where he openly states this fact
and mentions it in the caption under the picture of the church.

Blessings, Bro. Larry
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