The long-serving clergyman, Gegham Avetisian, said Bishop Anushavan Zhamkochian repeatedly hit him right after a recent Easter Eve service in Yerevan’s St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral.
“I don’t know if that can be considered a beating, but he dealt me several blows,” Avetisian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
He said he is still taking medication to cope with what he described as mental pain caused by the April 4 incident.
Zhamkochian, who oversees the country’s largest cathedral, denied assaulting Avetisian. He said he only reprimanded the latter over “proper performance of a deacon’s duties” after the service led by Archimandrite Poghos Vardapetian.
Vardapetian said that during the service the bishop ordered the deacon to descend from the cathedral’s altar and stop participating in the ceremony for unknown reasons.
“I called [Avetisian] and wondered if there is a [reason for such an order,]” Vardapetian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “He said no. I therefore said, ‘Stay on and continue your ministry so that the liturgical service does not suffer.’”
Zhamkochian and Avetisian had a one-on-one meeting in an adjacent room after the service, Vardapetian said. He described the deacon as a “very humble, obedient and servile person devoted to the church.”
Avetisian has served as a deacon for 23 years and remains loyal to Garegin. By contrast, Zhamkochian was among about a dozen senior clergymen who broke ranks last November to join Pashinian’s controversial campaign against the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
One of them, the California-based Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, effectively pledged renewed allegiance to Garegin in February. He signed a joint statement by over two dozen bishops that condemned Armenia’s authorities for their “unfounded prosecution” of the Catholicos. Another renegade bishop, Abraham Mkrtchian, retired from the church one month later with Garegin’s permission requested by him.
Pashinian began his campaign last May right after Garegin accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland.