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   Take the right fork and drive past the extensive cemetery to the monastery  of Khor Virap ("deep pit"), built on the side of one of a chain of low hills looking out across the Russian-guarded border to Turkey and Mt. Ararat. The central church, S. Astvatsatsin, dates from the end of the 17th c.  The smaller S. Gevorg church was originally constructed in 642 by Katholikos Nerses the Builder, but has been repeatedly rebuilt.  In this second church are two deep stone cisterns, the further of which, then garnished with serpents (or alternatively poisonous insects), is said to have been the pit in which Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for 13 years by the cruel king Trdat (Tiridates) III (or maybe IV – the chronology set forth by the ancient Armenian sources makes no sense without finding another Trdat the ancients left out). The descent into the pit, now via a perilous metal stairway, is spiritually rewarding and generally not fatal.  (The same cannot be said about the public restrooms behind the monastery.)
   After the murder of his father Chosroes by Chosroes' evil brother (or a Persian -- the sources differ), the young Tiridates was taken to Rome to protect him from the usurper and give him a good Roman upbringing.  Installed by the Romans on his father's throne around AD 298, after the Romans made Greater Armenia a protectorate as one of the spoils of their victory over the Persians in AD 297, King Tiridates "the Great" cheerfully followed the lead of his friend the Emperor Diocletian in savagely persecuting Christians.  It is open to question whether he put Gregory in the pit for being a Christian or for being (some sources say) the son of his father's murderer.  God ultimately punished Tiridates' misdeeds by giving him the head of a boar in place of his own. Gregory cured the King and was rewarded with the official conversion of Armenia to Christianity probably in the year 314 (after the Emperor Constantine the Great made it safe to do so) rather than in the year 301, 1700th anniversary of which date will be celebrated with great pomp in 2001.  Gregory was sent to Caesaria to be consecrated a bishop, and he and his children and descendants became the hereditary religious chiefs of Armenia.

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