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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iran
Index
Armenians, a non-Muslim minority that traditionally has lived
in northwestern Iran adjacent to the historic Armenian homeland
located in what today are eastern Turkey and Soviet Armenia, speak
an Indo- European language that is distantly related to Persian.
There were an estimated 300,000 Armenians in the country at the
time of the Revolution in 1979. There has been considerable
emigration of Armenians from Iran since, although in 1986 the
Armenian population was still estimated to be 250,000. In the past
there were many Armenian villages, especially in the Esfahan area,
where several thousand Armenian families had been forcibly
resettled in the early seventeenth century during the reign of the
Safavid ruler, Shah Abbas. By the 1970s, the Armenians were
predominantly urban. Approximately half lived in Tehran, and there
were sizable communities in Esfahan, Tabriz, and other cities. The
Armenians tend to be relatively well educated and maintain their
own schools and Armenian-language newspapers.
Most Armenians are Gregorian Christians, although there are
some Roman Catholic and Protestant Armenians as a result of
European and American missionary work in Iran during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The Armenian Orthodox Church is
divided between those who give their allegiance to the patriarch
based at Echmiadzin, near Yerevan in the Armenian Soviet Socialist
Republic, and those who support his rival, the patriarch of Cicile
at Antilyas, near Beirut in Lebanon. Since 1949 a majority of
Armenian Gregorians have followed the patriarch of Cicile. Clergy
from Soviet Armenia were at one time active among the Iranian
Armenians and had some success in exploiting their sense of
community with their coreligionists in the Soviet Union. Several
thousand Armenians emigrated from Iran to Soviet Armenia during
World War II, and, except for occasional interruptions by one
government or another, such emigration has continued. There has
also been steady emigration of Iranian Armenians from Iran to the
United States.
Data as of December 1987
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