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Iran
Armenians
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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