St. George's Cathedral (Damascus)
The Cathedral of Saint George ( Arabic كاتدرائية مار جرجس or كاتدرائية مار جرجس للسريان الأرثوذكس"Syrian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint George", French Cathédrale Saint-Georges de Damas , English Cathedral of Saint George ) is the seat of the patriarchate of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch . The cathedral is currently run by Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem II Karim . It is located in the old city of Damascus in mainly of Christians inhabited the northeast quadrant of the Bāb-Tūmā Street south of Thomas gate Bab Touma .
General
The Syrian Orthodox Cathedral of St. George is located in the Christian district in the northeast of the old town on the eastern side of Bāb-Tūmā Street (شارع باب توما) about 100 m north of Bāb Sharqī Street (شارع باب شرقي).
Every year on May 6, the church celebrates the feast of its patron saint, the martyr George .
history
The Syrian Orthodox Bishopric of Damascus was opened in the 7th century. The original Syrian Orthodox ("Jacobite") church was located in the southwest of the city and was already in ruins at the time of the historian Ibn ʿAsākir . In his history of Damascus in 1175, he reports that of the 15 churches that had existed after the Islamic conquest of the city 500 years earlier, most of them had fallen into disrepair or destroyed. Two churches east of the Umayyad Mosque had been converted into mosques. Only two churches still served the Christians of Damascus: the Greek Orthodox St. Mary's Church - today's Mariamite Cathedral - and a Syrian Orthodox church west of the city gate Bāb Tūmā .
Under the Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem I. Barsum in 1951 in the southern section of the Bāb-Tūmā Street on the east side of the new Syrian Orthodox Cathedral of St. George was built, and in 1959 was under the Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III. the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch moved from Homs here. The Syrian Orthodox Chapel on Hanania Street is older. In 2003 the Syrian Orthodox Church in Damascus had around 25,000 members, which was significantly fewer than the largest Christian denomination - the Greek Orthodox - and the second largest group - the Melkite Greek Catholics - but significantly more than the Syrian Catholics (around 8,000 in 2006) and the Maronites (around 12,000 in 2006).
Ignatius Jacob III died on July 26, 1980. On September 14, 1980 Ignatius Zakka I. Iwas succeeded him. Zakka fled to Lebanon in 2013 because of the civil war in Syria . He went to Germany for medical treatment, where he died on March 21, 2014 in a hospital in Kiel. Since March 31, 2014, Ignatius Ephrem II Karim, the 123rd Patriarch of Antioch and the whole Orient of the Syrian Orthodox Church, has his seat in the Cathedral of St. George in Damascus. In summer, however, he resides in the predominantly Christian small town of Saidnaya .
Architecture of the church and outbuildings
The two-story church building is made of white stone. It has a flat roof and a dome in the middle . On the front, on the right side, there is a bell tower with a square cross-section, on the onion dome of which there is a three-dimensional three-bar cross. The light front facade has four half-columns and a false gable , which is decorated with a simple cross at the top. On the front at the level of the second floor there is a square plaque made of white stone with a relief depicting Saint George the Dragon Slayer. A rectangular plaque rests on two thin half-columns above the entrance door, on which the building of the church is commemorated in Arabic. Below the gable above the picture with Saint George is an inscription in Syrian . To the south and south-east of the cathedral are outbuildings and the seat of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate.
Patriarchy
The cathedral is the seat of the Patriarchate of Antioch of the Syriac Orthodox Church , a church that has a total of six million believers, about three million of them in India .
The seat should actually be in Antioch , which is now officially called Antakya since the Ottoman conquest . The patriarchate of Antioch and Syria had its seat in the Cilician Sis , later in Damascus and finally in Jerusalem . It also had jurisdiction over Aleppo, Melitene and Cyprus. From 1444/5 it was united with the Patriarchate of Mardin. After the genocide of the Assyrians in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire, there were considerations about relocations to Damascus. When the Sanjak Alexandretta was founded as part of the French League of Nations mandate for Syria and Lebanon in 1918, the seat initially remained in Mardin. But already in 1924 the patriarchate was moved from its centuries-old seat in Mardin (west of the Tur Abdin ) to Homs in the state of Damascus (since that year state of Syria ) and finally in 1959 to Damascus in the United Arab Republic .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ St. George's Cathedral (كاتدرائية القديس مار جرجس, in Arabic). Qenshrin.com to http://www.alepposuryoye.com (editor of the encyclopedia of churches and monasteries).
- ↑ a b Damascus. In: George Anton Kiraz (Ed.): Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage . Gorgias Press, Beth Mardutho - The Syriac Institute, Piscataway (New Jersey) 2011. Electronic Edition . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
- ↑ a b متري هاجي اثناسيو ، قتيبة شهابي ، 2005 ، اديرة وكنائس دمشق وريفها: (بحث ميداني توثيقي تاريخي اثري)[ Mitri Haji Athanasio , Qutaiba Shihabi : Monasteries and churches in Damascus and their landscape (historical archaeological documentary research). Damascus 2005], pp. 57-58.
- ↑ The Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, Bab Touma, PO Box 22260, Damascus, Syria ( Memento from April 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Patriarch Zakka died. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 24, 2014, p. 5.
- ^ New Patriarch of Antioch elected ( Memento of March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). Katholisch.de , March 31, 2014.
- ^ Syria: Christians under Assad's protection. ORF, September 25, 2019.
Coordinates: 33 ° 30 ′ 37.6 ″ N , 36 ° 18 ′ 54.1 ″ E