Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian was discharged earlier in the day from a hospital in Yerevan where he has undergone two surgeries since December. He was hospitalized two months after an Armenian court convicted him of calling for a violent regime change and sentenced him to two years in prison.
Ajapahian, who heads the Armenian Apostolic Church diocese in the northwestern Shirak province, rejected the accusation as politically motivated during his unusually quick trial. He appealed against the verdict. Armenia’s Court of Appeals agreed on February 6 to move him to house arrest pending a final verdict on the high-profile case.
The 63-year-old archbishop highly critical of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will be confined to his private quarters at the diocese headquarters in Gyumri. Hundreds of his supporters gathered outside the building, applauding and chanting “Monsignor!” as police officers escorted him into his residence. Some of them also sang church hymns in his honor.
The bells of an adjacent church rang in the meantime. The crowd included Avetis Arakelian, the acting opposition mayor of Armenia’s second largest city, and his aides.
“We are very moved and happy but at the same sad because he won’t be able to go to liturgies and deliver his rousing sermons,” one woman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We are happy with something that should not have happened in the first place,” said another, male resident of Gyumri. “His Eminence should not have been arrested at all.”
Ajapahian was arrested on June 27 the day after Pashinian threatened to forcibly remove Garegin from his Echmiadzin headquarters. The case against him is based on a June 2025 interview in which he lamented the Armenian military’s failure to topple Pashinian and thus “save” Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh following the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.
On June 25, another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanian, and his 15 supporters were arrested on what they see as trumped-up charges of plotting “terrorist acts” in a bid to seize power. In October, the authorities arrested Bishop Mkrtich Proshian, Garegin’s nephew heading another church diocese. Proshian, who was also granted house arrest last week, denies forcing his subordinates to attend opposition rallies in Yerevan in 2021.
The crackdown on clergy loyal to the Catholicos continued with the arrest on December 4 of Archbishop Arshak Khachatrian, the head of the church’s Mother See Chancellery in Echmiadzin. Khachatrian is facing drug-related charges rejected by him as politically motivated.
Six other bishops and archbishops as well as the supreme head of the church himself were indicted but not arrested this year. They were not allowed to leave the country to attend an emergency meeting of the church’s top clergy that began in Austria on Tuesday.
