The Armenian Catholic Cathedral of Aleppo

It stands on Tilal Street, where Aziziyah meets Jdeideh. This is the cathedral of Aleppo’s Armenian Catholics and the seat of their archbishop; its full name is Our Mother of Reliefs. It was never built as a church. Bishop Ibrahim Kupelian bought a large courtyard house here in 1831, and the conversion ran until 1840. Step into the yard and you can still read that history in the walls.

Getting there

Walk about a hundred metres west of Farhat Square. The Maronite Cathedral, the Forty Martyrs and the church courtyard of Jdeideh all sit on the same short walk.

How long it takes

Half an hour is enough. The church is not large and most of your time goes in the yard. If a service is on, allow an hour: the liturgy is sung in Armenian.

What to see

What you see today is the sum of three separate campaigns. A new entrance was built in 1910, and the enlargement between 1963 and 1966 gave the nave its present size. In the yard stands a memorial stone raised in 1993 for the Armenians killed in 1915. The archbishop’s residence adjoins the cathedral, and the same compound holds the Sardarabad hall, which seats 600, and the Mar Grigorius school. Marianist monks founded that school in 1907 and it became a secondary school in 1956.

Don’t miss

The yard itself. Stop for a few minutes before you go in. The two-storey front, the arched passage and the stone paving belong to an Aleppine merchant house; the church settled around this courtyard afterwards. Once you have seen churches in the city that were built as churches, the difference is obvious.

How it stands now

The church was looted in the Aleppo uprising of 1850, but it survived the fire that swept the city. The second blow came on 9 January 2015, when shelling destroyed 65 per cent of the building. Restoration finished in December 2019 and the cathedral reopened that month; the cost was shared by two Syrian associations and by Armenian Catholic dioceses in Italy and Germany.