On This Day

The Yaysmawurk' is an Armenian liturgical collection of brief saints' lives arranged according to the day on which they were celebrated in the annual church calendar. The first Yaysmawurk' was translated from an existing Greek liturgical collection, the Synaxarion, "where the lives are all collected". In fact, it is common knowledge that this Greek collection was the basis for nearly all such liturgical collections of the lives of the saints throughout the early Christian world; however, it was not a mere translation. Rather, it constituted a logical culmination of a long and steady development in the Armenian Church of what scholars today like to call the "cult of the saints". This volume in the "On This Day" series collects the entries for March.