"Again Against the Armenians: New Map of Armenofobia" by Carlo Coppola
Within the space of just a few weeks, two separate incidents, yet difficult to dissociate from a broader context of growing hostility, have struck the Armenian community in two places that are symbols of its history and faith: the cemetery of the Surb Karapet Church in Istanbul and the Monastery of Saint James in Jerusalem, the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate of the Holy Land.
During the night of July 7–8, unidentified individuals broke into the cemetery of the Armenian Surb Karapet Church in the Üsküdar district, the ancient Scutari on the Asian shore of the Turkish metropolis. Six gravestones were damaged, along with a commemorative fountain inside the cemetery. The Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Constantinople denounced the incident as an attack on a sacred place and on the eternal rest of the dead, while Turkish authorities opened an investigation that led to the detention of a suspect.
The incident is part of a sadly familiar history: Armenian sites of memory in Turkey — churches, cemeteries and monasteries abandoned in the aftermath of the 1915 genocide — have for decades remained exposed to vandalism and neglect, bearing witness to a wound that has never truly healed.
Only a few days later, during the night between Saturday, August 1, and Sunday, August 2, another incident struck the Armenian community, this time in Jerusalem. At around 1 a.m., a group of six religious Jews — five minors and one adult — appeared at the entrance to the Monastery of Saint James, in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate and the residence of its highest-ranking local representative. According to video footage circulated on social media and reported by several media outlets, including The Times of Israel, the assailants took turns spitting on and repeatedly striking the entrance gate of the complex before throwing stones at the monastery walls.
When an Armenian woman living in the area began filming the scene from a window of her home, the group reacted by throwing stones at her windows and hurling offensive insults at her. Israeli police, alerted by local residents, intervened and detained all six individuals. Three were issued restraining orders barring them from entering the Old City for fifteen days, while investigators sought an extension of pre-trial detention for the other three.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem filed a formal complaint with the authorities and issued a public appeal to the United States Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, calling for incidents of this kind finally to be recognized and prosecuted as hate crimes.
Although different in their dynamics and circumstances, the two incidents form part of a trend that the Churches of the Holy Land have for some time now described as structural rather than occasional. A report by the Religious Freedom Data Center, cited by the Jordanian website Abouna.org, recorded no fewer than 83 attacks against Christians in Jerusalem between April and June 2026, almost twice as many as in the previous quarter. These included spitting, physical assaults, threats, verbal abuse, acts of vandalism and stone-throwing targeting churches and monasteries, often perpetrated by very young people and, in some cases, even encouraged by their own families.
Only a few months ago, a French nun was pushed to the ground and kicked by an extremist on Mount Zion, an incident that prompted strong international condemnation. Wadie Abunassar, coordinator of the Holy Land Christian Forum, spoke openly of a “racist matrix,” stressing that arresting the perpetrators is not enough: the environments that foster hatred must also be investigated, and genuinely deterrent sanctions must be imposed. This is all the more necessary, he observed, at a time when sections of the Israeli far right appear convinced that they can act with impunity.
The Armenian community of Jerusalem, the oldest Armenian diaspora community in the world, has been present in the Holy Land since the fourth century and today numbers approximately two thousand people gathered around the historic Armenian Quarter. A community that, amid contested land sales, pressure from settler groups and now direct attacks on places of worship, is being forced to defend not only its physical security but also its very right to remain, after centuries of history, in one of the holiest cities in the world.
The incidents in Istanbul and Jerusalem, despite their differences, tell the same story: the vulnerability of a people that still carries the weight of the 1915 genocide in both its collective memory and its lived experience, and that today finds itself confronting new forms of intolerance in places that should, by definition, be inviolable.
Carlo Coppola
