polarising the deeply religious South Caucasus nation of 3 million. St Echmiadzin, the Armenian Apostolic Church’s headquarters, has been “taken over by the anti-Christian, immoral, antinational and antistate group and has to be liberated”, Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on Tuesday, adding: “I will lead this liberation.”

The dispute escalated late last month, with bells ringing tocsin over St Echmiadzin on June 27. Usually, the loud and alarming sound signals an event of significance, such as a foreign invasion. But on that parching-hot June day, the noise rang out to signal the detention of a top cleric who, according to Pashinyan, was part of a “criminal-oligarchic clergy” that was involved in “terrorism” and plotted a “coup”.

He said the “coup organisers” include the Church’s head, Karekin II, who has disputed with Pashinyan in a months-long personal feud. But the conflict should not be seen as a confrontation between secular authorities and the entire Church, observers said. “It’s a personal clash,” Richard Giragosian of the Regional Studies Center think tank based in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, told Al Jazeera. But some Armenians still described the furore in almost apocalyptic terms.

“We lost our statehood so many times, so being part of the Church was equal to being Armenian,” Narine Malikyan, a 37-year-old mother of two from Armenia’s second-largest city of Guymri, told Al Jazeera. “Attacking the Church is like attacking every Armenian.” The Church, whose doctrine differs from that of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox sees, has for centuries helped maintain the identity of Armenians while their lands were ruled by Iranians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Russians.

The conflict between Pashinyan and Karekin is rooted in the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended a decades-old “frozen conflict”. In the early 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Azeri enclave dominated by ethnic Armenians, broke away in a bloody war that uprooted up to a million. Moscow-backed separatist leaders from Nagorno-Karabakh became part of Armenia’s political elite and cultivated ties with the Church. (Al Jazeera/Reuters)