Guide
The Surp Giragos Armenian Church, also known as the Church of Saint Kyriakos, stands in the Sur district of Diyarbakır. It is regarded as the largest church of the Armenian community in the Middle East, and it was expropriated by the government in 2016.
According to the account of İnciciyan the church was built in the sixteenth century. He writes that after the Church of Saint Theodoros was turned into a mosque in 1518, Surp Giragos was built within the graveyard belonging to that church.
The church underwent a wide-ranging restoration in 1722 under Bedros Vartabed, the metropolitan of the day. It was ruined by a fire in 1881. The documents show that the fire was accidental and that the Armenian community asked the sultan for leave to repair the building. A ruling was sought from the şeyhülislam, who held that where an old church in a town taken by treaty had burnt down, it was lawful for the non-Muslim subjects of that town to repair it in keeping with its former state without adding anything to it. Leave was granted, and the church was rebuilt and opened for worship in 1883.
Simeon of Poland, who visited Diyarbakır, called on the Armenian churches there and described two large stone Armenian churches in the city, Surp Kiragos and Surp Sargis, together with the bishop's residence and school buildings. He wrote that on going into Surp Kiragos one day he found a separate service being held before each of its five altars, and that besides vardapets, monks and bishops he counted twenty-five priests there. İnciciyan and travellers who came to the city in the nineteenth century describe it as a very large church with seven altars.
In Ottoman archive documents and court registers the church also appears under the names Küçük Kilise, the small church, and Çanaklı Kilise. Why it should have been called the small church is not known, since the travellers' accounts describe a large building; the Diyarbakır politician and teacher Mustafa Akif Tütenk, who died in 1952, wrote in his memoirs that it was a small church.
