_ 288 _ and investment. Others make wine, which they drink and sell clandestinely to the Moors. This city is the capital of Greater Armenia, where there were formerly forty important, very large churches, some with forty altars. All of them, when they were captured in earlier times by the Turkomans, became, because of our sins, the very sumptuous mosques they are now. The Christians no longer have more than a tiny church in it the city, in which there are two priests who say Mass for them. They dress like lay people in tunics and turbans, they wear beards and are married. They say that the Holy Father permits them this. If the wife of one of them dies, they do not marry again, but become monks, and shave their heads. The others leave only a few hairs in the middle, combed back. The origin of their Christian belief was as follows: in earlier times, when the king of all Armenia was a heathen giant, the blessed St Gregory Nazianzeno went to those parts and performed his mission as a true Christian, preaching the doctrine of Christ and His Passion, condemning the king, too, and saying many things as a true servant of God and a valiant saint, without fear of death, or of the martyrdom he might have inflicted upon him. For this the king ordered him to be placed in a well forty fathoms deep, where the blessed one remained for seven
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