The Blessing of the Grapes: An Armenian Feast of First Fruits

Every August, on the Sunday nearest the fifteenth, Armenian churches fill with the smell of ripe grapes. It is the Feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God, and with it comes one of the most loved ceremonies in the Armenian calendar: the Blessing of the Grapes, Khaghoghorhnek. If you grew up in an Armenian home, you may remember a grandmother who would not let anyone eat a single grape until the priest had blessed the first of the harvest.

This year the feast falls on Sunday, August 16. Here is what it marks, and why the grape carries so much weight in Armenian faith and heritage.

Assumption, not Ascension

The feast is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in Armenian Verapokhumn, a word that in classical Armenian means "transport up." It commemorates Mary being taken up to heaven after her death. It is worth being precise here, because the English can mislead: the Assumption is Mary's feast. The Ascension, Hambardzum, is Christ's, forty days after Easter. They are two different days.

The Assumption is one of the five great tabernacle feasts of the Armenian Church, alongside Christmas, Easter, the Transfiguration, and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It has been kept on the Sunday closest to August 15 since the time of St. Nerses the Graceful.

Why grapes

The Blessing of the Grapes takes place right after the Divine Liturgy. The grape is blessed as the first fruit of the harvest, the first produce to ripen, and in the old agricultural life of Armenia that made it the natural offering of thanks. To bless the first of the crop was to acknowledge that the whole harvest was a gift.

The custom of holding back until the blessing was never really about the fruit. It was about gratitude, and about not taking the year's abundance for granted. That is why the memory of a grandmother guarding the grape bowl stays with people. It carried a lesson under it.

The vine as an Armenian symbol

Grapes and the vine run deep in Armenian identity, well beyond this one feast. Armenia sits in one of the oldest winemaking regions on earth, and the grapevine appears again and again in Armenian ornament, carved into stone and woven into cloth, often twined together with the pomegranate and the tree of life. Together they form a language of abundance, faith, and continuity.

That is the same language behind the designs in our Pomegranate & Haykakan Symbols collection. The pomegranate is the symbol most people reach for first, but it belongs to a wider family of harvest and abundance motifs that the vine sits inside. If the feast has you thinking about the meaning your ancestors read into the fruit of the earth, the Blankets & Throws and Wall Hangings carrying these motifs are a quiet way to keep that meaning in the home.

Keeping the feast

You do not need a vineyard to mark the day. A bowl of grapes on the table, a moment of thanks before anyone reaches for them, is the whole tradition in miniature. If you can get to a Badarak this Sunday, you will come home with blessed grapes of your own. However you keep it, the feast is a reminder the Armenian Church has held for centuries: the ordinary fruit of the earth is worth stopping for.