Khachverats: The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and What It Means at Home

On September 13 this year, the Armenian Church marks Khachverats (Խաչվերաց), the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It is the greatest of the four Armenian feasts of the cross, and one of the five great feasts of the church year. Here is the story behind it, and why the cross sits at the center of an Armenian home.

The greatest of the cross feasts

Khachverats is the last of the five Tabernacle feasts and the most important of the four devoted to the cross. The church sets it on the Sunday closest to September 14, which in 2026 falls on September 13. A five-day fast leads into it, and a memorial day for the dead, Merelots, follows the next day.

It is a day of names as well. Khachik, Khachadur, Khachouhi and others carry khach, the cross, in their names, and keep their name day now. If someone in the family answers to one of them, this is their week.

A cross carried off, and brought home

The feast remembers a real loss and a recovery. In the year 614, Persian armies took Jerusalem and carried the True Cross away. Years later the Byzantines, with Armenian regiments among them, defeated the Persians and returned the cross to Jerusalem. There it was raised up before the faithful. That raising up is what the word exaltation means, and what the feast keeps.

Basil, and the four corners of the world

On the feast the cross is adorned with fresh basil, rehan, a herb long treated as a mark of royalty, and carried in procession. The service closes with the antasdan, in which the four corners of the church are blessed as a sign that the whole world is made holy. Like the Assumption before it, Khachverats is also a harvest feast, a thanksgiving for the fruit of the year — the same abundance carried by the Pomegranate & Haykakan Symbols collection.

The cross at home

For Armenians the cross is not only a church symbol. It is the khachkar, the carved cross-stone, among the oldest and most recognizable forms of Armenian faith and art. That thread runs through the Prayer & Faith collection — khachkar cross woven blankets and sacred-scene wall hangings that carry the cross the way Armenian homes always have.

Keeping the day

Khachverats is a beginning as much as a remembrance: the cross raised up, the world blessed to its four corners, the harvest gathered in. However you keep September 13, it is a fitting day to let the cross be seen where the family gathers.