The Tondrakians () were members of an anti-feudal Christian sect that flourished in medieval Armenia between the early 9th and the 11th century, centered on the district of Tondrak north of Lake Van.
The Tondrakians () were members of an anti-feudal Christian sect that flourished in medieval Armenia between the early 9th and the 11th century, centered on the district of Tondrak north of Lake Van.
==History== The founder of the movement was Smbat Zarehavantsi, who advocated the abolition of the Church along with all of its traditional rites. The Tondrakians denied the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, the Church, and its feudal rights. They supported peasants' property rights and equality between men and women. The Tondrakians organized their communities in much the same fashion as did the early Christians under the Roman Empire during the first three centuries. They also participated in the peasant revolts of the 10th century, particularly in Ayrarat and Syunik. The Tondrakian movement resembled the Paulician movement in many ways, and various scholars consider it a continuation of the Paulician movement under different conditions when Armenia was independent. The Paulician movement was of a social nature and simultaneously a resistance movement directed against the Arabs and Byzantines, while the Tondrakian movement was likewise of a social nature and was directed against the developing feudal system.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).