History & overview · every faith gets one
Saint Mark's see, and the longest fasting year in Christendom.
The church of Egypt, holding the see that Athanasius and Cyril held, which refused the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and has kept its own patriarch ever since. It numbers its years from the Era of the Martyrs, fasts through more than two hundred days of each one, and still prays in Coptic — the last stage of the language of the pharaohs.
The founding
The church dates itself to Mark's preaching in Alexandria, traditionally in the 40s AD, and its calendar to the persecution under Diocletian that began in 284. What happened in 451 was not a founding but a parting: Chalcedon defined Christ in two natures, Alexandria heard two Christs, and Egypt kept its own patriarch while the empire installed a second one beside him.
Its founding is bound to Mark the Evangelist, by the church's own account — 451 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Created out of nothing, good, and repairable — the Word entered it and did not recoil..
The divine. One God in three persons. Of Christ the church confesses one incarnate nature of the Word, divinity and humanity united without mingling, confusion or alteration — refusing both the Chalcedonian two-natures formula and the Eutychian idea that the humanity was swallowed up..
Death and after. Resurrection of the body and judgment; the departed are named aloud and prayed for at every liturgy..