Leon Tourian
Archbishop Leon Tourian (1 January 1879 – 24 December 1933) was a cleric of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Appointed primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America in 1931, he was assassinated in New York City by his political opponents. Early ministry. Ghevont Tourian was born 1 January 1879 in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire. Tourian was archbishop of Smyrna, Vicar Patriarch of Constantinople, and later a prelate in Greece, Bulgaria, and, from 1924 to 1931, in Manchester, United Kingdom. North American ministry. Archbishop Tourian was appointed to head the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church in  New York in 1931. The incident that resulted in a plot to assassinate the archbishop took place on 1 July 1933, in a pavilion for the celebration of Armenian Day at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Archbishop Tourian, upon his arrival to deliver an invocation, ordered the removal of the red, blue, and orange Tricolor of the First Republic of Armenia (1918–20) from the stage before he would step out on it. From the archbishop's point of view, appearing beside this flag would provoke the wrath of Armenia's Soviet government, which was a serious concern, since  the church's ultimate seat of spiritual authority lay in the Holy See at Etchmiadzin, within the borders of Soviet Armenia, and the Catholicos of All Armenians felt bound to keep peace with Soviet authorities. However the members of the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), known as Dashnaks, for whom the flag was a sacred symbol of the Armenian nation, took this as an act of treason. Tourian was soon attacked by five ARF members in Worcester, Massachusetts. Two of the attackers were convicted. After this incident Tourian hired a bodyguard. Murder. Tourian was murdered on December 24, 1933, when  several men attacked him in the Church of the Holy Cross, in Washington Heights, Manhattan, at the start of the Christmas Eve service. Tourian’s constant bodyguard, Kossof Gargodian, was sitting in the back of the church certain that there would be no assault upon Tourian in a holy place, on the day before Christmas. When, at the end of the procession, the archbishop passed the fifth row of pews from the rear, he was suddenly surrounded by a group of at least nine men. Two men stabbed Tourian with large butcher knives, and once the archbishop fell, the attackers  scattered and mixed with the crowd. Two of the assailants were seized by the parishioners, beaten, and subsequently handed over to the police. The police soon apprehended the other seven assailants, who were all ARF members. On July 14, 1934, after a trial that lasted five weeks, two of them, Mateos Leylegian and Nishan Sarkisian, were found guilty of first degree murder, and the other seven of first degree manslaughter. Leylegian and Sarkisian were sentenced to death, but Governor of New York Herbert Lehman commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment "on account of most unusual circumstances in this case