Archbishop Shnork Kaloustian was a prolific and active leader of the Armenian Church, who served in different capacities from Jerusalem to America to Istanbul, where he was the 82th Armenian Patriarch of Turkey for the last 29 years of his life.

Arshag Kaloustian was born on September 27, 1913, in the village of Ighdel, in the region of Yozgat. His father was a victim of the genocide and most of his siblings also died in the period 1915–1923. Little Arshag changed various orphanages in the years 1922-1927, from the former American college of Talas (Kayseri) to the American orphanages of Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon and of Nazaret in Palestine.