Birth of Fr. Hagopos Dashian (October 25, 1866)

The Viennese branch of the Mekhitarist Congregation, founded in 1811, has been remarkable for its erudition, as reflected in its publications and particularly its journal Handes Amsorya, which has been continuously published for over one hundred and thirty years since 1887. One of the main names of that “golden age” of the Vienna Mekhitarists was Fr. Hagopos Dashian, who enriched Armenian Studies with his important publications over a span of forty-five years.

Born Franciscus Tashjian in the village of Ardzati, in the province of Karin (Erzerum), on October 5, 1866, he learned the first letters in the parochial school of Erzerum. In 1880 his parents sent him to the seminary of the Mekhitarist monastery in Vienna. Three years later, he took the vows as a novice and adopted the name Hagopos, and in 1885 became a member of the congregation. In 1889 he finished his studies and was consecrated priest. In the same year, he became a teacher of philosophy and Armenian language at the monastery. After signing his first works as “Tashjian,” in 1890 he adopted the Armenian surname Dashian.

An iron will of learning endowed Fr. Hagopos Dashian with comprehensive knowledge of the Armenian language, as well as history, geography, and literature. This included a well-rounded command of almost a dozen ancient and modern languages. As his younger colleague, Fr. Nerses Akinian wrote, “he did not go to schools of higher education, but his knowledge bewitched university lecturers and professors.”

From 1893-1909 he visited Venice, Berlin, Constantinople, Smyrna, and Erzerum. From 1909-1912 he was the abbot of the Mekhitarist convent of Constantinople. Returning to Vienna in 1912, he was a member of the Administrative Council of the congregation.

At the age of twenty-five, in 1891, he published the catalog of manuscript of the Royal Library of Vienna, followed by the catalog of manuscripts of the Mekhitarist Congregation of Vienna (1895), which he compiled in two years, including 571 manuscripts with detailed information of encyclopedic character about each unit. The mode of cataloging received the name of “Dashian style” in Armenian philology.

Two years later, in 1897, he completed and prepared for publication the study on the Armenian Divine Liturgy, compared with the Greek, Syrian, and Latin liturgies, which his predecessor Fr. Hovsep Katerjian had left unpublished.

After that, he took over the publication of another unpublished work written three decades before, Fr. Kerovpe Spenian’s Study of the Armenian Classical Language. To this end, he submerged himself into a study of the origins of the Armenian people and many historical and linguistic issues related to it. This resulted into the publication of the 700-page book in 1920, with a posthumously published continuation, Hittites and Urartians (1934).

Dashian was an indefatigable researcher, publishing studies on Agatangeghos (1891), the Life of Alexander by Pseudo-Callistenes (1892), Armenian paleography (1898), authors of the early centuries of Armenian literature (1898 and 1901), and many other issues. He translated into Armenian books by eminent foreign scholars of Armenian Studies, such as Heinrich Hübschmann, Heinrich Petermann, Paul Vetter, Friedrich Müller (from German), Frederick Conybeare (from English), Nikolai Marr (from Russian), and others. He was the point person for any Armenian or non-Armenian scholar who had a query about issues related to the discipline.

The shock that he suffered after learning the fate of his people in 1915 brought him to deal with contemporary subjects too. In 1921 Dashian published a collection of German documents on the genocide in Armenian translation ( The Deportation of the Armenian Nation according to German Documents ) and a demographic study, The Armenian Population from the Black Sea to Karin . The latter was published in French in 1922.

This fecund Armenologist passed away on February 3, 1933, at the age of sixty-six. Fifteen years later, his study The Western Frontier of Ancient Armenia (1948), came out of the presses of the Mekhitarist Congregation.

Birth of Fr. Nerses Akinian (September 10, 1883)

Father Nerses Akinian was one of the most prolific and renowned names of Armenian philology in the first half of the twentieth century.

 

He was born Gabriel Akinian on September 10, 1883, in Artvin, an area in northeastern Turkey that was part of the Russian Empire at the time. He was sent to the Mekhitarist seminary of Vienna at the age of twelve, in 1895, and entered the Viennese branch of the congregation in 1901 when he was anointed a celibate priest and renamed Nerses. He followed the courses of the University of Vienna, where he studied Greek, Latin, and Syriac, history of Greco-Roman and Byzantine culture, philosophy, and theology. After graduation in 1907, he would have a wide number of functions in the Mekhitarist Congregation for the next decades. He was first a teacher at the seminary (1907) and later its deputy principal (1908-1911) and principal (1916-1920). Along his educational tasks, from 1909 until his death Fr. Nerses Akinian was also the head librarian of the Vienna monastery and the editor, with intermittencies, of Handes Amsorya, the Armenian Studies journal of the Viennese branch of the Mekhitarists. He became a member of the general board of the congregation in 1931 and superior of the monastery from 1931-1937.  

 

From the very beginning, Akinian passionately pursued historical studies, following the general orientation of the Viennese Mekhitarists, and researched the whole extent of Armenian history and literature with German-like rigorousness and method. He was an indefatigable traveler, and would go to many countries to study Armenian culture and gather thousands of Armenian manuscripts and printed books for the library of Vienna. In 1912 he represented the Mekhitarists of Vienna at the consecration of Catholicos Gevorg V Sureniants (1911-1930) and traveled to his birthplace, Artvin, and Eastern Armenia, where he visited Ani, Garni, Geghard, and other ancient places. During World War I, he collected money to help the refugees of the Armenian Genocide, as well as Armenian war prisoners in Germany and Austria.

 

In 1924 Fr. Akinian was assigned to pastoral mission in Soviet Armenia and he would also visit Moscow, Nor Nakhijevan (Rostov-on-the-Don), Batumi, Tbilisi, and Lvov. This gave him the opportunity to visit ancient monuments and research collections of ancient Armenian manuscripts, particularly in Armenia, where he worked at the collection of Holy Etchmiadzin (which would be later moved to Yerevan and became the basis for the collection of the Matenadaran). In 1929 he was arrested, suspected of being a foreign spy, and forced to leave Armenia after a forty-day imprisonment. He went back to Vienna and continued his studies in different cities of Western Europe, including Berlin, Munich, Tubingen, Paris, Rome, and Livorno. In 1939 he went to the Middle East, but remained stranded in Beirut for the next seven years due to World War II. He spent his time teaching at the local Mekhitarist School and studying available Armenian manuscripts. He returned to Austria in the fall of 1946 and spent his last years in Vienna. In 1954 he earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna.

 

Akinian published most of his studies in Handes Amsorya over more than a half century . Many of them were also published in book form. He published more than 40 books related to Armenian medieval literature, Armenian text issues, and Armenian Studies in general. He also compiled catalogues of Armenian manuscripts conserved in collections of Cyprus, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. He discovered and published works by fathers of the Church and various early Christian authors (John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, Irenaeus, Ephrem the Syrian, Proclus, and others). Some of his studies on Armenian ancient authors, like Koriun, Movses Khorenatsi, Yeghishe, Ghazar Parpetsi, and others, became controversial due to his penchant to accommodate their texts and chronologies to his views. He passed away on October 28, 1963, in Vienna, leaving more than a dozen unpublished works in the archives of the Mekhitarist Congregation.