Death of Ghugas Injijian (July 2, 1833)

Father Ghugas Injijian, geographer and philologist, was a member of the Mekhitarist Congregation of Venice and a prolific author of many valuable works in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

He was born in Constantinople in 1758. His mother was the sister of another famous Mekhitarist monk, historian Mikayel Chamchian (1738-1823). His father sent him to study in the monastery of San Lazzaro, the headquarters of the congregation. He embraced ecclesiastic life in 1774. After a four-year sojourn in Constantinople (1786-1790), he returned to Venice, where he started publishing his works.

His first publications were in verse: Brief Survey of Ancient and New Geography (1791), also translated into Italian, and partially into French; Byzantine Summerplace (1794), partly translated into Italian and French, which depicted the geography and geology of the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits. After the publication of Azdarar (1794-1796) in India, Injijian became the publisher of the second Armenian periodical in history, called Darekrutiun (“Annals,” 1799-1802), which was continued by Yeghanag Piuzantian (“Byzantine Times,” 1803-1820). Both were yearbooks, written in Modern Armenian, which contained information about world political affairs, religious, academic, and scientific issues, as well as weather information and predictions.

In 1805 Injijian moved back to Constantinople and continued his activities. In 1806 he contributed a volume on Asia to the Geography of the Four Parts of the World (picture), produced by his teacher Stepanos Agontz, the Abbot of the Venice branch of the congregation.


With the support of the Duzians, a wealthy family of amiras, in 1812 Injijian launched the Arsharouni Society with the goal of promoting books published in Modern Armenian. The Duzians fell in disgrace with the sultan in 1819, and Injijian, fearing for his life, escaped to Odessa, where he remained for a year. The Arsharouni Society was dissolved by the Turkish government, and Yeghanag Piuzantian, which the society sponsored, ceased publication.


After the danger had passed, Injijian returned to Constantinople in 1820, and two years later he published one of his most important works in Venice, Topography of Ancient Armenia, where he presented the historical and geographical picture of Greater Armenia on the basis of a wealth of data gathered from Greek, Roman, and Syriac sources. His work included the description of the geography of the fifteen provinces and hundreds of districts, etymology of place names, ethnographic information, and topographic amendments. This would be followed by the posthumous, three-volume Geographical Archaeology of the Armenian Land (1835), which was the first voluminous work after Chamchian’s History of Armenia to talk about the geography, administrative division, laws, science, arts, ethnography and other issues related to ancient Armenia.

Still, Injijian would produce an eight-volume work called Narration of the Century (Դարապատում), where he offered an abridged history of all countries from 1750-1800, which was published from 1824-1827. The last two volumes were devoted to the history of the development of science and art, as well as the life and work of great thinkers, artists and clergymen.

In early 1828, the Catholic Armenians of Ankara were deported, and Injijian considered it dangerous to remain in Constantinople. He returned to Venice, where he was elected deputy abbot of the Congregation and remained in that position until his death on July 2, 1833.

December 4, 1738: Birth of Mikayel Chamchian

Fifth century historian Movses Khorenatsi has been commonly labeled as the Father of Armenian History. It is not unfair to call Father Mikayel Chamchian the Father of Modern Armenian Historiography.

Chamchian was born in Constantinople. He was initially homeschooled and then attended the local Catholic school. He later studied jewelry with Mikayel chelebi Diuzian, imperial jeweler and a distant relative. The young Garabed (that was Chamchian’s baptismal name) was so famous in town for his talent as a jeweler that a contemporary wrote: “Not even one was found like him.” Diuzian thought of turning him into his business partner and even arranging marriage with his daughter. However, in 1757, barely eighteen, Chamchian left his promising career and went to the island of San Lazzaro, in Venice, to enter the Mekhitarist monastery and satisfy his thirst for knowledge. His elder brother Hagopos was a member of the Mekhitarist Congregation.

After graduating from the island’s school in 1762, Chamchian joined the congregation and became a teacher at the school. His scholarly studies were interrupted in 1769, when he was consecrated vartabed and sent to serve the Armenian Catholic community of Basra (Iraq). He traveled through the Armenian communities of the Middle East (Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, etcetera) and collected manuscripts for the library of the monastery. In the 1770s he wrote a four-volume polemical work (each volume contained 800-900 pages) entitledShield of Orthodoxy. This work was destined to demonstrate “the orthodox doctrine of the Armenian Church.” His enemies robbed this work from his room, and the Vatican called him for an interrogation, since his defense of Catholicism seemed to have been accompanied with some sympathy for the “schismatic” Armenian Apostolic Church.

He returned to the monastery in 1775 and taught at the seminary for the next fourteen years. Many of the best scholars of the congregation in the next several decades were his students. He produced a remarkable grammar of Classical Armenian in 1779, which he abridged in 1801 and became the main textbook of Armenian schools in the nineteenth century (eleven reprints).

Between 1780 and 1788, Chamchian dedicated himself to write the first comprehensive history of Armenia from the origins to his days. The author was an enormously fastidious writer and made countless changes and additions in his volumes until they went into printing. The thick three volumes, which had the publishing dates 1784-1786, were actually published between 1785 and 1788. Chamchian’s History of Armenia would become a reference work for Armenian Studies scholars for over a century and, besides, it would offer a full picture of the past for a people that were trying to construct their national identity.

Afterwards, he devoted himself to religious and theological works. Due to his poor health, the congregation sent him back to Constantinople as its resident representative. He would remain in the capital of the Ottoman Empire and he would continue producing with incredible fecundity; among other works, he published a ten-volume commentary of the Psalms, more than 6,000 pages (1815-1823). He also worked on a project to create a school of Armenian higher education in any European university town. Besides a history of the Ottoman Empire that remained unpublished, he produced an abridged version of his History of Armenia, both in Armenia (1811) and in Turkish (1812). The Armenian version was translated into English and published in Calcutta in 1827.

Following the ecumenic orientation that had been the focus of the founder of the congregation, Mekhitar of Sepastia, Chamchian dedicated himself also to solve the disputes among Armenian Apostolics and Catholics in Constantinople, in the understanding that the Armenian Church was not heretic, as it was frequently portrayed at the time, and there was no need to shock the Armenian nation with new quarrels. He even tried to unify both communities. During four decades (1776-1815), he wrote a theological work of some 900 pages, Shield of Faith, Which Confirms the Orthodoxy of the Armenian Church from St. Gregory, the Illuminator of Armenia, until Today. Another Catholic priest robbed the book and took it to Rome, where it had the impact of a bomb. After four years of discussions and debates, the book was destroyed by order of the Propaganda Fide and only an abridged version was published half a century after Chamchian’s death (Calcutta, 1873).

Chamchian passed away on November 30, 1823 and was buried in the Armenian cemetery of Pera (today Beyoglu). His History of Armenia still remains as a classic, and has been the foundation of his intellectual fame.