Pope Francis Appoints Boghos Levon Zekiyan as Apostolic Administrator of Armenian Archieparchy of Istanbul

Pope Francis has appointed Archpriest Boghos Levon Zekiyan, emeritus lecturer at the Universita Ca’ Foscari, Venice, as apostolic administrator “sede plena” of the archieparchy of Istanbul of the Armenians, Turkey, elevating him to the dignity of Archbishop, the Vatican Information Service reports.

Boghos Levon Zekiyan was born in Istanbul in 1943, gave his solemn vows in 1964 and was ordained a priest in 1967 as a member of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Venice. He has assumed the pastoral care of the Armenian diaspora and the fraternity of Sts. Nicola and Sergio in the Patriarchate of Venice.

Archbishop Zekiyan is a Professor of Armenian Language and Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and of Armenian Church Institutions at the Pontifical Oriental Institute of Rome, as well as president of the special “Armenian Studies 2004″ Committee of AIEA (Association Internationale d’Études Armeniennes) to celebrate the 16 th centenary of the Armenian Alphabet.

He is author of fourteen monographs and more than one hundred fifty scholarly articles in six languages (Armenian, Italian, Turkish, English, French, and German). His scholarly interests regard mainly Armenian studies in their different dimensions such as literature and philology, Church history, Armenian thought and identity, as well as philosophical and theological issues, such as the problem of consciousness, the philosophical idea of humanism, the question of value and the attempt of a theology of ethnicity. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia since 1994.