For nearly 250 years the Mekhitarist Monastery of Vienna has retained its status as one of the major spiritual and cultural pillars of the Armenian Diaspora.
It was established in 1773, after a group of monks
separated from the mother Venice congregation and moved to Trieste. In
1810 the congregation moved again, this time to Vienna, when Emperor Francis I of Austria (1804-1835) provided them with refuge in an abandoned Capucine
abbey in the St. Ulrich suburb of the city.
The monastery includes a church, museum, library,
and school. The library has the largest and the oldest collection of
Armenian newspapers: some 170,000 volumes. The museum has one of the
most significant Armenian coin collections, the oldest dating from the 4th
century B.C. It also has ancient tapestries, ceramics, maps, a huge
globe of the world, old Armenian silver works, Bibles, paintings by
Naghash Hovnatan and Ivan Aivazovsky, and cartoons by Alexander Saroukhan. Its
2,600-illuminated manuscript collection is the third-largest after that
of Armenia and Jerusalem. The library also has an estimated 500,000
books. The street where the monastery is located is called
Mechitaristengasse. It’s in the 7th district of Vienna.
The congregation was founded by Mekhitar
Sebastatsi in Constantinople in 1701. After being forced out of the
country and a brief stay in the Peloponessus, the monks
established themselves in the San Lazzaro island of Venice.
The following interview with Father Vahan Hovagimian, the head of the Vienna monastery, was conducted in late fall.
