"The Vienna Mekhitarist Congregation. Pages of History"

The article, published in issue No. 6 (39) and based on materials from the 1911 jubilee collection ՅՈՒՇԱՐՁԱՆ, is devoted to little-known pages in the history of the Viennese branch of the Mekhitarist Congregation — from the crisis of the mid-eighteenth century to the order's final establishment in Vienna at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Introduction and occasion for publication. The material opens a series of articles timed to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the Viennese Congregation, marked in 2011, and with the author's personal impressions from a trip to Vienna. It is emphasized that the Viennese branch of the brotherhood is less known to a broad audience compared to the Venetian one.

The schism in the Congregation after the death of Mekhitar of Sebastia. After the founder of the order's death in 1749 and the ensuing disagreements over the rule introduced by his successor Stepanos Melkonian, part of the monks left the island of San Lazzaro and in 1773, in Trieste, proclaimed themselves a separate Mekhitarist brotherhood, being the first to officially adopt this name.

Austrian privileges and the Trieste period. A key event was the granting, by Empress Maria Theresa, of a charter of privileges in 1775, which recognized the order as a separate religious institution with the right to land, a church, a printing house, and a school. However, the purchase of the property of the dissolved Jesuit order drew the Congregation into debt, and the formation of an independent abbey was completed only in 1803 with the election of Archbishop Astvatsatur Babikian.

The Napoleonic Wars and the ruin of Trieste. The annexation of Trieste to Napoleon's Illyrian Provinces and the policies of Marshal Marmont led to the financial collapse of the brotherhood: the Mekhitarists' property was sold at auction, the monks were expelled, and the Congregation itself found itself on the verge of extinction. Babikian's attempt to seek the intercession of the Viceroy of Italy, Eugène de Beauharnais, was unsuccessful.

The move to Vienna. The exiled monks found protection under the Viennese Archbishop Count Hohenwart and the support of Emperor Franz I, whom the wandering brethren personally encountered on the road to Graz. This marked the beginning of the final establishment of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna.

The article's key conclusion is that the formation of the Viennese branch of the Mekhitarist order was the result of a long historical process — internal schism, the political upheavals of the Napoleonic era, and the monks' persistent efforts to preserve their spiritual and cultural heritage — which ultimately led to the emergence of a second major center of the Armenian Catholic scholarly tradition in Europe.