«Հավատարմություն սեփական ընտրությանը» - Հարցազրույց Կորնել ՆԱԴԵՄԻ հետ

Kornél Nagy's article is devoted to the history of his formation as a researcher of Armenian studies and to the presentation of the main results of his many years of archival work on the history of the Armenian Church of the Transylvanian Armenians at the end of the 17th – beginning of the 18th century. The text is an interview in which the author consistently reveals the path of his scholarly formation, the methodology of his archival research, and the key conclusions that refute established myths of historiography.

Introduction and scholarly biography. The author describes the accidental nature of his turn toward Armenology: as a history student in Budapest, his interest arose from acquaintance with a publication on medieval Georgian and Armenian church architecture. A decisive role in his formation was played by his teachers — Professor Edmund Schütz (Eötvös Loránd University) and Father Levon Zekiyan (Venice), whom the author characterizes as outstanding pedagogues and scholars who exerted a profound intellectual influence on him.

Archival methodology. A significant part of the article is devoted to describing the source base of the research. The author lists the main archival centers involved in the work:

Hungarian archives (the National Archives, the Primatial Archive of Esztergom, the manuscript archive of Eötvös Loránd University);
Transylvanian church archives, considerably damaged in the twentieth century;
the Matenadaran (Yerevan);
the archives of Warsaw and Vienna;
the archives of Rome and the Vatican — the Vatican Secret Archive, the archive of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the Central Archive of the Jesuit Order.

Particular attention is given to the significance of the Roman and Vatican sources, which, owing to the ecclesiastical-jurisdictional subordination of the Transylvanian Armenians to the Holy See after the union of 1689, preserved unique and the most complete documentation, otherwise lost in the local archives.

Key thesis. On the basis of these materials the author defended his doctoral dissertation (2009) on the conversion of the Transylvanian Armenians to Catholicism in 1685–1715, which became the first systematic critical study of the subject, free of reliance on the legendary tradition of earlier literature.

Refutation of historiographical myths. The author demonstrates that the archival documents of the Holy See refute the notion of the voluntary and conflict-free character of the union, as well as the myth of Bishop Minas Tokatetsi's conversion to Catholicism in Lviv in 1686 — in reality he remained a consistent opponent of the union.

Factors of ecclesiastical union. The author concludes that ecclesiastical-political rather than economic causes were decisive: Rome's aspiration to restore union with the Armenian Apostolic Church through diasporic channels, as well as the patronage extended by the Transylvanian princes (including the Protestant Mihály Apafi) to Armenian trade. The union of 1689 preceded the Habsburg Counter-Reformation, which makes the process independent of Viennese policy and, in the author's view, historically inevitable.

The key conclusion of the article is that a full-fledged study of the history of the Church of the Transylvanian Armenians is possible only on the basis of a critical analysis of Roman-Vatican archival sources, which radically revise the mythologized notions established in historiography.