Father
Nerses Akinian was one of the most prolific and renowned names of
Armenian philology in the first half of the twentieth century.
He
was born Gabriel Akinian on September 10, 1883, in Artvin, an area in
northeastern Turkey that was part of the Russian Empire at the time. He
was sent to the Mekhitarist seminary of Vienna at the age of twelve, in
1895, and entered the Viennese branch of the congregation in 1901 when
he was anointed a celibate priest and renamed Nerses. He followed the
courses of the University of Vienna, where he studied Greek, Latin, and
Syriac, history of Greco-Roman and Byzantine culture, philosophy, and
theology. After graduation in 1907, he would have a wide number of
functions in the Mekhitarist Congregation for the next decades. He was
first a teacher at the seminary (1907) and later its deputy principal
(1908-1911) and principal (1916-1920). Along his educational tasks, from
1909 until his death Fr. Nerses Akinian was also the head librarian of
the Vienna monastery and the editor, with intermittencies, of
Handes Amsorya,
the
Armenian Studies journal of the Viennese branch of the Mekhitarists. He
became a member of the general board of the congregation in 1931 and
superior of the monastery from 1931-1937.
From
the very beginning, Akinian passionately pursued historical studies,
following the general orientation of the Viennese Mekhitarists, and
researched the whole extent of Armenian history and literature with
German-like rigorousness and method. He was an indefatigable traveler,
and would go to many countries to study Armenian culture and gather
thousands of Armenian manuscripts and printed books for the library of
Vienna. In 1912 he represented the Mekhitarists of Vienna at the
consecration of Catholicos Gevorg V Sureniants (1911-1930) and traveled
to his birthplace, Artvin, and Eastern Armenia, where he visited Ani,
Garni, Geghard, and other ancient places. During World War I, he
collected money to help the refugees of the Armenian Genocide, as well
as Armenian war prisoners in Germany and Austria.
In
1924 Fr. Akinian was assigned to pastoral mission in Soviet Armenia and
he would also visit Moscow, Nor Nakhijevan (Rostov-on-the-Don), Batumi,
Tbilisi, and Lvov. This gave him the opportunity to visit ancient
monuments and research collections of ancient Armenian manuscripts,
particularly in Armenia, where he worked at the collection of Holy
Etchmiadzin (which would be later moved to Yerevan and became the basis
for the collection of the Matenadaran). In 1929 he was arrested,
suspected of being a foreign spy, and forced to leave Armenia after a
forty-day imprisonment. He went back to Vienna and continued his studies
in different cities of Western Europe, including Berlin, Munich,
Tubingen, Paris, Rome, and Livorno. In 1939 he went to the Middle East,
but remained stranded in Beirut for the next seven years due to World
War II. He spent his time teaching at the local Mekhitarist School and
studying available Armenian manuscripts. He returned to Austria in the
fall of 1946 and spent his last years in Vienna. In 1954 he earned an
honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna.
Akinian published most of his studies in
Handes Amsorya
over more than a half century
.
Many
of them were also published in book form. He published more than 40
books related to Armenian medieval literature, Armenian text issues, and
Armenian Studies in general. He also compiled catalogues of Armenian
manuscripts conserved in collections of Cyprus, Poland, Ukraine, and
elsewhere. He discovered and published works by fathers of the Church
and various early Christian authors (John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysus
the Areopagite, Irenaeus, Ephrem the Syrian, Proclus, and others). Some
of his studies on Armenian ancient authors, like Koriun, Movses
Khorenatsi, Yeghishe, Ghazar Parpetsi, and others, became controversial
due to his penchant to accommodate their texts and chronologies to his
views. He passed away on October 28, 1963, in Vienna, leaving more than a
dozen unpublished works in the archives of the Mekhitarist
Congregation.
