Journal ArticleOpen Access
Kostikyan, Kristine, 2026
Religions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2026), art. 31 (MDPI); DOI 10.3390/rel17010031
From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, much of the Armenian population of the Armenian Highland and the South Caucasus lived under the Safavids, Afsharids and Qajars, whose rulers repeatedly encouraged conversion to Shi'i Islam. Beyond outright coercion, Kostikyan identifies a set of structural pressures, focusing on the Shi'i inheritance law applied to Armenians from the 1620s onward, which became a major driver of conversion. Drawing on contemporary documents, she reconstructs the consequences of that law and the legal strategies Armenians used to protect property from the claims of relatives who had converted. She also documents the efforts of Armenian Church leaders to limit its damage and to obtain royal decrees against it.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Edilyan, Hayk, 2025
Fundamental Armenology, Issue 2(22) 2025, History; DOI 10.54503/1829-4618-2025.2(22)-6 (National Academy of Sciences of RA / All Armenian Foundation Financing Armenological Studies); ISSN 1829-4618
Using Armenian and German-language sources, Edilyan reconstructs how the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society established itself in Shushi between 1820 and 1824. He traces the society's entry into the Russian Empire, the 1821 mission of Dittrich and von Zaremba to St Petersburg, their petition for a Christian colony, and Yermolov's refusal of colony status while permitting a school and printing house. The missionaries reached Shushi in October 1823, toured the surrounding regions, met Armenian clergy including Nerses Ashtaraketsi, and settled there in January 1824. He argues the missionaries planned from the outset to work among Armenians first (through schools, Armenian Bibles and a press) and that this period laid the foundation for the celebrated Shushi printing and school enterprise.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Avakian, Knarik, 2018
Fundamental Armenology, Issue 1(7) (Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences of RA, Yerevan); ISSN 1829-4618
Argues that the displacement of thousands of Syrian-Armenians by the war beginning in 2011 (to Lebanon, the Gulf, North America, Europe, and to Armenia and Artsakh) demands a fundamental reevaluation of pan-diasporan priorities. Calls for a coordinated moral, ideological, and practical reorganization of diaspora communal life led jointly by diaspora structures, the Armenian churches (Apostolic, Evangelical, Catholic), the national parties (Hunchak, ARF Dashnaktsutyun, Ramkavar), benevolent organizations, media, schools, and the homeland state. Frames repatriation and homeland-diaspora coordination as an epoch-making mission.
ThesisOpen Access
Manoogian, Sylva Natalie, 2013
PhD dissertation, Library and Information Science, University of California, Los Angeles; eScholarship
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem is a major religious, educational and cultural institution established more than fourteen centuries ago, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Library is one of its intellectual resource centres. Planning began in 1925 as a tribute to Patriarch Yeghishe I Tourian; its mission has been to collect and preserve works of Armenian religion, language, art, literature and history alongside world literature. Construction was funded by the benefaction of Calouste Gulbenkian, with continuing support from the Gulbenkian Foundation. The dissertation offers the first systematic English-language institutional history of the library, analysing its emergence, leadership and functions. Manoogian found that key primary sources existed in the Patriarchate's administrative archives but had never been consistently organized.
