The National Archives of Armenia is preparing to release the documents related to properties of the Armenian Church in the 17th-19th centuries, as director of the National Archives of Armenia Amatuni Virabian told Aravot.am.
“In today’s terms, estate papers are the ownership documents that the Ottoman government would provide for lands and assets belonging to the Church. Today, it’s hard for us to specify which of those papers pertained to the Hierarchical See. There are 200 papers in Ottoman Turkish, and each of them has a corresponding seal. The National Archives will publish the photo of a document in Ottoman Turkish and the Armenian version of that document. We are also thinking about publishing the Ottoman Turkish and English versions later. We initially wanted to publish the Ottoman Turkish versions of the estate papers. There was a problem with translating certain toponyms into Armenian, but fortunately, we were able to do it,” Amatuni Virabian said.
Virabian noted that even though the estate papers for 200 churches have been preserved, there were actually nearly 1,000 Armenian churches in the territory of the entire Ottoman Empire. “Either we haven’t received all the estate papers, or not all churches had a document,” our interlocutor said.
Let us add that the collection of documents will be published this year.
