Armenian Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Zamość in the 16th-18th Century

Authors : Marcin łukasz Majewski

Pages : 65-118

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Publication Date : 2024-08-27

Article Type : Research

Abstract :The Armenian church in Zamość was the westernmost Armenian temple in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Even though the church was demolished in the first half of the 19th century, its history and architecture have attracted the interest of researchers and have been the subject of several valuable studies. In the previous research, focused mainly on the architecture and artistic values of the building, written sources were scarcely used. Historians limited themselves only to the analysis of the settlement privilege for Armenians from 1585 and the 19th century copy of the summary of privileges received by the Armenian church in the 17th century. This contributed to an extremely cursory discussion of the history of the temple in the various periods of its existence and to the consolidation of many erroneous views in historiography. This article, based on numerous written sources from the 16th-18th centuries (city books, books of the Armenian court, church inventories, and metrical sources), thoroughly discusses the history of the Armenian church in Zamość and its furnishings. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances of the construction of the first makeshift temple, the organization of the parish, and the construction of a new brick church and its endowment. The course of the conflict that took place in Zamość during the union between the Armenian Church and the Latin Church is also discussed. The article also presents the gradual decline of the church related to the crisis of the Armenian commune in Zamość, which at the beginning of the 19th century ended with the final liquidation of the Armenian parish and a few decades later with the demolition of the temple.
Keywords : Zamosc, Polonya Ermenileri, cemaat, kilise birliği, rahipler