Avetik from Tokat

Avetik von Tokat ( Armenian Ավետիք Եվդոկիացի Avetik Jevdokiatsi ; * April 7, 1657 in Tokat , † July 21, 1711 in Paris ) was a patriarch of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople .

Life

Avetik was ordained a deacon at Adana in 1676, and a few years later a priest. He then worked in the Jakobs monastery near Erzincan as head of the monastery and was appointed bishop of Erzincan in 1690 , but could not officiate there unmolested. From Erzurum he ran a violent propaganda against Catholic-friendly Armenians such as Mechitar von Sebasteia as well as Latin missionaries and got into disputes with Catholicos Nahabet of Echmiadzin . In 1701 he went to Istanbul and was enthroned there on March 7, 1702 as Patriarch of the Armenians. A few months later he also claimed the dignity of an Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem. Before his anti-Catholic work, Mechitar fled to Greece and finally to Venice. In 1706 Avetik was deposed by the Ottoman authorities and expelled to Jerusalem. The French ambassador Charles de Ferriol d'Argental had him arrested on Chios and deported to France. There he was imprisoned first in Marseille, then in the Saint-Michel monastery and finally in the Paris Bastille (therefore occasionally identified as a man with the iron mask ). Under the pressure of the circumstances, Avetik took up ecclesiastical fellowship with the Roman Pope on September 22, 1710, was then allowed to live with friends in Paris and from March 20, 1711 also worked as a liturist. He died on July 21, 1711 and was buried in the choir of the Church of St-Sulpice de Paris . His gravestone has not been preserved.

literature

• A. Vardanian: Avédik . In: Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques 5 (Paris 1931) 998-1000.
• Bernadette & Philippe Rossignol: L'Arménien Cachadur, une bavure au temps de Louis XIV , in: Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe 131 (2002) 27-45.

predecessor	Office	successor
Mechitar	Patriarch of Constantinople of the Armenian Apostolic Church 1702–1703 and 1704–1706	Michael of Harput