Vaneni M. Petrosyan came to the Jagiellonian University in the summer semester of the academic year of 2019-2020 as a holder of a grant from the International Visegrad Fund. It was the occasion for a series of meetings with employees and associates of the Research Centre for Armenian Culture in Poland. Having acquainted herself with the aims and activities of the Centre, she gave a presentation of her interests and research plans. Possible directions for cooperation were discussed.
Vaneni Petrosyan is the daughter of Dr Tatevik E. Sargsyan, who is a scholar of the history of the Crimean Armenians. Polish armenologists have been working with her for several years on a number of editorial and source-material projects. Ms Petrosyan graduated in history from the Taurida National V. I. Vernadsky University in Simferopol (Crimea), and now works at the Institute of History of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences in Yerevan. She has written about the ethnic history of Crimea in a work entitled The cities and an ethnographic description of the people of Crimea, in the work ‘History of Crimea’ by Hovhannes Ter-Abrahamian. During her stay in Kraków she analysed a manuscript of an Armenian-Latin, Latin-Armenian dictionary entitled Thesaurus lingue Armeniorum, which was compiled by Stefan Roszka (1670–1739). In addition to being a linguist and liturgist, Roszka was the Armenian Catholic Deacon of Pokucie and Podole, a parish priest of Stanisławów, an apostolic visitator of the Armenians in Transylvania, and one of the most outstanding Armenian intellectuals of Old Poland.