Symeon Lehacy
Zapiski podróżne
w tłumaczeniu z języka ormiańskiego i opracowaniu
Hripsime Mamikonyan
Kraków 2023, Księgarnia Akademicka
Summary
Simeon Mardirosowicz Lehatsi (Armenian: Սիմեոն Լեհացի) was one of the most prominent representatives of the intellectual elite of Polish Armenians in the 17th century. He was a clerk, copyist, writer and traveler who visited many countries and left valuable travel notes, due to which he is often referred to as “the Armenian Marco Polo” in historiography, He wrote a lot, mostly as a copyist to earn money, but thanks to his travel notes and colophons of the manuscripts he copied, we have a lot of precious historical data about the society of his time. Simeon’s works are valuable in many respects and constitute an important source of information for historical, religious, linguistic, ethnographic, literary and architectural studies.
Simeon Lehatsi (i.e., ‘from Poland’) was born in 1584 in Zamość. He came from an Armenian family who emigrated to Zamość from Kaffa (today Feodosia) in the Crimea at the invitation of the Great Chancellor of the Crown, Jan Zamoyski. As a student of clerical scholars in Zamość and Lwów (today Lviv), Simeon read widely. At that time, he was already dreaming of travelling and exploring unknown countries, as well as making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places. Over years, he made his plans come true. We learn about the biographical facts of Simeon from his main work: Travel Notes. In his Notes, he included his autobiography and valuable information about the countries he visited. It is worth to mention that the author was particularly interested in Armenians, describing their lives in detail and giving the specific number of Armenian houses in all places he visited. Simeon’s aim was to entertain readers who were interested in distant lands. However, his primary goal was to provide information to those who, like him, wanted to travel the world. He intended to create a guide to the holy places for Armenian pilgrims. It is one of the rare works in the genre of pilgrimage literature written from the perspective of an Easterner.
He began his journey on February 25, 1608 at the age of 24, leaving Lwów in the direction of Constantinople. He traveled through Moldova and the Balkan countries. As he did not make it to the ship sailing to Egypt, he stayed longer in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, earning his living mainly by copying religious books. In 1609-1611, as the secretary of one of the learned monks, he visited the centers of Armenian communities scattered around the shores of the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea. In July 1611, he left Constantinople on a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way, he visited Split, Venice, Ancona and Loreto. In Rome, he stayed in an Armenian hospice at the Church of St. Mary of the Egyptians. He visited and described all the most important local pilgrimage sites. He was in audience with Pope Paul V, participated in the solemn celebration of the Christmas liturgy in St. Peter’s basilica, and attended a dinner at the Vatican Palace. After returning to the East, he visited Armenian pilgrimage sites in Asia Minr. In 1616, Simeon left Constantinople and reached the Holy Land through Alexandria and Cairo. After leaving Jerusalem through Damascus, Aleppo, Caesarea and Constantinople, he returned to Lwów in 1618.
After ten years of pilgrimage, Simeon settled in Poland and from then onwards he was busy mainly copying manuscripts and teaching. It is very likely that his plan was to publish his adventures right after his return, but due to the death of the Lwów printer and the collapse of the Armenian printing house in the city, his intention did not materialize. In 1620, he married an Armenian woman from Lwów, Anastasia née Kieworowicz, daughter of Jacek (Jakub) Kieworowicz and Sophie (Zofia, Hoska) née Serebkowicz, and afterwards left for Zamość. Due to the disputes related to the division of the inheritance, he
got conflicted with his family and local Armenian notables and as a result he had no chance of advancement in the church hierarchy. In 1623, during the plague in Lwów, he hosted influential Lwów Armenians. Thanks to their mediation, he obtained a teaching position at the Armenian cathedral school in Lwów. He and his wife moved there permanently in the
autumn of 1624, after selling their house in Zamość. In Lwów, he was given an apartment in a tenement house next to the Armenian cathedral. Simeon took part in the turbulent events concerning the union of the Armenian church with Rome. He was in the ranks of the opposition against the Uniate archbishop Nicolas Torosowicz, which got him persecuted and even arrested. He described the history of the struggle of the Armenian community with the unwanted archbishop in an elegiac poem The History of Nigol (i.e., Nicolas Torosowicz).
In 1635, he stayed in Bursa in Asia Minor for some time, and then returned to Lwów at the end of the year. In 1636, at the Armenian cathedral, he finished copying Vardan Areveltsi commentary on the Pentateuch. In the colophon to this manuscript, he included several historical notes about the Polish-Moscow war of 1633-34, the conflict with Sweden, the political situation in the Reich, Spain, Moldavia, Wallachia, the expulsion of the Armenians from Constantinople, as well as the Turkish-Persian hostilities in Armenia. A significant part of this colophon, however, is devoted to a long description of the persecution of Lwów Armenians by Archbishop Torosowicz in 1630-1635. Around 1636, he finally edited his travel notes, making various additions. It contained his concise autobiography, as well as the description of Sultan Osman’s march to Poland in 1621, and a chronicle of events from 1623-1635.
Simeon had no children and his marriage was not a happy one. There were constant fights between the couple and in 1637 his wife left him, filing for divorce. It is unknown whether the actual divorce was granted or not. In 1639, she died, and Simeon returned her remaining property to her mother. This is the last piece of information about him. He probably died soon afterwards.
Simeon’s work is full of the sense of Armenian patriotism and the longing for the liberation of Armenia, which seems surprising for an Armenian born so far from his historical homeland. At the same time, we see manifestations of Polish patriotism in his works, which is the result of his long residence in Poland: in Zamość and Lwów. His text shows that he had a difficult and complex character, which, in its turn, makes his perspective very interesting, at times even intriguing and surprising. Simeon knew the classical Armenian (Grabar), Common Armenian (Ashkharabar), Polish, Ruthenian, Tatar (Turkish-Kipchak dialect) and Ottoman languages well. He wrote in a “mixed” Old Armenian language, throwing in a lot of Turkish, Kipchak, Polish and Ruthenian words. Armenians in Lwów, as he mentions himself, did not speak Armenian in his time; instead they spoke Kipchak and Polish. The literary language (grabar) was unknown even to the majority of the clergy in Lwów. Hence, his work was intended for the intellectual elite, mainly monks, who wished to make pilgrimages to holy places. The work of Simeon, however, had no influence on his contemporaries, as it only remained in one manuscript until the twentieth century. But there was an exception: while teaching at the cathedral school, Simeon transplanted into Lwów the myth of the origin of Polish Armenians from the city of Ani (the capital of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia), which was previously absent in their tradition.
The manuscript of Travel Notes was first mentioned by a Dominican scholar of Armenian origin, Father Sadok Barącz, in 1869. In 1927, a French orientalist, Frédéric Macler, had described it as a “texte qui semble être un récit de voyage.” Travel Notes was first discovered for scholars by the Viennese Mekhitarist scholar, Father Nerses Akinian in the Library of the John Casimir University of Lwów. After rewriting the manuscript (loaned to him to Vienna), he published it in subsequent parts in the scholarly journal of the Vienna Mekhitarists Handes Amsorya in 1932-1935. In 1936, he published a separate book entitled Travel Notes (Ուղեգրութիւն). All translations into modern languages were made from this edition. After World War II, the manuscript was considered lost. However, it is known today that the Germans took it from Lwów in 1944 to Silesia, where a year later it was found by an expedition of Polish librarians. Right after it, Simeon’s work was sent to the National Library in Warsaw (reference number 12673 I). The digital version of Travel Notes has been made available recently by the National Library in Warsaw.
Currently, there are several translations of the Notes, incl. into Russian, English, Czech, New Armenian and other languages. The interesting fact is that Travel Notes has never been fully translated into Polish (only some fragments were translated by Zbigniew Kościow from the Russian edition). The purpose of this work has been to bring to light this incredibly interesting author, emphasize the historical value of his work (in the introductory part), and to translate the entire text into Polish. Two sources (by Simeon) have been added to the Polish edition: History of Nigol and a colophon from 1636, describing mainly the conflicts of the Lwów community with the Uniate archbishop Nicolas
Torosowicz. We hope that this book will reveal to the Polish reader the values and beauty of the accounts of journeys and pilgrimages made by an Armenian from Poland in the first half of the 17th century.
Hripsime Mamykonian