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Document Details :

Title: The prophecy of liberation
Subtitle: Margar Xōčenc' Erewanc'i and Catherine the Great's conquest of the Crimea (1783): A pragraph in the history of the Armenian Church in Russia
Author(s): VAN LINT, T.M.
Journal: Journal of Eastern Christian Studies
Volume: 52    Issue: 3-4   Date: 2000   
Pages: 269-309
DOI: 10.2143/JECS.52.3.565604

Abstract :
The purpose of this article is to present a work entitled Translation and Commentary of the Poems and Prophecies of Veysī Efendi concerned with the conquest of the Crimea by Catherine the Great in 1783. It was written six years after the event by Margar Xōčenc' Erewanc’i, an Armenian author, translator and copyist working in St. Petersburg. It is remarkable that the work turns out to be based on a qasida by the Ottoman poet Veysi, written in the early seventeenth century, entitled Nasīhat-e Islāmbol, ‘An Admonition to Constantinople, the City of Islam’. No less interesting is the fact that it was understood by its translator as a prophecy, a claim substantiated in the commentary. There Margar Xōčenc' uses a method of interpretation which he calls cabalistic and which is found both in the Arabic Kitāb al-Jafr and in the principal Armenian work on magic, the Vec’hazareak or ‘Book of the Six Thousand’.