Vazgen was born in
Bucharest to a family belonging to the
Armenian-Romanian community. His father was a shoemaker and his mother was a schoolteacher. The young Levon Baljian did not initially pursue the Church as a profession, instead graduating from the
University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. After graduation, he became a philosopher and published a series of scholarly articles. As his interests began to shift from philosophy to theology, Baljian studied Armenian Apostolic Theology and Divinity in
Athens, Greece. He eventually gained the title of
vardapet, an ecclesiastical rank for learned preachers and teachers in the Armenian Apostolic Church roughly equivalent to receiving a doctorate in theology. In the 1940s, he became a bishop, and then the
arajnord (leader) of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Romania. His rise through the hierarchy of the Church culminated in 1955 when, on September 30, 1955, he was elected Catholicos of All Armenians, becoming one of the youngest Catholicoi in the history of the Armenian Apostolic Church. During his tenure as Catholicos, Vazgen managed to assert some independence for his church under Soviet rule. In May 1956, he unsuccessfully appealed to
Nikolai Bulganin for the unification of
Nagorno-Karabakh with Soviet Armenia. In 1965, he attended the
Conference of Addis Ababa, in order to strengthen ties to the other
Miaphysite churches. Vazgen lived to see the independence of Armenia in 1991 and the restoration of
religious freedom in the republic. From then on, he was busy renewing ancient Armenian churches and reviving institutions of the church. He saved a number of church treasures by establishing the
Alex Manoogian Museum of the Mother Church. He also intensified contacts with the
Armenian Catholic Church, with the aim of reuniting both wings of Armenian Christianity.
Vasily Grossman wrote that he sensed "nothing fanatical" about Vazgen, describing him as "intelligent, educated, and worldly," with "an enlightened worldliness" being "his most striking quality." However, he also found him to be "unremarkable." Vazgen served as Catholicos until his death in Yerevan on August 18, 1994, after a long illness from cancer. == Gallery ==