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What Cultural Genocide Looks Like for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh

S eptember 2023 saw the tumultuous and traumatic departure of over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh . This mass exodus of an indigenous people from their homeland followed nine months of starvation-by-blockade , which culminated in a murderous military assault on Sept. 19.

These men, women, and children, terrified for their lives, left behind entire worlds: their schools and shops; their fields, flocks, and vineyards; the cemeteries of their ancestors. They also left behind the churches, large and small, ancient and more modern, magnificent and modest, where they had for centuries gathered together and prayed. They also left behind bridges, fortifications, early modern mansions, and Soviet-era monuments, such as the beloved “We are Our Mountains” statues. What will happen now to those places? There is no question, actually.

We know well what happened in Julfa , in Nakhichevan : a spectacular landscape of 16th-century Armenian tombstones was erased from the face the earth by Azerbaijan over a period of years. We know what happened to the Church of the Mother of God in Jebrayil and the Armenian cemetery in the village of Mets Tagher (or Böyük Taglar) —both were completely scrubbed from the landscape using earthmoving equipment like bulldozers. And we know what happened to the Cathedral of Ghazanchetsots in Shushi, which was, in turn, shelled, vandalized with graffiti, “restored” without its Armenian cupola, and now rebranded as a “Christian” temple. The brazenness of these actions, as journalist Joshua Kucera wrote in May 2021 , “suggests a growing confidence that [Baku] can remake their newly retaken territories in whatever image they want.”

The annihilation of millennia of Armenian life in Arstakh was enabled by the inaction and seeming indifference of those who might have prevented it. The United States and the European Union speak loftily of universal human rights, but did nothing for nine months while the people of Arstakh were denied food, medicine, fuel, and other vital supplies. They did nothing to enforce the order of the International Court of Justice demanding back in February 2023 that Azerbaijan end its blockade. That inaction clearly emboldened Azerbaijan to attack—just as it will encourage others to do the same elsewhere.

More From TIME

Read More: The U.S. Keeps Failing Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh

It’s important to understand the stakes of this kind of cultural erasure: These monuments and stones testify to the generations of Armenians who worshipped in and cared about them. To destroy them, is to erase not only a culture, but a people. As art historian Barry Flood observed in 2016 about the destruction of cultural heritage by the so-called Islamic state since 2014, “the physical destruction of communal connective tissues—the archives, artifacts, and monuments in which complex micro-histories were instantiated—means that there are now things about these pasts that cannot and never will be known.” The Julfa cemetery is a tragic example of such loss.

If history is any indication, ethnic cleansing tends to be followed by all kinds of cultural destruction, from vandalism to complete effacement from the landscape. The latter tactic will be used with smaller, lesser-known churches. It will be a sinister way to remove less famous Armenian monuments, which will serve the narrative that there were no Armenians there in the early modern period to begin with.

Falsification will also occur, in which Armenian monuments are provided with newly created histories and contexts. The 13 th - century monasteries of Dadivank (in the Kalbajar district) and Gandzasar (in the Martakert province), both magnificent and characteristic examples of medieval Armenian architecture, have already been rebranded as “ancient Caucasian Albanian temples.” Expect these and other sites to become venues for conferences and workshops to highlight “ancient Caucasian Albanian culture.” As for the countless Armenian inscriptions on these buildings, khachkars, and tombstones: these, as President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev announced in February 2021, are Armenian forgeries , and will be “restored” to their “original appearance” (presumably through gouging, sandblasting, or removing of Armenian inscribed stones, as was done in the 1980s).

Finally, there will be a celebration of the “multiculturalism” of Azerbaijan. “Come to Karabakh, home of ancient Christians,” people will say. “Please ignore the gouged-out letters on that stone wall, for it is not an Armenian inscription. There were never Armenians here!" Except for soldiers and invaders, like the ones depicted in a reprehensible museum in Baku, featuring waxen figures of dead Armenian soldiers —a sight so dehumanizing that an international human rights organizations, including Azerbaijani activists, cried out for its closure.

This is how cultural genocide plays out. A little more than 100 years ago was the Armenian Genocide waged by the Ottoman Empire, followed by largescale looting, vandalization, and destruction of Armenian sites across what is now modern-day Turkey. The prospect of a second cultural genocide is now on the table. Except now, Armenians will watch the spectacle unfold online, enduring the trauma site by site and monument by monument.

In 2020, Armenian activists called for international monitoring of vulnerable sites in Nagorno-Karabakh by UNESCO and other heritage organizations. Nothing happened. Now is the time for the world to protect what Armenian culture remains in Nagorno-Karabakh. If we don’t, what culture will be next to go?

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The original version of this story misstated the president of Azerbaijan's name. It is Ilham Aliyev, not Ilhan Aliyev.

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Armenian Language Program

Armenian (հայերեն) is the official language in the Republic of Armenia as well as the Republic of Artsakh. The Armenian language belongs to the Indo-European language family constituting its own Armenian branch. Historically having been used only within the Armenian Highlands, Armenian is currently spoken worldwide throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian has its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet.

Literature written in Armenian appeared in the 5th century right after the Armenian alphabet was created by Saint Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD. The written language of the time, called Classical Armenian or Grabar (գրաբար), remained the Armenian literary language, with various changes, until the beginning of the 19th c. It contained numerous borrowings from Middle Iranian languages (primarily Parthian), Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Mongol, and Persian. The early grammatical forms had much in common with classical Greek and Latin. Many ancient manuscripts originally written in Ancient Greek, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac and Latin survive only in Classical Armenian translation.

Spoken Armenian, on the other hand, developed independently of the written language. Many dialects appeared when Armenian communities became separated by geography or politics. In the 19th c., the traditional Armenian homeland was divided into Eastern Armenia (conquered by the Russian Empire) and Western Armenia (remaining under Ottoman control). The intellectual and cultural life of the Armenian communities were consolidated in two separate centers, one in Tbilisi and the other in Istanbul. The new literary forms and styles reached Armenians living in both regions, and created a need to use the vernacular (աշխարհաբար) as the literary language instead of the now outdated Grabar. Two major standards emerged: Eastern and Western Armenian. The proliferation of newspapers and emergence of literary works in both dialects and the development of a network of schools increased the rate of literacy.

By the turn of the 20th c. both standards of the modern Armenian language prevailed over Grabar. After World War I, the newly emerged Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic used Eastern Armenian as its official language whereas the diaspora created after the Armenian Genocide preserved the Western Armenian branch.

Modern Armenian has undergone many transformations in phonology and mostly in grammar, creating a certain degree of difficulty for learners to move from Eastern standard to Western or from the modern language to the Classical. The vocabulary, on the other hand, has survived to present day and is at some extent shared by the two standard branches and the Classical Armenian. The alphabet (with two additional letters) is still used today.

The Armenian Language Program

Started in September of 2001, the Armenian Language Program intended to compliment the annual one-quarter course by a visiting Dumanian Professor in Armenian Studies, and to ensure the continuity of Armenian instruction, with an objective of further promoting and enriching Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago. The program aims at serving students, both graduate and undergraduate, as the source for Armenian language instruction as well as History and Culture. In addition, the program prepares students for research in Armenian and related Area Studies.

The undergraduates mostly take Armenian to better expose themselves to Armenian culture or visit Armenia. Those are mostly heritage learners. Some also become NELC minors. Others, mostly graduate students, take Armenian as their second or third language and focus on translations for their research (in Armenian, Byzantine, or Islamic Studies, Indo-European or General Linguistics, Archaeology, History of Religions, Post-Soviet Studies, Human Rights Studies, etc.). Knowledge of Armenian language (both Modern and Classical) is crucial for their research, they would need Classical Armenian to use the original Armenian historical sources (i.e., related to Zoroastrian religion, translations of and commentaries on Greek philosophical texts, the history of the Byzantine and Armenian Church, historical chronicles, literary works, etc. from 5th to 19th c.), as well as Modern Armenian to be able to read modern Armenian literary works, mass media or scholarly publications in their field.

Since Armenian is considered a less commonly taught language there are on average 2-4 students enrolled in each level which creates a more advantageous circumstance for the Armenian language learners facilitating their more accelerated language acquisition within 1-2 years.

Furthermore, as part of the CLC collaborative language pedagogy, starting in Autumn of 2014 Elementary and Intermediate Armenian are offered as “shared curricula” courses to include students in remote locations who are enrolled at institutions which participate in course-share program.

As for other opportunities, over the years the students enrolled in the Armenian language courses were very successful in applying and obtaining FLAS grants, Critical Language Scholarships (CLS), Fulbright and Boren fellowships, and other summer and year-long language programs to study Armenian in Armenia.

Armenian Language Program Faculty

Hripsime Haroutunian

Courses offered.

The NELC Department currently offers three levels of Modern Armenian instruction and at least one quarter of Classical Armenian per year. The Armenian language courses offered annually or as needed are as follows:

• ARME 10101-02-03 Elementary Modern Armenian This three-quarter sequence focuses on the acquisition of basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in modern formal and spoken Armenian. The course utilizes the most advanced computer technology and audio-visual aids enabling students to master the alphabet, a core vocabulary, and some basic grammatical structures in order to communicate their basic survivor’s needs in Armenian, understand simple texts and to achieve a minimal level of proficiency in modern formal and spoken Armenian.
• ARME 20101-02-03 Intermediate Modern Armenian This sequence covers a wider-range vocabulary and more complex grammatical structures in modern formal and colloquial Armenian. Each class includes a healthy balance of real-life like conversations (shopping, ordering food, asking directions, getting around in the city, banking, etc.), readings (dialogues, jokes, stories, news, etc.) and writings (e-mailing, filling forms, essays, etc.). The students can also communicate in Armenian well beyond basic needs about the daily life and obtain some level of fluency in their professional interests.
• ARME 30101 Independent Study : Advanced Armenian The course focuses on the improvement of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in modern formal and spoken Armenian. The course covers a rich vocabulary in modern formal and colloquial Armenian, and the most complex grammatical structures and frames. The main objective is literary fluency. Reading assignments include a variety of texts (literary works, newspaper articles, etc.). Students practice the vocabulary (newly acquired in their readings) through discussions and critical analysis of texts in Armenian. There are also enhanced writing assignments: essays on given topics, writing blogs or wiki pages, etc. The goal is to achieve an advanced level of proficiency in modern formal and spoken Armenian. The course may be tailored to individual students' reading and research needs.
• ARME 10501 Introduction to Classical Armenian The one-quarter course focuses on the basic grammatical structure and vocabulary of the Classical Armenian language, Grabar (one of the oldest IndoEuropean languages). It enables students to achieve basic reading skills in the Classical Armenian language. Reading assignments include a selection of original Armenian literature, mostly works by 5th c. historians, as well as passages from the Bible, while a considerable amount of historical and cultural issues about Armenia are discussed and illustrated through the text interpretations. It complements the Modern Armenian language instruction and provides more profound and solid knowledge of Armenian language and its ancient dialects, targeted especially to graduate students. Recommended for students with interests in Armenian Studies, Classics, Medieval Studies, Divinity, Indo-European or General Linguistics. It is usually offered as dictated by student needs. Students may take the Classical Armenian course before or even without taking any Modern Armenian.

Advanced students can also register for Reading and Research classes in Armenian to improve their ability to read targeted academic & scholarly materials for their research. Those courses are offered on-demand.

A considerable amount of historical-political and social-cultural issues about Armenia are skillfully built into the language courses. In addition, related courses on various aspects of Armenian art, culture and literature are occasionally offered including the NEHC 20692 Armenian History through Art and Culture (offered annually).

Class Times

In scheduling first-year classes, every effort is made to make sure that interested students are not excluded because of scheduling conflicts. Second- and third-year classes are generally by arrangement, based on the mutual convenience of instructor and students.

Placement and Proficiency Exams

Prospective Armenian students (other than beginners) have to take a placement test before registering for second-year and above classes. A placement test for incoming first-year undergraduates and graduate students is usually administered during orientation week.

Please contact Hripsime Haroutunian ([email protected]) with any questions concerning the time and date of the placement exam.

Additionally, a language competency exam is offered at the end of Spring quarter for those taking this course as college language requirement.

Extracurricular Activities

Aside from the formal academic curriculum, there are weekly Armenian Circle meetings (to listen to lectures on Armenian culture and history, to watch Armenian movies and documentaries on Armenia, practice Armenian language while indulging in tasty Armenian cuisine, etc.), as well as “special hands-on classes” in Armenian cuisine, field trips to community events, annual Armenian Cultural Nights (evenings of Armenian poetry recital, music performance and staging of Armenian plays by the students). Students also have opportunities to make their own presentations on Armenian art, culture, current issues or related topics.

What if I have a potential schedule conflict?

Please email the instructor ([email protected]) explaining your problem.

I’d like to audit/sit-in on an Armenian course. Is that possible?

Please consider registering for the class. In rare cases, if you are absolutely unable to enroll in the Autumn quarter but have all intentions to register for the Winter and Spring quarters you may be permitted to audit the Autumn quarter class at the Instructor’s discretion. Note that you must complete all the required assignments for the course (including regular attendance).

I already have some background in spoken or written Armenian. What class should I take?

You will need to take the placement exam, so that the instructor can learn about your levels of spoken and written Armenian.

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Armenia , landlocked country of Transcaucasia , lying just south of the great mountain range of the Caucasus and fronting the northwestern extremity of Asia . To the north and east Armenia is bounded by Georgia and Azerbaijan , while its neighbours to the southeast and west are, respectively, Iran and Turkey . Naxçıvan , an exclave of Azerbaijan, borders Armenia to the southwest. The capital is Yerevan (Erevan).

Modern Armenia comprises only a small portion of ancient Armenia, one of the world’s oldest centres of civilization. At its height, Armenia extended from the south-central Black Sea coast to the Caspian Sea and from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Urmia in present-day Iran. Ancient Armenia was subjected to constant foreign incursions, finally losing its autonomy in the 14th century ce . The centuries-long rule of Ottoman and Persian conquerors imperiled the very existence of the Armenian people. Eastern Armenia was annexed by Russia during the 19th century, while western Armenia remained under Ottoman rule, and in 1894–96 and 1915 the Ottoman government perpetrated systematic massacres and forced deportations of Armenians.

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The portion of Armenia lying within the former Russian Empire declared independence on May 28, 1918, but in 1920 it was invaded by forces from Turkey and Soviet Russia. The Soviet Republic of Armenia was established on November 29, 1920; in 1922 Armenia became part of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic; and in 1936 this republic was dissolved and Armenia became a constituent (union) republic of the Soviet Union . Armenia declared sovereignty on August 23, 1990, and independence on September 23, 1991.

The status of Nagorno-Karabakh (also called Artsakh), an enclave of 1,700 square miles (4,400 square km) in southwestern Azerbaijan populated primarily by ethnic Armenians, was from 1988 the source of bitter conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. By the mid-1990s Karabakh Armenian forces had occupied much of southwestern Azerbaijan, but, after a devastating war in 2020, they were compelled to withdraw from most of that area.

Armenia is a mountainous country characterized by a great variety of scenery and geologic instability. The average elevation is 5,900 feet (1,800 metres) above sea level . There are no lowlands: half the territory lies at elevations of 3,300 to 6,600 feet; only about one-tenth lies below the 3,300-foot mark.

The northwestern part of the Armenian Highland—containing Mount Aragats (Alaghez), the highest peak (13,418 feet, or 4,090 metres) in the country—is a combination of lofty mountain ranges, deep river valleys, and lava plateaus dotted with extinct volcanoes. To the north and east, the Somkhet, Bazum, Pambak, Gugark, Areguni, Shakhdag, and Vardenis ranges of the Lesser Caucasus lie across the northern sector of Armenia. Elevated volcanic plateaus (Lory, Shirak, and others), cut by deep river valleys, lie amid these ranges.

In the eastern part of Armenia, the Sevan Basin, containing Lake Sevan (525 square miles) and hemmed in by ranges soaring as high as 11,800 feet, lies at an elevation of about 6,200 feet. In the southwest, a large depression—the Ararat Plain —lies at the foot of Mount Aragats and the Geghama Range; the Aras River cuts this important plain into halves, the northern half lying in Armenia and the southern in Turkey and Iran.

Armenia is subject to damaging earthquakes . On December 7, 1988, an earthquake destroyed the northwestern town of Spitak and caused severe damage to Leninakan (now Gyumri ), Armenia’s second most populous city. About 25,000 people were killed.

Of the total precipitation, some two-thirds is evaporated, and one-third percolates into the rocks, notably the volcanic rocks, which are porous and fissured . The many rivers in Armenia are short and turbulent with numerous rapids and waterfalls. The water level is highest when the snow melts in the spring and during the autumn rains. As a result of considerable difference in elevation along their length, some rivers have great hydroelectric potential.

Most of the rivers fall into the drainage area of the Aras (itself a tributary of the Kura River of the Caspian Basin), which, for 300 miles (480 kilometres), forms a natural boundary between Armenia and Turkey and Iran.

The Aras’ main left-bank tributaries, the Akhuryan (130 miles), the Hrazdan (90 miles), the Arpa (80 miles), and the Vorotan (Bargyushad; 111 miles), serve to irrigate most of Armenia. The tributaries of the Kura —the Debed (109 miles), the Aghstev (80 miles), and others—pass through Armenia’s northeastern regions. Lake Sevan , with a capacity in excess of 9 cubic miles (39 cubic kilometres) of water, is fed by dozens of rivers, but only the Hrazdan leaves its confines.

Armenia is rich in springs and wells, some of which possess medicinal properties.

More than 15 soil types occur in Armenia, including light brown alluvial soils found in the Aras River plain and the Ararat Plain, poor in humus but still intensively cultivated; rich brown soils, found at higher elevations in the hill country; and chernozem (black earth) soils, which cover much of the higher steppe region. Much of Armenia’s soil—formed partly by residues of volcanic lava—is rich in nitrogen, potash, and phosphates. The labour required to clear the surface stones and debris from the soil, however, has made farming in Armenia difficult.

Because of Armenia’s position in the deep interior of the northern part of the subtropical zone, enclosed by lofty ranges, its climate is dry and continental. Regional climatic variation is nevertheless considerable. Intense sunshine occurs on many days of the year. Summer, except in high-elevation areas, is long and hot, the average June and August temperature in the plain being 77° F (25° C); sometimes it rises to uncomfortable levels. Winter is generally not cold; the average January temperature in the plain and foothills is about 23° F (−5° C), whereas in the mountains it drops to 10° F (−12° C). Invasions of Arctic air sometimes cause the temperature to drop sharply: the record low is −51° F (−46° C). Winter is particularly inclement on the elevated, windswept plateaus. Autumn—long, mild, and sunny—is the most pleasant season.

The ranges of the Lesser Caucasus prevent humid air masses from reaching the inner regions of Armenia. On the mountain slopes, at elevations from 4,600 to 6,600 feet, yearly rainfall approaches 32 inches (800 millimetres), while the sheltered inland hollows and plains receive only 8 to 16 inches of rainfall a year.

The climate changes with elevation, ranging from the dry subtropical and dry continental types found in the plain and in the foothills up to a height of 3,000 to 4,600 feet, to the cold type above the 6,600-foot mark.

The broken relief of Armenia, together with the fact that its highland lies at the junction of various biogeographic regions, has produced a great variety of landscapes. Though a small country, Armenia boasts more plant species (in excess of 3,000) than the vast Russian Plain . There are five altitudinal vegetation zones: semidesert, steppe, forest, alpine meadow, and high-elevation tundra.

The semidesert landscape, ascending to an elevation of 4,300 to 4,600 feet, consists of a slightly rolling plain covered with scanty vegetation, mostly sagebrush. The vegetation includes drought-resisting plants such as juniper, sloe, dog rose, and honeysuckle. The boar, wildcat, jackal, adder, gurza (a venomous snake), scorpion, and, more rarely, the leopard inhabit this region.

Steppes predominate in Armenia. They start at elevations of 4,300 to 4,600 feet, and in the northeast they ascend to 6,200 to 6,600 feet. In the central region they reach 6,600 to 7,200 feet and in the south are found as high as 7,900 to 8,200 feet. In the lower elevations the steppes are covered with drought-resistant grasses, while the mountain slopes are overgrown with thorny bushes and juniper.

The forest zone lies in the southeast of Armenia, at elevations of 6,200 to 6,600 feet, where the humidity is considerable, and also in the northeast, at elevations of 7,200 to 7,900 feet. Occupying nearly one-tenth of Armenia, the northeastern forests are largely beech. Oak forests predominate in the southeastern regions, where the climate is drier, and in the lower part of the forest zone hackberry, pistachio, honeysuckle, and dogwood grow. The animal kingdom is represented by the Syrian bear, wildcat, lynx, and squirrel. Birds—woodcock, robin, warbler, titmouse, and woodpecker—are numerous.

The alpine zone lies above 6,600 feet, with stunted grass providing good summer pastures. The fauna is rich; the abundant birdlife includes the mountain turkey, horned lark, and bearded vulture , while the mountains also harbour the bezoar goat and the mountain sheep , or mouflon.

Finally, the alpine tundra, with its scant cushion plants, covers only limited mountain areas and solitary peaks.

Armenians constitute nearly all of the country’s population; they speak Armenian , a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The remainder of the population includes Kurds, Russians, and small numbers of Ukrainians, Assyrians, and other groups.

Armenia was converted to Christianity about 300 ce , becoming the first kingdom to adopt the religion after the Arsacid king Tiridates III was converted by St. Gregory the Illuminator . The Armenians have therefore maintained an ancient and rich liturgical and Christian literary tradition. Believing Armenians today belong mainly to the Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Church or the Armenian Catholic Church , in communion with Rome.

Documenting the Armenian Genocide

Essays in Honor of Taner Akçam

• Open Access
• © 2024

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• Thomas Kühne 0 ,
• Mary Jane Rein 1 ,
• Marc A. Mamigonian 2

Clark University, Worcester, USA

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National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Belmont, USA

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Honors the life and the work of Taner Akçam, the first Turkish intellectual to acknowledge the Armenian genocide
• Includes twelve contributions from Armenian genocide scholars around the globe
• Sheds new light on the historiography of the genocide, its perpetrators, victims, and bystanders

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide (PSHG)

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About this book

This open access book brings together contributions from an internationally diverse group of scholars to celebrate Taner Akçam’s role as the first Turkish intellectual to publicly recognize the Armenian Genocide. As a researcher, lecturer, and mentor to a new generation of scholars, Akçam has led the effort to utilize previously unknown, ignored, or under-studied sources, whether in Turkish, Armenian, German, or other languages, thus immeasurably expanding and deepening the scholarly project of documenting and analyzing the Armenian Genocide.

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• Ottoman Empire
• genocide studies
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Table of contents (14 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Thomas Kühne, Marc A. Mamigonian, Mary Jane Rein

Taner Akçam, Istanbul, My Bridge

• Peter Balakian

The Victims of “Safety”: The Destiny of Armenian Women and Girls Who Were Not Deported from Trabzon

• Anna Aleksanyan

Cohabitating in Captivity: Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (Zarevand) at the Women’s Section of Istanbul’s Central Prison (1915–1918)

• Lerna Ekmekçioğlu

Mediatized Witnessing, Spectacles of Pain, and Reenacting Suffering: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarian Cinema

• Nazan Maksudyan

“Special Kind of Refugees”: Assisting Armenians in Erzincan, Bayburt, and Erzurum

• Asya Darbinyan

On the Verge of Death and Survival: Krikor Bogharian’s Diary

Categories and their interstices: the armenian genocide beyond resistance and accommodation.

• Khatchig Mouradian

The Property Law and the Spoliation of Ottoman Armenians

• Raymond H. Kévorkian

Refocusing on—Crimes Against—Humanity

• Hans-Lukas Kieser

Taner Akçam as Scholar-Activist and Armenian-Turkish Relations

• Henry C. Theriault

The Margins of Academia or Challenging the Official Ideology

• Hamit Bozarslan

The Genocide of the Christians, Turkey 1894–1924

• Benny Morris, Dror Ze’evi

Since the Centennial: New Departures in the Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, 2015–2021

• Ronald Grigor Suny

Back Matter

“This book of essays by leading scholars on the Armenian Genocide is a fitting tribute to Taner Akçam and a major contribution to the field he has helped to define. Embodying the virtues of his pathbreaking work, they present both micro- and macro-perspectives on one of the twentieth-century’s defining events.”

— A. Dirk Moses , City College of New York, USA

 “This book is a major contribution to the field of Armenian Genocide Studies. The interdisciplinary aspect of the book - that ranges from gender violence, humanitarianism, the role of cinema, and memoirs, to the economic dimension of the genocide, activism in genocide studies, and historiographic analysis - provides new perspectives on the Armenian Genocide and its repercussions.  This groundbreaking volume brings together leading senior and junior scholars in the field whose research will have a tremendous impact on future generations of scholars. The book is a must read to all those interested in understanding the different facets of the Armenian Genocide.”

— Bedross Der Matossian , University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Editors and Affiliations

Thomas Kühne, Mary Jane Rein

Marc A. Mamigonian

About the editors

Thomas Kühne is Strassler Colin Flug Professor of Holocaust History and Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, USA.

Mary Jane Rein is Executive Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, USA.

Marc A. Mamigonian is Director of Academic Affairs at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, USA.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Documenting the Armenian Genocide

Book Subtitle : Essays in Honor of Taner Akçam

Editors : Thomas Kühne, Mary Jane Rein, Marc A. Mamigonian

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36753-3

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : History , History (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-36752-6 Published: 29 December 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-36755-7 Published: 29 December 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-36753-3 Published: 28 December 2023

Series ISSN : 2731-569X

Series E-ISSN : 2731-5703

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 308

Number of Illustrations : 10 b/w illustrations

Topics : History of the Middle East , Modern History , Historiography and Method

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Armenia from ethnogenesis to the dark ages: from a world history perspective: home, the class syllabus.

This guide will introduce select sources on Ancient and pre-modern Armenian history to its users.

Primary Sources: Ancient Period

• Strabo's Geographica-see: Book XI, Chapter 14
• Cassius Dio Roman History : Epitome of Book LXXI (On Armenia)
• Récit des malheurs de la nation arménienne. Aristakēs, Lastiverttsʻi, Vardapet, active 11th century.; Canard, Marius, editor.; Pērpērean, Hayk, 1887-1978.

Subject Guide

Persian Sources on Armenian History

• طبقات ناصرى / تاءلىف منهاج سراج جوزجانى ؛ تصحىح، مقابله و تحشىۀ عبد الحي حبىبى./ Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī by Minhāj Sirāj Jūzjānī, 1193-1266. ISBN: 9789643314231
• زیج ایلخانی

Armenian E-Books from Haybooks

• On the Origins of the Armenian People

Հայ ժողովրդի ծագման ու հնագույն պատմության հարցեր / Ռաֆաել Իշխանյան, Երևան 1988

• On medieval Armenia

Արաբական արշավանքները Հայաստանում , in Մանր Հետազոտություններ / Հակոբ Մանանդյան (Hakob H. Manandyan – b. 1873), Երեվան 1932 (p. 22-64). See the table of contents (on Gallica)

Մամիկոնյանների ծագման ավանդությունը և պատմական իրականույթւոնը , Ա. Քեշիշյան, in Հայոց պատմության հարցեր, Հ. 1, 1997 (on Armenian Academic Research)

Ասորական աղբյուրներ , Հ. Ա, series “Օտար աղբյուրները Հայաստանի և հայերի մասին” Հ. 8, Երևան, 1976 (on Armenian Academic Research)

On glass and metal craftmanship in medieval Armenia :  Միջնադարյան Հայաստանի գեղարվեստական մետաղը IX-XIII դդ. ։ Միջնադարյան Հայաստանի հաղճապակին IX-XIV դդ ., Նյուրա Հակոբյան, Աղավնի Ժամկոչյան, Երևան : ՀՍՍՀ ԳԱ հրատ., 1981

• On Armenian Cilicia

Հայկական Կիլիկիա / Վահան Մ. Քիւրքճեան, Նիւ Եորք 1919 (139 p.), with a map . See the table of contents (on Gallica)

Other guides related to Armenian History

• Hist 177B: Armenia: From Pre-modern Empires to the Present
• Armenian Studies

Article Databases

Armenian Manuscripts

• Armenian Manuscripts at the French National Library
• Artstor: Armenian Manuscripts
• Manuscripts in the Libraries of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates in Jerusalem

Armenian Sources

• Patmut'yun Nahangin Sisakan = History of the State of Sisakan

Primary Sources: Byzantine/ Sassanian Period

• "Vahram's Chronicle of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia, during the time of the Crusades"

Select Arabic Sources

• لكامل في التاريخ - ابن الأثير الإمام العلامة أبي الحسن علي بن أبي الكرم محمد بن محمد بن عبد الكريم بن عبد الواحد الشيباني المعروف بابن الأثير الجزري الملقب بعز الدين 630 هـ
• كتاب التحفة الملوكية فى الدولة التركية : تاريخ دولة المماليك البحرية فى الفترة من 711-648 هجرية / تأليف بيبرس المنصورى ؛ نشره وقدم له ووضع فهارسه عبد الحميد صالح حمدان.; Kitāb al-tuḥfah al-mulūkīyah fī al-dawlah al-Turkīyah : tārīkh dawlat al-Mama On Mamluk History (Baybars al- Mansuri's (d. 1324-25) Kitab al-Tuhfa al-mulukiyya jil-dawla al-Turkiyya)

Sources on Armenian Art and Monuments

Books from catalog.

Important Islamicate and Islamic Manuscripts Databases

• Last Updated: Apr 1, 2024 4:26 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/armenia

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Harvard Squared | Explorations

“Armenian creativity, culture, and survival”

A museum reflects an ancient civilization and the modern global diaspora..

January-February 2022

The impressive two-tiered modern interior of the Armenian Museum of America Photograph courtesy of the Armenian Museum of America

In 1207 an elderly scribe in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia completed the Garabed Gospel. Although blinded by the 11-year undertaking, he completed the 250 inked, goat-skin pages, with decorative marginalia, at a monastery near what is now southern Turkey and gave it to a priest. For the next 700 years, the manuscript was passed down through that family lineage of priests, serving as a sacred object, according to the Armenian Museum of America, in Watertown, Massachusetts, where the volume is now on display. “If one became sick, one would ask the family for ‘the blessing of the book’ to cure their disease. A supplicant would rub a piece of bread or a rag on the Gospel Book,” a museum plaque explains. “If the bread was eaten by the afflicted, or the rag was worn against their body, it was thought to cure the disease.”

It is the museum’s oldest book, says executive director Jason Sohigian, A.L.M. ’11, and survived the looting and destruction of other texts, art, cultural objects, and whole villages by the invading Turks over the years. The museum’s collection of more than 25,000 objects elucidates some 3,000 years of Armenian history and culture, from the early days of Christianity (Armenians were the first to accept Christianity as a state religion) to the contemporary global diaspora. That includes 5,000 ancient and medieval coins and pre-Christian pottery and metalwork, along with liturgical manuscripts and objects, rugs, lacework, embroidery, and artifacts from the World War I-era genocide. More contemporary are the museum’s series of famous portraits by Yousuf Karsh, underground works from the Soviet era (donated by Norton Townshend Dodge, Ph.D. ’60) and, surprisingly, a handful of oil paintings by the American pathologist, and pioneering right-to-die with dignity proponent, Jack Kevorkian, whose mother escaped the genocide.

“Many of the objects in our collection and on display are survivors of history,” says Sohigian. “Armenians have inhabited those lands for thousands of years, and our cultural heritage has been under threat especially in recent centuries. Our museum is unique in that it preserves and displays many of these artifacts that tell the story of Armenian resilience, creativity, culture, and survival over millennia on the territory known as the Armenian Highland.”

That mission, of bridging gaps between ancient and modern identities, “is not easy or unproblematic, as we know,” says Tufts professor of art and architecture, Christina Maranci, Dadian and Oztemel chair in Armenian art and architectural history, and an academic adviser to the museum. “It is best, in my view, to let the objects speak for themselves,” she says. “The Garabed Gospels…does this well: its colophon records its initial production by the scribe Garabed, successive owners and users over generations, indeed centuries, as well as its vandalization during the Genocide.”

The museum’s “extraordinary collection,” she adds, is both under-researched and under-studied, but is instrumental in chronicling and bearing witness to rich aspects of world history. She highlights the late fifteenth-century hymnal illuminated by Karapet of Berkri, a famous medieval artist and scribe from the Vaspurakan region (the cradle of Armenian civilization, now within the borders of Turkey and Iran), and an eighteenth-century altar curtain made from wooden block prints for a church of Saint George in Mardin as “testifying to circulation of objects across the Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire.” A priest’s cope ( shurchar ), made in Surabaya for a wealthy Armenian trading family, as one of her students discovered during a research seminar, “combines traditional Indonesian batik fabric with an Armenian inscription, speaking eloquently to the dynamics of cultural exchange in the early modern world, and the role of Armenians within it.”

 Scholarly value aside, the museum is a powerful experience for visitors, no matter how familiar they are with Armenian culture and history. It’s a testament not only to the layered ancient world, but to a peoples’ resilient drive to survive and flourish despite historic genocide and other forms of destruction. The local effort to find and preserve elements of this heritage began in 1971 when a small group of Armenian Americans first gathered contributed items in the basement of the First Armenian Church in Belmont, Massachusetts.

The state has long been home to the nation’s second-largest Armenian American population, with about 30,000 residents of Armenian heritage living primarily in Boston, Worcester, and Watertown. Los Angeles is home to 205,000 residents of Armenian descent (Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known as Cher, and the Kardashian clan among them), but has no museum. The Watertown institution’s founders eventually bought a former bank building, a brutalist structure designed by Ben Thompson, of The Architects’ Collaborative, in Cambridge, stored valuable items in existing vaults, and began opening exhibits to the public in 1991, the same year Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union.

 Preservation of materials connected to Armenia is a continuing effort, Sohigian notes. In September 2020, the museum took a stand against the “resumption of war” and the threats against Armenian culture in the Artsakh region, expressing “solidarity with colleagues in the scholarly and cultural heritage community around the world, who are calling attention to the threat of cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing in Artsakh.” The 44-day war in that region, also known by its Russian name Nagorno Karabakh, began on September 27, 2020, and was led by the Republic of Azerbaijan with Turkey’s military support and Syrian jihadist mercenaries. The war was halted by a trilateral agreement, and Russian peacekeeping troops currently occupy the region, although remaining Armenians face a precarious future.

Joining the effort to draw attention and aid to the political crisis, the museum spotlights, near the entrance, an artful pair of #PeaceForArmenians cleats. Donated for the NFL’s “My Cleats, My Cause” program by the New England Patriots’ director of football/head coach administration Berj Najarian, an Armenian American, the cleats are painted with Armenian iconic imagery by Massachusetts artist Joe Ventura, and were auctioned off to support the Armenia Fund. They were bought and donated by museum president Michele Kolligian and vice president Bob Khederian. Nearly all of the items have been gifts, notably from Paul and Vicki Bedoukian.

Among the most stirring objects are in the exhibit about the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916. During this period, Armenians living in the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire were subjected to arrest and deportation, and otherwise systematically annihilated through massacres, starvation, exposure, and illness. Many were forced to walk to desert regions where they died along the way. The events were finally publicly recognized as genocide by President Joe Biden last year. “The global diaspora was the result of the Armenian Genocide, and the survivors of that generation went on to thrive and prosper,” Sohigian says. “This is a source of pride for us, and we are honored to tell this story to the world.”

Walls depict maps and photographs interspersed with an extensive chronology of both the historic context for the genocide, and the events themselves. But artifacts convey the human toll. “This is an outfit worn by a child victim of the 1915 genocide,” Sohigian says during a museum visit. “And this eighteenth-century Bible was found buried in the Syrian desert, Der Zor,” where deportees died. There are also human bone fragments, a metal collar used as an instrument of torture, handwritten letters, and a folk art crafted by survivors.

The first wave of Armenians to Massachusetts grew out of the spread of American Protestant missionary schools across Anatolia, according to the genocideeducation.org project, but then worsening economic conditions, violence, and forced conscription into the Ottoman army led to a second wave in the 1890s. “The most important destination…was Watertown, where the new Hood Rubber factory opened its doors in 1896. Coinciding with the exodus of Armenians from the 1890s massacres, a direct pipeline developed between the Armenian provinces and east Watertown.” Thousands more arrived in flight from the 1915 genocide such that by 1930 more than 3,500 Armenians lived in Watertown—nearly 10 percent of the population. The community still thrives today, with churches, grocers, a cutural center, and a school.

The museum owns hundreds of beautifully hand-woven rugs, several of which are on display, along with traditional apparel and examples of fine needlework. Visitors will see a velvet wedding dress with gold-lace embellishments and a woven belt typical of the women’s clothing of Erzurum, a once-thriving Armenian city that’s now part of eastern Anatolia, Turkey. Embroidered textiles from Marash, in Cilicia, now southeastern Turkey, feature interlaced stitching depicting architectural and natural motifs. There’s also white lacework, liturgical clothing and objects, like the 1813 Hmayil, an illustrated scroll featuring prayers and quotes to help ward off dangers and sickness, and musical instruments. Among them is the indigenous Armenian duduk, an ancient double reed woodwind piece made from apricot wood. Striving to connect this rich past of ancient kingdoms and global migration to the present, the museum typically hosts art classes and year-round in-person activities featuring Armenian food, music, dance, and scholarly talks on its huge, skylighted third floor. Planning is under way for 2022 programs; check the website calendar at armenianmuseum.org for details.

Within that event space, look for the two galleries of striking contemporary art. Dissident Collection of Armenian Art features a painting by the well-regarded Sarkis Hamalbashian, and about 10 works produced in Soviet-era Armenia. They were donated by the foundation for the economist and collector Norton Townshend Dodge, who first traveled to the Soviet Union in 1955, ostensibly as part of his Harvard dissertation, and eventually, covertly, amassed one of the largest collections of Soviet art outside of the Soviet Union. (His activities are narrated in John McPhee’s 1994 The Ransom of Russian Art. )

Hanging in the adjacent gallery are the graphic, surrealist Kevorkian works. In addition to his active support of physician-assisted suicide (for which he was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 and served eight years in prison), Kevorkian was also a jazz musician, composer, linguist, and painter. Of the art displayed, most salient, and framed using human blood, is 1915 Genocide 1945. Kevorkian’s own explanatory label reads, in part: “No collective human action can match the depravity of race murder. To call it bestial would be unfairly lowering the beast…Any such attempt (including this painting) would never convey the real meaning of unlimited murder for the purposes of national extinction, beginning with the American Indians.”

This winter, the museum adds to these contemporary galleries a multimedia exhibit anchored by its recently acquired Armenian cross-stone, known as a khachkar . The object reflects a medieval art form unique to Armenia, and was carved in 2018 by sculptor Bogdan Hovhannisyan for the Smithsonian Institute’s Folklife Festival. “It’s a connection between a modern artist and a tradition; if you go to Armenia now, you will see artists carving these crosses in their workshops,” Sohigian says. “And all these things, the monuments, artifacts, relics, art, are actively being destroyed by Turkey and Azerbaijan now.”

The cross-stone, like the Garabed Gospel painstakingly created in the thirteenth century, stands to preserve cultural history and the collective experience of a displaced, dispersed people. Although the manuscript was seized by authorities when older members of the extended Der Garabedian family, which held the Holy Book for 39 generations, were killed during the genocide, a surviving relative paid a ransom for its return. In 1927, he gave it to a nephew who had emigrated to America, and his surviving daughter, Julia Der Garabedian, entrusted it to the museum. “If we agree that cultural heritage is a human right,” Christina Maranci says, “then we should respect, protect and learn from those communities whose cultures have faced destruction.”  

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The Veil of History: Translating across the Armenian Genocide Divide

Posted on March 11, 2024

Essay by Nanor Kebranian 

Since the Armenian Genocide during the First World War, translation has become a source of cultural preservation for survivors and their increasingly assimilated non-Armenophone descendants. This marks a significant shift from translation’s role prior to the Genocide. In the 19 th century, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire employed translation into Armenian as a formative process for developing and standardizing the so-called ‘Western’ branch of modern Armenian language and literature. Translators were not only instrumental in coining new terms or drawing additional meanings from existing Armenian words, but they also applied and promoted the spread of standardized grammatical forms in Western Armenian literature. This so-called ‘Western’ variant was unique to what was deemed ‘Western’ Armenia encompassing the autochthonous Armenian territories of the Ottoman Empire and various cultural hubs abroad. The mutually comprehensible ‘Eastern’ branch developed in the Armenian Caucasus – now Armenia – and the communities of Persia – now Iran. After the Genocide, Western Armenian became the mainstay of Diaspora Armenian culture – consisting primarily of survivors and their descendants –, [1] whereas Eastern Armenian constituted the language of Armenia proper. [2] Western Armenian literature, including translations from other languages, initially flourished in the post-War Diaspora. But cultural – and especially linguistic – assimilation has ultimately led to the precipitous decline of Western Armenian. It now appears on UNESCO’s list of endangered languages. In this climate of precarity, translation from Armenian has consequently attained redoubled force as a powerful medium of cultural continuity and conservation. The question of what and how to translate, however, remains to be answered.

Despite the Diaspora’s evident commitment to cultural continuity through various social and educational organizations, post-Genocide translation from Armenian into other languages has mostly remained an afterthought. An overview of what has been produced in English and French even in the most active cultural centers of the Armenian Diaspora – notably, Paris, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Fresno – reveals a disconnected patchwork consisting of monographs or collections representing a few notable authors from the post-World War II canon of Western Armenian literary history; anthologies organized by genre; or references and textbooks with translated excerpts. These translations are important for cataloguing names and contexts. But, with very few exceptions and aside from highlighting linguistic-literary trends or underscoring a specific writer’s innovations, they grant few insights into the conceptual and epistemic wealth of Armenian literary culture in the Ottoman Empire. What is preserved through such translations, then, are fragments of a cultural façade. In that respect, they function more as public monuments to the dead and gone rather than as gateways into the throbbing intellectual world of a living Armenian past. Out of place and out of time, they invite but a passing glance.

Before the Genocide, translations did not compartmentalize, preserve, or mummify Armenian literature; they enlivened it. Of course, these consisted of translations into Western Armenian. They included predominantly classics of the Western humanist canon, but also significant treatises on progressive politics and social reform. Less frequently, translators tackled major religious, philosophical, and literary texts from neighboring regions in the Middle East as well as from East and South Asia. Their collective effort has been described as a constitutive aspect in the broader project of generating a national awakening inspired by the tenets of the 1848 French Revolution. Historical accounts of this process accordingly tend to present it exclusively as a mimetic event with Armenians attempting either to graft the Enlightened West onto Armenian culture or to massage Armenian thought to fit the contours of existing Western conceptual paradigms.

But this somewhat abridged – and patently underestimating – chronicle of Armenian intellectual history overlooks the fact that many translators collectively perceived translation as a self-consciously performative strategy geared at (re-)building and manifesting consensus, sociality, and solidarity. This was not a matter of interpolating Western principles over Armenian ones, but rather of revealing and restoring these values’ indigenous origins prior to the (economic, social, political, and linguistic) fractures wrought by the communalist Ottoman system. A meta-reading of these translators’ text selections, commentaries, and prefatory statements alongside their activism and institutional initiatives reveals a sophisticated enactment of social reconstitution. This was done with the awareness – especially but not only since the Ottoman State’s authoritarian turn in the 1880s – that their efforts could cost them their livelihoods, or even lives. Translation could indeed become a matter of life and death if perceived as politically subversive discourse. But, if translators – and the broader world of progressive Armenian print culture – took these chances, it was with the understanding that a greater looming danger was making the very conditions of their entire nation’s – and hence, of their own – existence virtually impossible.

This was the threat of fragmentation and assimilation symptomatized through language loss, inter-confessional strife, economic dispossession, and State repression. By the turn of the 20 th century, some began to name the last and greatest of these threats, ‘extermination’ – pnachnchum . The word ‘genocide’ – coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe – did not yet exist. And Armenians from across the social and political spectrum assumed the task of translating against the exterminationist will pervading – and imperiling – their lives. One editor went so far as to engage in what I term elsewhere, ‘literary diplomacy.’ In 1914, just one year before the Armenian Genocide was put into effect, none other than the purportedly ‘nationalist’ writer, Rupen Zartarian, republished and amplified his compilation of translations from Ottoman-Turkish works into Western Armenian. It was, as his preface indicates, the very first such initiative to place the two neighboring peoples’ literatures side-by-side. Zartarian’s rationale? The hope of mutual knowledge and hence, ‘harmony’ – nertashnagutiun . Zartarian was among the first wave of Armenian intellectuals who were then arrested on April 24, 1915 and executed on the deportation route a few months later. Remarkably, except for a couple of passing or synoptic references, Zartarian’s groundbreaking compilation of translations from Ottoman-Turkish has been exceedingly underestimated or effectively expunged from post-WWII Ottoman and Armenian literary historiography. But Zartarian’s intervention can be read as an important signpost on the way to dispersion. It provides some guidance on translating with purpose; that is, in a more worldly way than the act of preserving or memorializing a few names and events.  

Over the past two decades, translations of Armenian literature into Turkish have tended increasingly towards that direction. Many of the often incredibly well-received publications of Aras Yayıncılık, for example, reveal a more deeply engaged approach to translation, one that deliberately confronts and contests official Turkish narratives of the Armenian presence – or lack thereof – in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Importantly, most of these works highlight the little-known post-genocide experience of marginalized Armenians remaining in Turkey, especially the tensions and intricacies of multiethnic coexistence.

However, an important element in that story – its antecedent, as it were – remains to be translated. It consists of original writings and other projects – such as Zartarian’s noted earlier – that attempted to breach the Armeno-Turkish divide both before and after the Genocide. In the past decade, two such works have appeared through Aras Publishing House: the republication of a 1913 collection presenting contemporary Armenian literature (including Zartarian’s) in Ottoman-Turkish translation, alongside commentaries by various Ottoman-Turkish authors; and the Turkish translation of Zabel Yessayan’s 1925 novella, Meliha Nuri Hanım , written from the first-person standpoint of an Ottoman-Turkish woman volunteering as a nurse in WWI Gallipoli. While they constitute significant breakthroughs, these works have deeper literary and social connections that are not immediately apparent in their discrete appearances. One of the tasks – although, by no means the only one – of Armenian literature’s translation today is to uncover those veiled – at times, quite deliberately – features of Ottoman/Armenian literary history. It is a difficult – but not impossible – task, since few guiding principles and precedents exist. At stake is not just the now tired cliché of fostering Armeno-Turkish dialogue and mutual understanding. More importantly, for a culture and literature on the brink of extinction – and for a world that is becoming increasingly siloed through tribalist loyalties – is access to the intuitive pull by which to maintain a regenerative emotional and conceptual link to these cultural resources.

Zartarian the polyglot and multilingual translator understood the value of forging this link. As did others, such as the Ottoman-Armenian woman author, Zabel Yessayan, who also wrote and translated between French and Armenian. It seems appropriate then to reorient Armenian translation in the Diaspora – and in the liminal zone of Armenian Turkey as well – through their long forgotten or ignored attempts at crossing the Armeno-Turkish divide. This process is already underway in English, beginning with two edited collections of translated works from Yessayan: Captive Nights: From the Bosphorus to Gallipoli with Zabel Yessayan (California State Frenso, 2021) and Zabel Yessayan on the Threshold: Key Texts on Armenians and Turks as Ottoman Subjects (Gomidas Institute, 2023). A critical edition of Zartarian’s Ottoman-Turkish literary compilation is soon to follow. Importantly, none of these initiatives could have been possible without the institutional support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and its mission to recenter the cultural significance of Armenian translation. These projects have culminated from years of unaided inquiry into the psychic life of Ottoman-Armenian subjecthood, and especially into the syntheses of Armeno-Turkish coexistence in the hierarchically organized Ottoman state. Since the Genocide, few writers and scholars have attempted to broach that delicate topic – as though no such syntheses were ever possible.  Would that still be true had the 19 th century Armenian culture of purposeful translation survived the ruptures of history? One can imagine an alternate reality, where post-Genocide Armenian society recognizes the veritably translational landscape of Ottoman belonging and attunes itself to the boundary-crossing literary translations that enriched it.

[1] While Armenians had for centuries enjoyed a diasporic presence especially in various global economic hubs, this post-genocide Diaspora formed with the dispersal of survivors from their ancestral homes in the Ottoman Empire to various host countries. Over the course of the early twentieth century, the survivors’ descendants created significant communities in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, employing Western Armenian as their ‘national’ language.

[2] The fall of the Soviet Union has altered the Diaspora’s linguistic/literary profile, however, as the exodus of Armenians from the independent post-Soviet State has enabled Eastern Armenian to take root abroad. Eastern Armenian remains relatively strong thanks to Armenia’s statehood.

Nanor  Kebranian is a Research Fellow at the Faculty Centre for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna (2023 - 2024). She was Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar in the History Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2020 - 2021). Prior to this appointment, she was Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Theory, History, and Human Rights in the HERA-funded project for Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She also served as Assistant Professor in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, where she researched, published, and taught on the history of the Middle East, literary studies, human rights, and Armenian culture. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford with fellowships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Oxford's Clarendon Fund. In 2023, she published a collection of translations from the work of Ottoman-Armenian woman author, Zabel Yessayan (1878 - 1943?), Zabel Yessayan on the Threshold: Key Texts on Armenians and Turks as Ottoman Subjects (London: Gomidas Institute, 2023). She is currently completing her first monograph on the Armenian literature of Ottoman subjecthood (1860 - 1945) with funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as a translation of the influential and previously untranslated memoir — Twelve Years Away from Constantinople (1896 - 1909)—  by Ottoman-Armenian intellectual and activist, Yervant Odian (1869 - 1926), with funding from the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund. 

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Armenia’s existential moment

• December 5, 2023

Thomas de Waal

• Themes: Geopolitics

Armenia is facing its most precarious moment in three decades. The loss of Karabakh, a region with a centuries-old history of Armenian habitation and heritage, will reverberate for generations.

Many people in the West are looking out on the global landscape with a grim sensation that the international order has broken down, conflicts are flaring up unchecked and we have arrived in a multi-polar world of a brutal kind.

In the South Caucasus many would say that this is the world they live in already. When the Soviet Union came to an end in 1992, a post-Cold War peace never properly arrived in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The region was torn apart by three ethno-territorial conflicts. In 2020 the biggest dispute of the three, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorny Karabakh , resumed after a 26-year pause, with Azerbaijan winning a military victory.

On 19 September Azerbaijan launched a new lightning operation to seize the Armenian-run region of Nagorny Karabakh, which it last administered in the late Soviet era. The entire Armenian population — more than 100,000 people — fled their homes. On 15 October, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, delivered a victory speech, dressed in camouflage fatigues, in an empty city, Karabakh’s local capital, Stepanakert, renamed Khankendi by Azerbaijan. ‘Today, all the people of Azerbaijan are genuinely rejoicing. All the people of Azerbaijan are praising Allah,’ said Aliyev , belying by omission the prospect that Karabakh Christian Armenians could be citizens of Azerbaijan.

Aliyev’s speech was one of personal redemption, made on the 20 th anniversary of his first inauguration as president in 2003. The whole visit to the deserted city was a one-man show, with the president filmed alone, walking around the empty office of the Karabakh Armenian administration and, like a triumphant Roman victor, trampling over their flag.

The symbolism was all about national rebirth and revanchism. Aliyev’s speech was made in the same square in which Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan had told crowds in August 2019, ‘Artsakh [the Armenian name for Nagorny Karabakh] is Armenia, full stop.’ Aliyev’s main reference point was to 1994, the year when Azerbaijan suffered a bitter defeat in the first Karabakh war of the 1990s, the culmination of many rounds of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement by both Armenians and Azerbaijanis, in which Azerbaijan ultimately paid the heaviest price. Years of humiliation, both personal and national, were being expunged.

The Azerbaijani leader was actually reaching further back, to the 1920s. Having once promised the Karabakh Armenians high levels of territorial autonomy, he has now declared ‘Nagorny (Mountainous) Karabakh’ abolished as both a name and as an Armenian-led autonomous region. He has thereby cancelled an arrangement first created by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and declared it an act of sabotage against Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is busy rewriting a whole century-old script.

The years 1917-21 were the formative era for the South Caucasus, in which the modern political contours of the region were first drawn, and it was a theatre of inter-ethnic and proxy conflict. Much of what happened then – and seemed to be settled – is being revisited again.

The lessons of that era are set out in the classic history The Struggle for Transcaucasia , written by Firuz Kazemzadeh and published in 1951. His story begins in 1917, at a moment that rhymes with the present: Russian power collapsed in the Caucasus along with the end of the tsarist empire, allowing Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Georgians to declare independence. It ends in 1920-1 with a turn of events which is much less likely: a Russian reconquest at the hands of the Bolshevik 11 th Army, which overturned the newly independent republics of Azerbaijan, then Armenia and finally Georgia in less than a year.

The story in between is of almost uninterrupted conflict across the entire region. Feckless local leaders won pieces of territory but weakened their new national projects in the process. The Bolsheviks’ eventual appeal to the population, such as it was, was as a strongman arbiter, who pacified the region and ended these fratricidal conflicts.

The Western powers promised more than they delivered. The European powers recognised the independence of the three Caucasus states only when it was too late. The British made empty reassurances that border disputes would be settled at the Paris Peace Conference, only to pull out of the region in 1921 with a few statements of regret. ‘British policy toward the new states lacked consistency, and was determined by the exigencies of the moment rather than any long-term plans,’ writes Kazemzadeh.

It is also a tale of collusion between the two former imperial powers in the region,Russia and Turkey, who both dared to put troops on the ground. Mustafa Kemal’s nascent Turkish Republic helped facilitate the Bolshevik takeover. Kemal’s actions sold out the young Turkic kin-state of Azerbaijan, fatally weakened Armenia and adopted ‘benevolent neutrality’, which allowed the Red Army to capture independent Georgia. In return, Turkey got to sign an agreement with Russia, the Treaty of Kars, in October 1921, which allowed it to keep the territorial conquests it had taken from Armenia.

Aliyev’s military operation in September in Karabakh was something right out of The Struggle for Transcaucasia . He seized the moment to achieve something Azerbaijan had tried and failed to do in 1918-20 and 1991-2: drive out the Armenians and make Karabakh a fully Azerbaijani territory.

The calculation was that Russia and Turkey are still the key outside powers and you get things done by cutting deals with them. Despite their overt rivalry, Russia and Turkey have shared interests in the South Caucasus. Seçkin Köstem (before the latest developments) called the relationship one of ‘ managed regional rivalry ’. As Vladimir Lenin and Mustafa Kemal before them, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan disagree on much, but both feel a resentment towards Western hegemony, which positions them as what Fiona Hill and Omer Taspinar have called the ‘ axis of the excluded ’.

The war in Ukraine has strengthened Turkey’s bargaining power. Turkey is playing different sides, giving military support to Kyiv,  throwing an economic lifeline to Moscow and making its case as the indispensable East-West hub. For its part, Russia is weakened by its war to the point where it decided to abandon its traditional role as the main arbiter of the Karabakh conflict as leverage over Armenia and Azerbaijan. In September 2023, for the first time in its post-Soviet history, it stood down the peacekeeping force it had sent to Karabakh in 2020, and allowed the Azerbaijani military to attack, unimpeded. Those who celebrate this as a defeat for Russia in the Caucasus are probably getting ahead of themselves. Laurence Broers calls Moscow’s pivot to Azerbaijan and abandonment of Karabakh and Armenia ‘managed decline’, in which it is redefining its goals in the region in order to stay in the game.

Azerbaijan’s bet was also that, as in 1920, the West is a paper tiger, when the soldiers start marching. Since the end of 2021 Azerbaijan and Armenia have been engaged in a diplomatic process, led first by the European Union and then jointly by Brussels and Washington, to finalise a ‘peace agreement,’ a bilateral treaty normalising their relations, demarcating the border and opening closed road and rail routes. A lot of progress was made, but the future of Armenian-populated Karabakh inevitably hung over the whole process. The Armenian government recognised that Karabakh would be part of Azerbaijan so long as the ‘rights and security’ of its Armenian residents would be respected. As Azerbaijan tightened its grip on the enclave, the European and US mediators, urged restraint and tried to facilitate direct talks between the Karabakh Armenian leaders and Baku.

We will probably never know how serious Aliyev was about this Western diplomatic track, or whether he was just keeping his options open until he was able to cut a better deal with the Russians. In any case, he launched his blitzkrieg in September, after reportedly making many reassurances to senior Western officials, such as EU Council President Charles Michel that he would not resort to force. (The Azerbaijanis arrested six of the local Armenians leaders they were supposed to be talking to. They are now in jail in Baku.)

Negotiations over a ‘peace agreement’ between Baku and Yerevan continue even though the Western-mediated process has not yet resumed. The Azerbaijanis pulled out of scheduled talks in Washington, alleging that the US is biased against them. Azerbaijan says there should just be a bilateral agreement without outside mediators; the Armenians say they are not against this but, in circumstances where they are much weaker, they want international guarantees on its implementation.

The cooling towards the West is also about the contrast between Armenia’s (imperfect) democracy, now turning West for support, and Azerbaijan’s Russia-style single-party autocracy. Aliyev’s regime is becoming even more repressive . It has arrested several dissident voices and journalists, and accused the US embassy of recruiting American-educated Azerbaijanis as spies.

In a vacuum that opens up if Western diplomacy stalls, several candidates are keen to step in. Iran, the third big regional neighbour, is trying to assert a role it has lacked in the South Caucasus since the end of the Soviet Union. The Iranians are talking up a so-called ‘3+3 format’, a mechanism devised by the three big neighbours to discuss the future of the region.

In substance, 3 + 3 is more accurately a 3 + 2. Georgia refuses to participate in a format that includes Russia. Armenia is very lukewarm, leaving Azerbaijan as the only one of the regional three to express any enthusiasm, talking of ‘regional solutions to regional problems’.

On 23 October, the Iranians hosted a meeting of five foreign ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia and Turkey in Tehran. The shared agenda was explicit. The format was supposed to supersede now-moribund engagement by multilateral organisations, such as the OSCE and UN and in particular by the West. Iranian Foreign Minister Hosein Amir Abdolahian said , ‘The presence of outsiders in the region will not only not solve any problems but will also complicate the situation further.’ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed Russia’s special role and disparaged Western mediation efforts. ‘ Let them try their luck ,’ was his summation of European Union diplomacy on demarcation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. The most authoritative maps of the border were Soviet-era ones, he said, in the hands of the Russians.

How far can we push the 1920s analogy? It has some limits.

For one thing the European Union is now present in the South Caucasus, if not as a strongman, as a regional power that offers ordinary citizens much that neither Iran, Russia or Turkey can: a path to democracy and potential economic integration, investment in technology and infrastructure and visa-free travel. On 8 November – the same day as Azerbaijan’s militarist parade in Karabakh – the European Commission recommended that, with many conditions attached – Georgia should have EU candidate status and a path to accession. The way forward for Georgia under the increasingly illiberal Georgian Dream government is very uncertain but the EU is an absolutely key player there.

Thankfully, also, no one is challenging the independence of the three Caucasus nation-states – or not directly. After what it has done in Ukraine, Russia is capable of anything, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have weakened it to the point that no one is anticipating a Bolshevik-style invasion of the South Caucasus any time soon.

The violent seizure of Nagorny Karabakh does, however, refocus attention on the two other protracted unresolved conflicts in the region, in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Like Karabakh, they fought ‘wars of the Soviet succession’ 30 years ago, with help from Russians, and de facto seceded from Georgia. Unlike Nagorny Karabakh, they were recognised as independent by Russia in 2008, which has effectively made them (whether they like it or not) into Russian protectorates.

The way the Karabakh conflict ended sets a precedent for the unfreezing of these two conflicts in the future. The key variables here are what happens with Russia’s war in Ukraine and the international choices Georgia makes. If Russia is more successful in its aggression against Ukraine and Georgia turns more to the West, a full-scale Russian annexation of the two territories is conceivable. If Russia gets weaker, there is the possibility of a Georgian revanchist attempt to take them by force.

A a third scenario – one that Abkhaz and Ossetians fear – would have been unthinkable only a year ago but is worth considering. This is one of collusion between Moscow and Tbilisi in which, as in Karabakh, Russian forces stand aside and the Georgian military ‘liberates’ the two territories it last controlled in Soviet times. Russia would have to get something substantial in return, presumably Georgia renouncing its Euro-Atlantic ambitions and re-aligning with Russia.

Far-fetched? Yes, but parts of the Georgian public might go for it. In a survey commissioned by Carnegie Europe in 2020, Georgians were asked, ‘If you had to choose between regaining control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia or membership in NATO and the EU, which would you choose?’ A big majority, 78 per cent, chose regaining control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and only 13 per cent preferred membership of NATO and the EU. Despite the country’s European aspirations, ethno-nationalism is still a potent force in Georgia that should not be discounted.

Armenia is the country that has most reason to be afraid and remember the 1920s. The country is facing its most precarious moment in three decades. The loss of Karabakh, a region with a centuries-old history of Armenian habitation and heritage, will reverberate for generations and is the biggest trauma for Armenians since the fall of Kars to the Turks in 1920.

Moscow’s failure to protect the Karabakh Armenians dramatically speeded up a process which was already underway: a breakdown in relations between Armenia and Russia, its supposed main ally and security patron. In recent months, the ties that held the two countries together have started to unravel.

Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan now publicly questions the utility of the Russian alliance. He has declared the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Russian-led security pact of which Armenia is a member, to be unfit for purpose. He is going against the international grain and declaring that he wants to enlist in the the Euro-Atlantic liberal order. Armenia has now acceded to the Rome Statute and joined the International Criminal Court (meaning that Vladimir Putin could technically be arrested if he sets foot on Armenian soil). Pashinyan sent his wife to a meeting in Kyiv and publicly met Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelensky, at a European summit in Spain.

The Russians have drawn their own conclusions, condemning Pashinyan as reckless and ungrateful. Armenia faces a difficult winter. It gets more than 80 per cent of its gas and 90 per cent of its wheat from Russia and still has thousands of Russian troops and border guards stationed on its territory. Russia will try to mobilise discontent from many constituencies who blame Pashinyan for having surrendered Karabakh to Azerbaijan. What insulates the prime minister and his government from popular anger – though not something more sudden and violent – is that Russia and its allies in Armenia are even more unpopular with the Armenian public than he is.

Russia’s South Caucasus pivot away from Armenia to Azerbaijan is part of a big structural re-invention of its foreign relations. Encircled by the West’s economic war against it, Russia is shifting its trade and energy policy from the west to the south and east. That makes Georgia more important to the Russian economy but Azerbaijan even more so. It is the only country in the South Caucasus to which Russia is connected by rail and a link to Russia’s big Middle Eastern ally, Iran, as well as Turkey, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Cargo freight volumes on Russia’s railway to Azerbaijan doubled and the land customs point started operating on a 24-hour basis in 2023.

This is where 21 st- century global trade meets regional power politics and the political geography drawn in haste by the Bolsheviks in 1921. In the early 20 th century three provinces with a mixed population were disputed by force between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Karabakh, which kept its mixed population throughout the 20 th century, was the only one whose status was still contested.

The other two provinces, Nakhchivan and Zangezur, also had mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani populations and were fought over in the early 20 th century. Fighting in 1918-20 brought Nakhchivan under Azerbaijani control while the Armenians took possession of Zangezur. In 1921 the Bolsheviks ratified these conquests. Nakhchivan was allocated to Soviet Azerbaijan but as an exclave, without a land border to the rest of Azerbaijan, while also receiving, thanks to Turkish intercessions, a 17-km border with Turkey. Zangezur, bordering Iran, was confirmed as part of Soviet Armenia, thus becoming a territory that bordered (or divided) Azerbaijani territory on two sides. By late Soviet times the two regions had become fully Azerbaijani and Armenian and effectively ‘ethnically cleansed’ of the other nationality.

In the Soviet Union there was at least free communication between all these regions, but from 1990, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict closed borders and shut down roads and railway lines. Nakhchivan was isolated from the rest of Azerbaijan and southern Armenia lost its railway connections beyond its borders.

In November 2020 the Russian-mediated ceasefire statement that ended the ’44-Day’ Armenian-Azerbaijani war declared that all transport routes would be re-opened and named in particular the restoration of a road and rail link across southern Armenia (Syunik/ Zangezur) to Nakhchivan.

Restoring and rehabilitating these routes and turning them into international connections should have been a win-win. Instead, ‘connectivity’ fell hostage first to enduring Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry, then to the new Great Power politics accompanying the Ukraine war.

At issue is a 43-km stretch of disused railway across Armenia that connects Nakhchivan with the rest of Azerbaijan. Armenia says it would be happy to see this route re-opened for Azerbaijani traffic so long as it retains sovereign control of the route, and as part of a bigger scheme it calls the ‘Crossroads of Peace’, in which all transport routes across Armenia are re-opened. Azerbaijan and Turkey focussed on the Nakhchivan route to the exclusion of all others and pressed for minimal Armenian control of traffic across it.

President Aliyev named the route the ‘Zangezur Corridor’ and linked it provocatively to Azerbaijanis’ former historic presence in the region. This rhetorical escalation continued with the creation of a so-called ‘West Azerbaijani’ community, who demanded the right of return to Armenia. In April 2021 Aliyev said , ‘We are implementing the Zangazur [sic] corridor, whether Armenia likes it or not. If they do, it will be easier for us to implement, if not, we will enforce it… Thus, the Azerbaijani people will return to Zangazur, which was taken away from us 101 years ago.’

Since the Ukraine war began this little stretch of railway has become the focus of two competing visions of international connectivity.

The war has revived Western interest in the so-called ‘Middle Corridor’ as an alternative East-West rail route for freight traffic between China and Turkey via Central Asia and the South Caucasus, bypassing Russia and its ‘Northern Route’ across Siberia. Freight volumes have already increased substantially (from a low base) and could be tripled by 2030 if trends continue.

The corridor already runs via Georgia but a new route across Armenia would be very attractive. Both Armenia and eastern Turkey would stand to benefit from it if it continued and crossed the (now closed) Armenia-Turkey border.

Western actors thus aspire to an old-fashioned liberal outcome, in which Armenia is de-isolated along with Nakhchivan and trade promotes peace, regional security and East-West connectivity. This is also the one area where the West, allied with major funding institutions such as the World Bank, has leverage. It can promise money and expertise to make it happen. Indeed in Brussels they already thought they had a deal: EU negotiators believed they had designed a compromise deal as early as last summer, which involved electronic checks, speedy transit and Western funding. But the documents they thought they had agreed in Brussels got queried in Moscow.

Russia views it differently. For Moscow the ‘Zangezur Corridor’ is part of its escape route to the south. The railway junction at Julfa in Nakhchivan was once the major crossing-point between the Soviet Union and Iran, but has stood idle for 30 years since the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict began; revive it and Moscow and Tehran are linked by rail again. One Russian Caucasus commentator wrote in 2022, ‘As for the role of the Zangezur Corridor in the development of the North-South international transport artery, then it very much resembles the role of transit to Iran for the Soviet Union in the years of the Second World War.’

A corollary of this is that Russia wants to be the one to guard the route across southern Armenia. The November 2020 statement stipulates that it will be done by Russian FSB border-guards, a condition that Azerbaijan still insists on but Armenia rejects.

The worry in Western capitals is that Azerbaijan now aligns itself with the Russian agenda and will support a Russian security presence to the exclusion of Armenia. The regional plot thickens further with Turkey, which currently supports Azerbaijan’s view but is suspicious of Iran, and Iran which has its own even more complex agenda. The Iranian Supreme Leader has warned against a corridor that seals off its northern border with Armenia – and onward connections to the Black Sea and Russia. Yet Iran is also dead set against a Western-run corridor there as well.

So Zangezur is back and Great Power politics has suddenly made Armenia’s sleepy and sparsely population Syunik region a geopolitical location once again. In early 2023 the European Union deployed a civilian monitoring mission there, EUMA, after Azerbaijani incursions across the border. The little town of Kapan (population 40,000) now has the flags of Russia, the EU and Iran (which has opened a consulate there) fluttering through it.

Threatening statements by Azerbaijani officials, the ‘West Azerbaijan’ discourse and the shared Russian-Azerbaijani-Turkey interest in the ‘Zangezur Corridor’ have convinced Armenians – and not only them – that Azerbaijan’s next move will be to seize a land bridge in southern Armenia and impose its Zangezur Corridor by force. Talk to almost any ordinary Armenian nowadays and they will tell you that they expect that Azerbaijan, with the tacit support of Russia and Turkey,  will invade tomorrow. Azerbaijani officials play all this down, saying that they merely expect Armenia to do what is required and agree to the corridor.

Azerbaijan certainly knows what a risky step this would be. A big military operation to seize sovereign Armenian territory would be a huge escalation that would put Azerbaijan in Armenia in the same category of aggressor as Russia in Ukraine. Besides, it is hard to plan construction of a major international railway route on territory that you occupy by force. For those reasons, it is more likely that Azerbaijan will use all coercive tactics it can short of outright military intervention in order to get Armenia to agree to its plans. It is hard to blame the Armenians for being nervous. In the new-old world of South Caucasus contestation, more volatile than at any time in the last century, the wisest bet at the moment is to prepare for worst-case scenarios.

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• About Armenia
• State Symbols

ARMENIAN CULTURE: FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE 21st CENTURY

“Armenia is the cradle of civilization,

one of the progressive and developed countries of the Ancient World”.

Franz Werfel, Austrian writer and humanist

The origins of Armenian culture date back to the time of the formation of Armenian tribal unions and state institutions. They are familiar to us due to excavation materials as well as preserved myths and religious beliefs. Numerous ancient settlements, Cyclopean fortresses and plentiful tombs (Metsamor, Lchashen, Vanadzor, etc.) were discovered on the territory of historical Armenia. Weapons, tools, household items, figurines and jewelry, that were found thereby, are indicative of ancient and high cultural development. The kingdom of Van (Ararat) (9th-7th centuries BC) played a special role in the formation and development of ancient Armenian culture. After the fall of Urartu, its famous cuneiform writing became a thing of the past. Urartian urban planning and fresco painting were distinguished by remarkable features, which were discovered during the excavations of the fortress cities of Erebuni (Yerevan), Argishtikhinili and Teishebaini. Not only numerous samples of buildings have been preserved, but also clay and metal products, weapons, armor and jewelry. It is worth mentioning the silver goblets (rhytons) with horsemen sculptures excavated in Arinberd (Teishebaini). Today architecture is one of the most fascinating art forms in Armenia, and richly adorned churches are undoubtedly a vivid confirmation of this.

Literature has always played an essential role in the development of Armenian national and cultural identity. Before the creation of the Armenian alphabet in the 5th century, Armenian legends and folk stories had been passed down through speech from one generation to the next or written down in foreign languages. Armenian manuscripts, gorgeously illustrated with miniatures, combine literary traditions and the art of illumination. The invention of the Armenian alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots, that reflects the Christian culture and highlights the richness of the Armenian language, gave a new impetus to the development of unique cultural traditions. This alphabet has not undergone any significant revision to the present day. One can admire Armenian literary and artistic history in the Matenadaran, Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan, a unique institution in the world, which houses an extraordinary collection of 14,000 volumes including complete manuscripts, fragments and miniatures. The oldest manuscripts are parchments dating from the 5th and 6th centuries. 

The history of Armenian theater dates back more than 2000 years. At Matenadaran there are also a number of manuscripts concerning theater. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, there were performances staged in Artashat in 53 BC, and Armenian King Artavazd was also known for composing tragedies. Theater art is still very popular in Armenia with the majority of theatrical traditions preserved.

It was especially in the 19th century that Armenian painting experienced a remarkable breakthrough. Such painters of this period as the portraitist Hakob Hovnatanyan or the marine landscape artist Ivan Aivazovsky are internationally recognized to the present day. In the 20th century, Martiros Sarian gave to the world a new feel of nature depiction. It is also worth mentioning Arshile Gorky, who influenced a whole generation of young American painters in New York, such as Jean Carzou and Jean Jansem, whose glory arose in France. A visit to the Saryan Park in Yerevan will give you an incredible opportunity to get acquainted with some contemporary Armenian painters.

Armenia is also considered to be one of the oldest centers of carpet-weaving art in the world. In Armenia one can find numerous shops selling old and new carpets. In Yerevan’s flea market (Vernissage) visitors can have a view of counters full of Armenian motifs, including jewelry, precious and semi-precious stones, for example, obsidian, which is widely used in Armenia. 

Our country is also known for its khachkars : wooden sculptures that often reproduce the ancient steles engraved with crosses. 

Armenia is often called an open-air museum. Tourists can find more than 4000 historical monuments tracing back to different periods of the country's history, from prehistoric to Hellenistic times, from the beginning of the Christian era to the present day.

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Online Armenian Language Proficiency Exam (12-Point)

NOTE: Online language proficiency exams are offered year-round. Once you register to take an exam, you will be able to schedule the exam on a date that is convenient for you, even if the exam date will be before or after the semester dates listed below in the section details.   This exam assesses reading, writing, listening and oral proficiency in Armenian. It consists of multiple-choice questions, short answers, one essay in Armenian, one translation into Armenian, two short audio sections in Armenian, and two oral responses in Armenian. Knowledge of technical or specialized vocabulary is not needed. No dictionaries, reference tools, or other support materials are permitted. This exam is available exclusively online, and you will have two hours in which to complete it. Point scoring is equivalent to undergraduate credits at US colleges; credit granted is at the discretion of the institution receiving the results. You are strongly urged to discuss accreditation with the institution’s adviser prior to taking the exam.

More details

Summer 2024

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Course Number

PROF1-CE1090

• Countries and Their Cultures
• Culture of Armenia

Culture Name

Alternative names.

Hayastan/Hayasdan; Haygagan/Haykakan/Haigagan; Haikakan

Orientation

Identification. The designation "Armenia" applies to different entities: a "historical" Armenia, the Armenian plateau, the 1918–1920 U.S. State Department map of an Armenia, and the current republic of Armenia. The notion "Armenian culture" implies not just the culture of Armenia but that of the Armenian people, the majority of whom live outside the current boundaries of the republic of Armenia.

Armenians call themselves hay and identify their homeland not by the term "Armenia" but as Hayastan or Hayasdan. The origins of these words can be traced to the Hittites, among whose historical documents is a reference to the Hayasa. In the Bible, the area designated as Armenia is referred to as Ararat, which the Assyrians referred to as Urartu. Armenians also identify themselves as the people of Ararat/Urartu and of Nairi, and their habitat as nairian ashkharh or yergir nairian . Armenians have called themselves Torkomian or Torgomian . They also call themselves Haigi serount or Haiki seround , descendants of Haig/Haik.

Location and Geography. Armenia has been identified with the mountainous Armenian plateau since pre-Roman times. The plateau is bordered on the east by Iran, on the west by Asia Minor, on the north by the Transcaucasian plains, and on the south by the Mesopotamian plains. The plateau consists of a complex set of mountain ranges, volcanic peaks, valleys, lakes, and rivers. It is also the main water reservoir of the Middle East, as two great rivers—the Euphrates and the Tigris— originate in its high mountains. The mean altitude of the Armenian plateau is 5,600 feet (1,700 meter) above sea level.

Present-day Armenia—the republic of Armenia—is a small mountainous republic that gained its independence in 1991, after seven decades of Soviet rule. It constitutes one-tenth of the historical Armenian plateau. Surrounding Lake Sevan, it has an area of approximately 11,600 square miles (30,000 square kilometers). Its border countries are Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan-Naxçivan, the Republic of Georgia, Iran, and Turkey. Its climate is highland continental, with hot summers and cold winters. Despite its small size, it was one of the most densely populated republics of the Soviet Union. Half of its inhabitants live in the Ararat plain, which constitutes only 10 percent of its territory and includes the capital city of Yerevan. Yerevan houses one-third of the country's population.

Armenia is a rugged, volcanic country with rich mineral resources. It is highly prone to earthquakes and occasional droughts.

Demography. Approximately 3 million people live in the republic of Armenia. Another 3 million Armenians live in various countries of the ex-Soviet Union—mainly in Russia. One and a half million Armenians are dispersed in the Americas. About one million Armenians live in various European countries, and half a million Armenians live in the Middle East and Africa. The ethnic composition of Armenia's population is 93.3 percent Armenian; 1.5 percent Russian; 1.7 percent Kurdish; and 3.5 percent Assyrian, Greek, and other.

Symbolism. Mount Ararat has had symbolic significance for all Armenians. Today it lies outside the boundaries of Armenia. It may be seen on the horizon from Yerevan, but like a mirage it remains inaccessible to Armenians. Ancient manuscripts depicting the history of Armenia are housed in the national library, Madenataran, and are valued national and historical treasures. Particularly significant symbols of Armenian culture include the statue of Mother Armenia; Dsidsernagabert, a shrine with an ever-burning fire in memory of the Armenian victims of the 1915 genocide; the ruined ancient monasteries; khatchkars engraved stone burial crosses; the ruins of Ani, the last capital of historic Armenia, which fell in 1045; and the emblem of the 1918 first republic of Armenia, its tricolor flag.

History and Ethnic Relations

Emergence of The Nation. Many prehistoric sites have been unearthed in and around Armenia, showing the existence of civilizations with advanced notions in agriculture, metallurgy, and industrial production, with diverse standardized manufacturing processes and pottery.

The origins of the Armenians have long been subject to debate among historians, linguists, and archaeologists. In the 1980s, linguists drew attention to the existence of many similarities between the Indo-European and Semitic languages. The only way to explain the linguistic similarities between these two linguistic groups would be to geographically move the cradle of the Indo-European linguistic groups farther east, to the Armenian plateau.

The Armenians and their plateau have been subject to various invasions. They witnessed Alexander the Great's expeditions toward the east. They fought the Roman legions and the Sassanid Persians, and in most cases lost. They stopped the Arabian expansion toward the north and provided emperors to the Byzantine throne. Having lost their own kingdom in the eleventh century to the invading Tartars and Seljuks, they managed to create a new kingdom farther south and west, in Cilicia, that flourished until 1375, playing a significant role during the Crusades. Then, they lost their last monarchy to the emerging Ottoman Empire, after the latter's westward expansion was stopped at the gates of Vienna. For more than two centuries, Armenia was devastated by the wars between two empires: the Iranian and the Ottoman. Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire also gained a foothold south of the Caucasus Mountains, defeating the Iranians and the Ottomans in a series of wars. The Armenian plateau thus became subject to the advances of three empires.

In late 1917 the Russian empire collapsed and its armies withdrew from the Caucasus front. Eastern or Russian Armenia was left unprotected and by the spring of the next year, the Turkish army was advancing toward the east, trying to reach the oil fields of Baku, on the Caspian Sea. Only a last-ditch effort at the gates of Yerevan saved the Armenians of the east (in Russian Armenia) from the fate of their western compatriots (in Turkey). After the victorious battles of Sardarapat and Bash-Aparan, the Turkish onslaught was contained and reversed, and Armenia declared its independence on 28 May 1918.

Independence, however, was short-lived. After two years, due to the increasing pressure of, on the one hand, advancing Kemalist Turkish forces, and on the other, the Bolsheviks, the small landlocked republic of Armenia was forced to sign treaties that led to the loss of its territories and to its becoming a Soviet republic. Soviet rule lasted seventy years.

Having essentially followed the same path as most other nations under Soviet rule, the Armenians welcomed the dawn of the glasnost era, proclaimed by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as a means to correct the decades-old injustices imposed upon them.

Armenians believed in glasnost, and framed their demands in its rhetoric. In February 1988 there were impressive demonstrations in Yerevan and Stepanakert (the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan) requesting the reunification of Karabakh with Armenia on the basis of self-determination rights. Following these demonstrations, on 28 May 1988, the seventeenth anniversary of the independence of Armenia was celebrated for the first time since Soviet rule. During the summer of 1988, mass demonstrations continued, followed by general strikes. In November 1988, Armenians were subjected to further massacres in Azerbaijan, leading to massive refugee problems. Emergency measures were established in both republics and Azerbaijan began a blockade of Armenia. The disastrous earthquake in Armenia on 7 December 1988 added to the existing refugee and economic problems. On 12 January 1989, a special commission to administer the Karabakh region, under the direct control of Moscow, was established. On 28 May 1989, the Soviet Armenian government recognized 28 May as the official anniversary of the republic of Armenia. During the summer of 1989, the Armenian National Movement acquired legal status, and held its first congress in November 1989. In January 1990, further Armenian massacres were reported in Baku and Kirovabad. During the spring elections, members of the Karabakh Committee, Soviet dissidents, came to power in parliamentary elections. The republic of Armenia gained its independence on 21 September 1991.

National Identity. The Armenian national identity is essentially a cultural one. From the historical depths of its culture and the dispersion of its bearers, it has acquired a richness and diversity rarely achieved within a single national entity, while keeping many fundamental elements that ensure its unity. Its bearers exhibit a strong sense of national identity that sometimes even clashes with the modern concept of the nation-state. It is an identity strongly influenced by the historical experiences of the Armenians. Events such as the adoption of Christianity as a state religion in 301 C.E. , the invention of the Armenian alphabet in 406 C.E. , and the excessively severe treatment at the hands of foreign powers at various times in its history have had a major impact.

Ethnic Relations. The republic of Armenia has thus far escaped the ethnic turmoil characterizing life in the post-Soviet republics. Minority rights are protected by law.

Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space

The great majority of Armenians in Armenia and in the Diaspora are urbanites. In the republic of Armenia, 68 percent live in urban areas with a population density of 286 persons per square mile (110.5 per square kilometer).

Food and Economy

Food in Daily Life. Staple foods are bread and salt. Harissa a traditional meal, consists of wheat grain and lamb cooked over low heat. Armenians everywhere love barbecued meats and vegetables. The pomegranate, with its symbolic association with fertility, is the national fruit. Armenia is also vine and grape country. When speaking of friendship, Armenians say "we have bread and salt among us." In the state protocol, when dignitaries are welcomed, bread and salt are presented.

Breakfasts on nonworking days are sometimes major get-together events. In huge pots khash is prepared, cattle legs are boiled and served with spices and garlic and consumed with Armenian brandy.

Basic Economy. Since its independence from the Soviet Union, Armenia has been focusing on small-scale agriculture. In 1992, the state-run industries, including agriculture, were immediately privatized as Armenia adopted a Western-style economic system.

Major Industries. During Soviet rule, Armenia began to develop and concentrate on computer-based high technology, alongside a manufacturing sphere, the production of brandy, heavy industry, and mining. The 1991 blockade of the country by Azerbaijan led to a fuel shortage that often left its industries at a standstill. Nuclear energy was shut down after the 1988 earthquake as well, but production was resumed after a few years for lack of other reliable sources of energy. The current trend in industrial development is toward small volume/high-value products such as diamond cutting and electronic components, since transportation is still a major problem for the landlocked republic.

Trade. Armenia has been subject to an economic blockade since the early 1990s by its neighboring countries, with the exception of Iran and Georgia. Trade relations are newly developing. Armenia exports woven and knit apparel; beverages, including brandy; preserved fruits; art and handicrafts; books; precious stones; metals; and electrical machinery.

Social Stratification

Classes and Castes. For several centuries until the end of monarchic historical Armenia in 1045 and Cilicia in 1375, there were aristocratic noble houses with their respective court-related responsibilities. Afterwards, the notion of a generalized middle class emerged. Most Armenians were peasants until the turn of the twentieth century. During the Soviet era, class was de-emphasized. A new elite had emerged, however, based on the nomenclature or system that prevailed during Soviet rule.

Political Life

Government. The republic of Armenia is a democratic constitutional state. A constitution was adopted by national referendum in July 1995. Parliamentary elections were held in July 1995 and May 1999. Presidential elections were held in March 1998.

In 1999, fifteen parties and six political blocs took part in parliamentary elections.

Leadership and Political Officials. Robert Kocharian was the second president elected in the republic of Armenia since its independence. There is an elected national assembly ( Azgayin Joghov ), or parliament. The cabinet is formed by a prime minister designated by the president.

Social Problems and Control. During Soviet rule, Armenia had followed Soviet criminal and civil law. Since independence, a new autonomous legal system has been developing. The post independence period has also witnessed a rise in awareness in the media of organized crime and sex service rings.

Military Activity. Gradually, an autonomous army and defense system are being developed. Armenia joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in March 1992 and signed the CIS Defense Treaty in May 1992.

Social Welfare and Change Programs

During the Soviet period, there was a well-established welfare system. Since then, the social welfare system has been affected by the economic crisis. Although the old age security system or pension is still in place, the amount of funding designated as monthly payment is not sufficient to maintain a subsistence living.

Nongovernmental Organizations and Other Associations

The number of organizations registered as of 31 December 1998 broke down as follows: seventy-six political parties, 1,938 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and 905 Media Outlets. The number of NGOs registered with the NGO Training and Resource Center totaled seven hundred.

Gender Roles and Statuses

Division of Labor by Gender. Armenian culture has historically stressed a division of domains among the sexes. The home/household is a woman's domain. The grandmother/mother-in-law was the manager of the household. Women and men both worked outside the home. In the domestic sphere, women had no choice when it came to the chores. It was their duty and responsibility to maintain the household.

The Relative Status of Women and Men. During the first republic of Armenia (1918–1920), women enjoyed equal voting and election rights. Four women were elected to the national parliament and one woman, Diana Apgar, became the ambassador to Japan. During the Soviet period, in spite of the legislation that stressed women's equality at all levels, women found it difficult to get into the higher decision-making processes. In 1991, during the first democratic elections in the newly independent republic of Armenia, women candidates won in only nine constituencies out of 240, representing only 3.6 percent of the parliament membership. None of the permanent parliamentary committees include any female members.

Marriage, Family, and Kinship

Marriage. Armenians are monogamous. In some cases, marriages are arranged. The accepted practice is to avoid marriage with close kin (of up to seven kin-distances). Because of housing shortages in Soviet Armenia, the new couple resided with the groom's family (patrilocality). The preference, however, has been and continues to be for neolocality, that is, the new couple forming a new household.

Domestic Unit. The married couple and their offspring constitute the domestic unit. During Soviet rule, the domestic unit consisted of a multi generational family. Often paternal grandparents, their married offspring, and unmarried aunts and uncles resided together. In pre-Soviet times, each region had its own preference. The most common domestic unit, however, was a patrilocal multi generational family.

Inheritance. Although inheritance laws have undergone changes and reforms over the years, historically, men and women have been treated equally. Diaspora Armenian communities follow the inheritance laws of their respective countries.

Kin Groups. Kin relations are bilateral. Descent, however, is determined by the patrilineal line.

Socialization

Child Rearing and Education. Women are considered to be the bearers and transmitters of culture, customs, and tradition and are seen as responsible for child rearing. Children are highly valued and they occupy the center of attention in households until they reach puberty. At puberty they are disciplined and are expected to take on responsibilities. Education is valued and is given great weight as an agent of socialization. In Armenia throughout the twentieth century, education was free and accessible to all. Because of privatization trends in the post reindependence period, however, there are fears that education may not remain accessible to all.

Higher Education. Armenia has stressed free access to education. A national policy directed at the elimination of illiteracy began in the first republic (1918–1920) and continued in Soviet times, resulting in a nearly 100 percent literacy rate. Women enjoy equal rights at all levels of education. A private higher education system was introduced in 1992. Although there is no discrimination on the basis of sex, some fields have become labeled "female." Of the students in the health-care field, 90 percent are women. In arts and education women constitute 78 percent of the students, in economics the number drops to 44.7 percent, for agriculture, 41 percent, and for industry, transportation, and communications, 40 percent.

Armenians put great emphasis on hospitality and generosity. There is also an emphasis on respect for guests.

Religious Beliefs. Christianity has been the state religion in Armenia since 301. During Soviet rule, religious expression was not encouraged. The emphasis was on atheism. Armenians had continued to attend church, however, in particular for life-crisis events and rites of passage. The majority of Armenians adhere to the Armenian Apostolic Church. There are also adherents to Catholic, Evangelical, and Protestant denominations.

The church has been a symbol of national culture. It has been seen as the home of Armenians and the bearer of Armenian culture.

Religious Practitioners. The Armenian Apostolic Church has two catholicosate sees: the Catholicos of All Armenians at Etchmiadzin, Armenia, and Cilicia, in Antelias, Lebanon. The two sees are organized differently. Each has its own educational system and hierarchy of priests. Among the Armenians there are celibate and married priests. There are also two patriarchates: one in Istanbul and another in Jerusalem. Women are not ordained into priest-hood. There is only one women's order: the Kalfayian sisters.

Death and the Afterlife. Most Armenians believe in the Christian vision of death and afterlife. The Apostolic Church, unlike some Christian institutions, does not put emphasis on sin and redemption. Likewise the notion of purgatory is absent. Armenians pay special attention to remembering the dead. After every mass, or badarak , there is a memorial service for the dead. The seventh day after death, the fortieth day, and annual remembrance are the accepted way of respecting the dead. Cemeteries are well kept. The communion between the living and the dead is seen in the frequent visits to the graves of loved ones. Food and brandy are served to the dead. The birthdays of dead loved ones are also celebrated.

Medicine and Health Care

Western medical practices are followed in the health sector. Until recently, medicine and health care were universal and state run. The introduction of a private health sector has been discussed. There are already a number of private clinics operating in the republic of Armenia. In addition, a few clinics operate under the sponsorship of Diaspora voluntary associations, such as the Armenian General Benevolent Union and the Armenian Relief Society.

Secular Celebrations

New Year's Eve (or Amanor, Nor Dari, or Gaghant/Kaghand) is a secular holiday. Other secular holidays include: Women's Day 7 April; the commemoration of the 1915 genocide of the Armenians 24 April; the Independence day of the first Armenian republic of 1918, and 28 May; the Independence Day of the current republic of Armenia, 21 September.

The Arts and Humanities

Support for the Arts. In the republic of Armenia, following the policies put forth during the pre-Soviet and Soviet eras, the state has been supporting the arts and humanities. In recent years, because of economic difficulties, there has been a privatization trend. State support is diminishing. In the Diaspora, the arts and humanities rely on local fund-raising efforts, Armenian organizations, and the initiative of individuals. In the republic of Armenia, artists are engaged full time in their respective arts. In the Diaspora, however, artists are rarely self-supporting and rarely make a living through their art.

Literature. Armenians have a rich history of oral and written literature. Parts of the early oral literature was recorded by M. Khorenatsi, a fourth-century historian. During the nineteenth century, under the influence of a European interest in folklore and oral literature, a new movement started that led to the collection of oral epic poems, songs, myths, and stories.

The written literature has been divided into five main epochs: the fifth century golden age, or vosgetar following the adoption of the alphabet; the Middle Ages; the Armenian Renaissance (in the nineteenth century); modern literature of Armenia and Constantinople (Istanbul) at the turn of the twentieth century; and contemporary literature of Armenia and the Diaspora. The fifth century has been recognized internationally as a highly productive epoch. It was also known for its translations of various works, including the Bible. In fact, the clergy have been the main producers of Armenian literary works. One of the most well-known early works is Gregory Narekatzi's Lamentations . During medieval times, a tradition of popular literature and poetry gradually emerged. By the nineteenth century, the vernacular of eastern (Russian and Iranian) Armenia became the literary language of the east, and the vernacular of Istanbul and western (Ottoman Turkish) Armenia became the basis of the literary rebirth for Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire.

Armenian literature has been influenced by European literary styles and movements. It also reflects the tragic history of its people. The 1915 genocide led to the death of the great majority of the Armenian writers of the time. The period immediately after the genocide was marked by a silence. Eventually there emerged a Diaspora literature with centers in Paris, Aleppo, and Beirut. In Soviet Armenia, the literary tradition followed the trends in Russia with a recognizable Armenian voice. Literature received the support of the Soviet state. A writers union was established. At the time of glasnost and perestroika, the emerging leaders belonged to the writers union.

Graphic Arts. Historically, Armenian art has been associated with architecture, bas-reliefs, stone engravings, steles, illuminated manuscripts, and tapestry. Since the Armenian Renaissance during the nineteenth century, interest in drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, pottery, needlework, and lace has intensified. During the Soviet period, graphic arts were particularly encouraged. A new Armenian style of bright colors emerged in painting. An interest in landscape painting, rustic images, a focus on rural life, and ethnographic genre paintings were noticeable in Soviet Armenia. A national art gallery houses the works of Sarian, M. Avedissian, Hagopian, Soureniantz, and other artists of the Soviet epoch. In the current republic, there are outdoor exhibits of newly emerging painters, and new private initiatives are being made.

Performance Arts. Armenia has a long tradition of musical art, dating back to prehistoric times, and Armenian musicians played a fundamental role in the modernization of oriental music during the nineteenth century. Armenian traditional music differs from its oriental counterparts by its sobriety.

The republic of Armenia has thus far continued the trend set in Soviet years. The opera house, the theaters, and the concert halls are the pride of Armenians and have remained highly accessible to the general public. Armenian folk, classic, and religious music, as well as its composers, such as Komitas and A. Khatchadourian, have been known throughout the world. The folk-dance ensembles have also been participating in various international festivals.

The State of Physical and Social Sciences

In the republic of Armenia, as in Soviet Armenia, as well as in the Armenian republic of 1918, the state has been the main support system for the physical and social sciences. There is a well-established Academy of Sciences, where the social sciences and humanities have been and are represented. In recent years Armenia has been experiencing a dramatic financial crisis. The state is unable to continue its support of research and development. There have been calls for Diaspora fund-raising support. International foundations have also been approached to provide financing.

Bibliography

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Aprahamian, S. "Armenian Identity: Memory, Ethnoscapes, Narratives of Belonging in the Context of the Recent Emerging Notions of Globalization and Its Effect on Time and Space." Feminist Studies in Aotearoa Journal 60 , 1999.

Armenia. National Report on the Conditions of Women , 1995.

Bauer-Manndorff, Elisabeth. Armenia, past and present. Translated by Frederick A. Leist, 1981.

Berndt, Jerry. Armenia: Portraits of Survival, 1994.

Bjorklund, Ulf. "Armenia Remembered and Remade: Evolving Issues in a Diaspora." Ethnos 58: 3-4, 335-360, 1993.

Cox, Caroline, and John Eibner. Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh, 1993.

Der Manuelian, Lucy, and Murray L. Eiland. Weavers, Merchants, and Kings: The Inscribed Rugs of Armenia. Edited by Emily J. Sano, 1984.

Der Nersessian, Sirarpie. The Armenians, 1969.

Hamalian, Arpi. The Armenians: Intermediaries for the European Trading Companies, 1976.

Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918, 1967.

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——, ed. The Armenian genocide in perspective, 1986.

——, ed. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, 1998.

Kasbarian, Lucine. Armenia: A Rugged Land, an Enduring People, 1998.

Kazandjian, Sirvart. Les origines de la musique Arménienne, 1984.

Khorenatsi, Moses. History of the Armenians. Translated by Robert W. Thomson, 1978.

Lang, David Marshall. Armenia: Cradle of Civilization, 1970.

——. The Armenians, a People in Exile, 1981.

Libaridian, J. Gerard, ed. Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era, 1991.

Lynch, H. F. B. Armenia, Travels and Studies, 2 vols., 1901.

Mandelstam, Osip. Journey to Armenia, Translated by Clarence Brown, 1980.

Marashlian, Levon. Politics and Demography: Armenians, Turks and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire, 1991.

Marsden, Philip. The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians, 2nd ed., 1995.

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Tashjian, Nouvart. Armenian Lace, Edited by Jules and Kaethe Kliot, 1982.

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Utudjian, Edouard. Armenian Architecture, 4th to 17th century. Translated by Geoffrey Capner. 1968.

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Walker, Christopher J. Armenia, the Survival of a Nation, rev. ed., 1990.

—S IMA A PRAHAMIAN WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF V IKEN A PRAHAMIAN

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What It Takes to Change Your Adopted Nation’s Foreign Policy

Armenian americans’ long fight for genocide recognition is a victory—and a cautionary tale.

Protestors during a 2019 march to commemorate the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. Courtesy of Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press.

by Kamyar Jarahzadeh  | August 12, 2021

In the media and in politicians’ minds, foreign policy often seems to take a backseat to other subjects such as the economy or social issues. But for the United States’ many immigrant communities, foreign policy is a kitchen-table topic—front of mind, almost all of the time, as they seek to influence the politics of their historic or former homelands.

From Tibetan Americans to Cambodian Americans to Palestinian Americans, many of these groups have rallied around causes, hoping to improve their homelands’ futures. Yet few have been as successful as the Armenian American community, which secured formal and explicit recognition of the Armenian Genocide from the Biden administration this year—the result of a single-minded, decades-long campaign that defied political obstacles, and reached across generations.

The Armenian American experience offers a crucial lesson to other U.S. immigrant groups working for change: Be patient, be persistent, and be prepared. The steadfast Armenian campaign for recognition needed the right set of circumstances to make its position an undeniable political reality—and when such openings for social change appeared, savvy activists in the diaspora capitalized on them, making such an outsized impact on the global stage. The U.S. government’s reversal on genocide recognition in April may have seemed sudden, but it was built on a century of cultural and political effort.

The cause célèbre for this community has been the pursuit of justice for the Armenian genocide. In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Turkish empire systematically killed or deported its Armenian population. Between 1915 and 1918, over 1 million Armenians perished. Soon after, the Ottoman government (and eventually, the Republic of Turkey) began a denial campaign that continues to this day, discouraging international recognition of the events as anything but an unfortunate but necessary instance of self-defense. The struggle to defeat this denialism provides a quintessential example of how power and entrenched political interests can stand in the way of justice. For over a century, it has fallen to survivors, their descendants, and the international community of human rights supporters to keep the memory of the genocide alive. At the very least, international recognition ensures a place in the historical memory for victims and survivors. Ideally, formal recognition can lay the groundwork for justice and restitution, similar to what was offered to survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The Armenian cause has always had an American dimension. The Armenian American community predated the genocide; even as the massacres were taking place, Armenians in the U.S. were already engaging the American government on the issue. The United States was involved in some of the policy failures that failed to prevent the massacres, and was also a player in contemporary relief efforts. Continually since the early 1900s, the U.S. has remained a leading immigration destination for survivors and their descendants who carry the torch of remembrance, and who have worked for official recognition of what happened.

From the get-go, geopolitical concerns created formidable obstacles. Successive U.S. administrations were hesitant to recognize the genocide; their priority was to preserve the U.S.-Turkish relationship as it was, with its supposed economic, political, and military benefits to both countries. The U.S. foreign policy establishment traditionally saw Turkey as a strategic geopolitical partner since the Cold War era, given the country’s location. And for decades, the Turkish government aggressively lobbied the U.S. government, identifying and supporting academics who shared and promoted the denialist stance, and manufacturing a false debate over the veracity of genocide claims.

Despite these roadblocks, Armenian Americans kept pushing for recognition. At first, these efforts—fundraisers, marches, and campaigns—were often helmed by survivors. Later, direct descendants took over. In 1981, Ken Khachigian—a White House speechwriter whose grandfather fled to America in advance of the Armenian genocide yet lost his grandmother in exile—wrote a Holocaust remembrance speech for Ronald Reagan that implicitly acknowledged the genocide, marking one of the first major instances of U.S. government recognition of the genocide. After significant backlash from the Turkish government, the U.S. government—particularly the State Department—walked back the remarks given political concerns at the time. Reagan and the State Department further disavowed those remarks throughout the 1980s, much to the ongoing chagrin of then California governor George Deukmejian—himself of Armenian descent. Deukmejian, a strong supporter of Reagan, was public about his disappointment but failed to elicit a change of heart among his peers.

Yet advocates marched on, using other domains to keep the cause alive. At the local level, community leaders facilitated protests, and advocated for state- and city-level recognitions of the genocide across the U.S. One of the key Armenian lobbies maintains a list of hundreds of instances of acknowledgment, ranging from a memorial in New Jersey in 1965 , an affirmation by the French National assembly in 1985 , almost yearly state assembly resolutions in California from the 1980s onward.

On the cultural stage, successive generations of Armenian American artists also mainstreamed genocide recognition, relegating denial to the fringes. Nearly every Armenian American artist who gained mainstream popularity—from mid-20th-century author William Saroyan to the still-active metal band System of a Down to pop icon Cher—has engaged in some kind of public advocacy on the issue, or touched on the genocide question through their art.

Ultimately these local and cultural gains coincided with a shifting global context that made U.S. federal recognition of the genocide possible. Starting in the 2000s and driven largely by the cumulative power of these global advocacy campaigns, many governments in Europe and South America began issuing official recognitions of the genocide—and suffered few, if any, geopolitical repercussions. For all its bluster, the Turkish government could not make good on its promises to punish countries that challenged its denialism. National genocide recognitions, even if they were walked back or met with strong rebukes from Turkey, typically ended in little more than the recall of an ambassador.

Realpolitik became a factor, too. Today, Turkey is no longer the strategic U.S. ally it once was, as that relationship has been strained. Turkey has turned away from the U.S. in favor of stronger relations with Russia and China, while there has been a declining American appetite for engagement in the region. Genocide recognition became a safe—even, potentially, beneficial—political move. The bargaining chip of recognition was replaced with an opportunity for countries to demonstrate their (however belated) commitment to human rights.

Of course, despite the U.S.’s changed course on genocide recognition, the path to true justice for the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide remains unclear. If we look at the history of similar crimes against humanity, acknowledgment is supposed to be just the first step in a long and painful process toward reconciliation for survivors and their descendants. But it is highly unlikely that attitudes in Turkey will ever shift towards acknowledgment or reconciliation. The issue continues to be a flashpoint in contemporary Turkish politics. Today the ethnic cleansing of minorities is a point of pride for some of the country’s right-wing ideologues. Recently, one Turkish politician made headlines when he posted—in advance of Biden’s genocide recognition—a celebratory tweet lauding the masterminds of the Armenian genocide. He noted that Turkey is ready to proudly “ do it again ”— it being the supposedly non-existent Armenian genocide. In the face of outcry from a Turkish Armenian parliament member, he again threatened a repeat of the genocide.

Recognition of Armenia’s woes by the U.S. stemmed entirely from tireless and multigenerational advocacy, sustained for over a century. But to turn recognition into something more tangible, Armenian Americans will have to keep up the fight—offering yet another lesson for immigrant groups in the U.S. seeking influence on the world beyond. Picking one’s battles is a key question for immigrant groups, and that too was a point of contention for the Armenian community. Some critics of genocide recognition have expressed concern that if the Turkish government refuses to engage the issue, there may not be any value in creating international controversy. A notable critic of the focus on genocide recognition was Turkish Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink, who took massive steps to end the taboo on Armenian issues in the 1990s and 2000s in Turkey. While he was a fearless supporter of Armenians and other minority groups, he believed the obsession with recognition would come at the expense of cross-cultural dialogue. His political project was monumental, and is credited with opening in civic space in Turkey and breaking the taboo on the Armenian question. Yet his untimely assassination at the hands of a Turkish nationalist in 2007 was a cruel testament to the powerful potential of his message.

Waging a campaign for international recognition of a human rights issue is time-intensive, costly, and can be nearly all-encompassing for an immigrant community. But one cannot underestimate the historical and rhetorical benefits of international acknowledgment for crimes against humanity. Recognition offers a chance to firmly correct the record and bring an end to dangerous—and persistent—attempts at historical revisionism. In the Armenian case, the annual commemoration of the genocide leads denial groups in the United States to put up billboards , support scholars who falsely refute the killings, and even promote dancing flash mobs to erase the genocide from history or shift blame onto the Armenian community.

Genocide recognition was never a given for the global Armenian community, even though the people’s struggles have become the flagship issue associated with the violence of the late 19th century. Many instances of ethnic cleansing from that era have faded from view. The Ottoman Empire and early governments of the Turkish Republic committed atrocities against a range of minority communities, including ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Assyrian and Pontic Greek communities concurrent with the Armenian genocide. Other immigrant groups in the United States—not yet able to draw attention to their cause—may feel their own historical struggles are already in danger of erasure.

For all its triumphs, the ongoing story of the United States’ approach to the Armenian genocide poses a cautionary tale for other immigrant communities in the U.S. affected by genocide. What does it take for communities to get their issues on the U.S. agenda, particularly in the face of entrenched political norms? This question looms not just for historic injustices but also for ongoing atrocities, such as the genocide of the Rohingya community in Myanmar, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China. Many other immigrant groups in the United States are far smaller than the Armenian community, and may face even steeper hurdles as they try to change their own political realities. But without a doubt, supporters of human rights should heed the lessons of the Armenian case: recognition requires tireless commitment from survivor communities. It is only that commitment that can keep the prospect of justice alive.

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American Armenians’ History, Culture, Religion Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

One of the ethnic communities in the US with its own history and a set of cultural and religious traditions is the Armenian community. This paper’s objective is to examine the peculiarities of the cultural and religious background of the Armenian ethnic minority, history of its development, and features of the cultural events inside the community. The paper is also to analyze the preconceptions and biases associated with the community on the basis of the interview with a community member.

Contextual background: demographics and history

American Armenians represent a strong ethnic minority community in the US. The distribution of the families with the Armenian ancestry is not even around the different states. In total, there are nearly a million of people of Armenian ethnicity in America. However, despite the fact that the approximate number of the American citizens with the Armenian ancestry in Arizona is nearly 2,500 households the community manages to preserve its historical, cultural, and religious identity (Griffiths, 2008). Considering the history of the Armenian nation, it may be the overcoming the hardship that helped this ethnic community to protect their national and cultural values and beliefs while integrating into the American society.

For the immigrant communities in the US and their descendants, there are a number of issues concerning the assimilation to the society while trying to preserve the cultural identity and traditions of their ethnic roots. The socialization and affiliating with the American most common lifestyle, as well as functioning in the society with the different cultural values imposes some boundaries on the process of recognition of the cultural heritage. That often concerns the background of preserving unity in terms of religious, linguistic and customary aspects. Also, the cultural identity of the ethnic or immigrant groups can often be lost because of their uneven geographical spread, or lack of geographical unity, when their local communities are too small to keep them together. In this respect, the communities of the American Armenians represent an interesting example of the geographical integration.

Usually, the immigrants of the Armenian ancestry in the US tend to settle near the groups of their ethnicity. Thus, the diaspora is unevenly represented throughout different states, but they have powerful communities in the places where they settle. Perhaps, the tendency of forming the little communities where they can sustain the traditional cultural environment is one of the main distinctions of the cultural group of American Armenians. It also helps them to promote their culture among the descendants of the Armenian ancestry and to organize work of getting the general public more familiar with their culture.

Thus, the important issue, in this respect, is the Armenian cultural heritage and historical background. Originally, the homeland of Armenians, today the Republic of Armenia, is situated in Asia Minor, just in-between two historical regions of Europe and the Middle East. Culturally, it has been influenced by its different neighbors because the country is small in size and, therefore, was many times throughout history under the impact of more powerful political bodies. The identity of the country was formed before around either 7th or 6th century BC from the tribes that inhabited the area. Thus, the Armenian civilization has developed its culture and history for a long time, and being invaded by the different other historical states and civilizations; it has adopted some cultural features from Romans, Greeks, Persians, Macedonians, Byzantine and Ottoman Empire. The most important of those cultural influences was, of course, the Christian religion (Takooshian, 2015).

Christianity as the national religion of the kingdom of Armenia was adopted in the year 301, even before the existence of the Byzantine Empire and Emperor Constantine. Over the years, various influences in the spheres of cultural and religious life tried to diminish the significance of this event. For example, during the invasions by Persians, the national identity and practice of the Christianity were suppressed. Whereas during the reign of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire in Armenia, the national culture and religion prospered, the Soviet governance of the country reduced the role of the national culture in the public life again. The Armenian Apostolic Church that was formed in the county and is recognized as belonging to the Oriental Orthodox branch of Christianity (Griffiths, 2008).

It remains today an important component of the national beliefs and values, together with those notions that were acquired in the process of interacting with the other culture, different assimilations. In the case of the American Armenians, the cultural concept formed among the descendants of the Armenian ancestry molded in the course of immigration and adapting to another culture.

Thus, another important aspect is the history of the immigration of Armenians to the United States. There are numerous diasporas of Armenians around the world, but the beginning of their immigration to the United States dates back to the end of the 19th century. It was the phase of the violent nationalistic times in Turkey, where many Turkish Armenians lived, during the period after the Ottoman Empire began to lose its power and influence.

The Armenian minorities were perceived as the non-Muslim infidels because of their Orthodox Christian faith, which resulted in massacres on the ethnic and religious grounds, and the genocide of a million Armenians during the World War I. During those times, Turkish Armenians united and formed a republican state in the northeast direction to Turkey. Since the newly formed country, who just lost thousands of Armenians, was threatened by the Turkish nationalistic army, they accepted the protection of the Soviet Russia. The latter became a significant political influence in Armenia for the major part of the 20th century. All of those events combined became the reason for the massive immigration of Armenians to the United States of America and worldwide (Takooshian, 2015).

Nevertheless, the Armenian immigration to the US had certain stages and was determined by a number of factors that influenced the formation of the Armenian descendants cultural values. This process can be divided into three main waves: the first one consisted of Turkish Americans who left the Ottoman Empire before WWI, the second one took place after the massacres of 1915-1920 when the short period more than 30,000 Armenians, including professionals and skilled workers, fled their homeland (Mead, 1978).

The third wave was the longest, and it represents the most complicated case. It started after the World War II, as the result of Armenian minorities forced out of Turkey initially into the Middle East. Then because of tendencies of nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism in Arab countries, many Armenians were driven away “first from Egypt, then Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran” (Takooshian, 2015).

This wave of immigration took the longest time and brought to the asylum in the United States most of the Armenian-ancestry population. Because Armenia was always a small county, and among some other nations the Armenians were suppressed, the immigrants settled in the US unevenly, choosing such cities as Los-Angeles and Philadelphia as their primary destination. Nevertheless, in the course of time, some of the Armenian immigrants’ descendants moved deeper into the country, including local communities in Arizona.

However, we cannot still suggest that the third wave of immigration is over. There are signs of the constant increase of the American Armenians in different communities around the US. The reason for that lies in the political and cultural background, as well as the unstable situation in the region. However, it is all the more important to analyze the principles of cultural assimilation of the ethnic community of American Armenians and to analyze the challenges and issues that the society faces in this case.

Contextual background: values and religious beliefs

The Armenian Apostolic Church that was formed in the county and is recognized as belonging to the Oriental Orthodox branch of Christianity. It is one of the oldest branches amongst the Christian communities. Its founders were apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus. It has been quite influential in the area of its origin, even though it was surrounded mostly by the countries with Islam as their major religion.

That is the reason why the religious beliefs are one of the grounds for the unity of the ethnic Armenians and the Armenian immigrants descendants throughout the world. In Arizona, the religious community of the Armenian Apostolic Church attends St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church of Arizona. Apart from being the major cultural symbol of Armenians in the state, this church also organizes various cultural events for everyone who wants to attend them, is engaged in the charity work, and helps the community to celebrate different religious and mundane holidays. The activities of the St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church include opening the sanctuary in Scottsdale, and different fundraising events for various charity initiatives (Griffiths, 2008).

The role of the St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church for the American Armenians of Arizona cannot be overlooked. 80 per cent of the Armenians practicing religion belong the Orthodox Church. The church was chosen as a place for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the formation of an Armenian community in the state (Griffiths, 2008).

It is one of the means to preserve the cultural identity of the community, and it provides a great insight into the Armenian culture and the shared beliefs for those who wants to find out more about it. Furthermore, and most importantly, the St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church, as well as other Armenian Orthodox Churches, does not impose any major restrictions and dogmas concerning the lifestyle and social issues of its followers, including their sexuality or birth control, and it certainly does not portend to make an impact on non-Armenians.

Nevertheless, the life of the Armenian community in America could not be possible without socialization and cultural assimilation in some aspects. The important nuance here is that the general cultural background of the Christian values, as well as being the immigrants because of the political and religious reasons provides the Armenian community with the system of beliefs and values that resonate with the American culture.

In this respect, it is important that there are no reasons for any cultural conflicts or misunderstandings. Moreover, the boundaries that separate such smaller communities are mostly imposed by their members. In fact, there substantial differences throughout the Armenian population in the US concerning their perception of their own social status, including the division between people of different ethnicities. Those boundaries can only appear because of the Armenian historical heritage that formed some of their beliefs of the social worlds and interactions with other nations and cultures (Mead, 1978).

Historically speaking, many Armenians lived among the nations with the different religious backgrounds, mostly among the Muslims, in the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey, and alongside various Middle Eastern ethnicities. That fact formed the presupposition in the historical memory of the Armenian nation. Thus, the mental separation from some American cultural that can be occasionally observed in the Armenian community is a result of the externally imposed factors of the historical nature.

However, those tendencies are the prerogative of the elder generations of the American Armenians, mostly the immigrants of the second or the beginning of the third waves of immigration. The reason for the positive dynamics in the sphere of the cultural socialization is connected with the development and recognition of the national identity and freedom of the community, where the descendants of the Armenian ancestry can equally participate within and outside its borders (Bakalian, 1993).

Observations during the cultural event and associated preconceptions

The St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church is known to organize the events to the celebration of the various occasions, including the St. Valentine’s Day. This year, however, it was on the same day as the Feast of Candlemas, one of the religious holidays of the Orthodox Church. There were no events at the Armenian Educational and Social Center, but the evening service at the church itself provide deep insight into the perception of their cultural and religious heritage by the American Armenians. The event seemed more of a social gathering of the members of the community rather than mysterious religious service.

This fact immediately ruined the misconception about the way the services in the Armenian Orthodox Church take place. Since Armenia is located quite close to the Middle East, people unfamiliar with this culture would expect the ceremony to have more oriental hints. However, there was not a lot of oriental motives, and overall, the event seemed more celebratory than solemn or gloomy. However, because of the fact that, at the time, all the Orthodox Churches had the Great Lent, the ceremony was kept quite plain and undemanding.

The main preconception of the St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church as the place that would be unwelcoming to strangers was ruined as well. It may be a close ethnic minority community in terms of how its members usually settle in the same block and districts, but it is socially open to the outsiders of the ethnic group.

Talking about the social parameters of the people who attended the event, there were American Armenians of the entirely different backgrounds in terms of age, gender, and social status. It underlines the important aspect that American Armenian people, despite the social differences, preserve their culture. In many ways, it describes the psychology of the national identity. Because of the historical memory of the nation, the tragedy of the genocide, and the habit of living alongside the nations with the diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, the community of the American Armenians tends to stay close together, yet is not unfriendly to the strangers (Bakalian, 1993).

Another important observation concerned the fact that children at the event at the church seemed very respectful to the parents. However, from the point of view of an observer, it seemed not like the obedience when the child is, in some ways, suppressed by the adults authority or out of fear, but listening to the elders out of respect. The reason for such value system can also be found in the fact that nationalities, such as Armenian and Jewish represent the cultures, in which the children are less rebellious since they both has been at the edge of the extinction (Mead, 1978).

This fact also has the reflection on the workplace behavior and any other kinds of the social interactions that need the feeling of commitment and the ability to follow instructions. Due to this, despite a certain level of isolating the communities, the American Armenians are improving the situation in the education and social status of the community members. For example, more than 80 percent of the children with the Armenian ancestry plan to go to college, and a significant part of the community speak English not only in social situations but also at home, which was not previously a tendency.

Results of the interview revealed challenges, and considerations for the practical application

The interview revealed that there are some challenges concerning the perception of the community of American Armenians in the society. Alongside the already mentioned association with the Middle Eastern countries, the community is also often attributed a connection to the former Soviet countries and the values associated with the USSR. However, in the opinion of the interviewee, the identity of her group has nothing to do with the values of the neighboring countries of Armenia.

In spite of the fact that the interviewee admitted that the community of the American Armenians is quite diverse within itself, and people in her ethnic group have different everyday occupations, there are societal restrictions that challenge expressing the national identity. For example, the American Armenians of different social classes have different levels of freedom in expressing their cultural identity. The descendants of the second and third generation of the Armenian immigrants from the well-off families with a higher social are more proud of their cultural heritage (Bakalian, 1993).

The community is acculturated in Arizona, and there is a positive level of interaction with the other social groups, but some of the members of the ethnic group feel insecure in the social institutions or the workplace because of their ancestry. The reason for this problem lies in the misconceptions and lack of the cultural knowledge in the society. This problem requires special attention in the workplaces and at the schools with a high level of diversity.

The Armenian civilization developed its culture and history in the process of interaction with other nations, which reflected on the exceptional unity amongst the community of the American Armenians. Some of the important aspects of the system of values in this ethnic community come from the religious background since 80 % of all the Armenians practicing religion adhere the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is recognized as a branch of Orthodox Christianity.

The Armenian Orthodox Church does not impose guidance on its followers in questions concerning their lifestyle. Apart from religious influences, the life of the Armenian community in America would not be possible without socialization. Despite generally molding in with the majority of the population, there are some challenges for the American Armenians of different social classes since they have different levels of freedom in expressing their cultural identity.

The interview with the member of the community revealed that some of the members of the ethnic group feel insecure in the social institutions or the workplace because of their ancestry. Therefore, this issue needs to be addressed both from the inside the community and on the outside, in the workplaces and social institutions, where people of the different cultural ancestries interact.

Bakalian, A. (1993). Armenian-Americans . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Griffiths, L. (2008). Arizona’s Armenian Christian community turns 50. The East Valley Tribune . Web.

Mead, M. (1978). Culture and commitment: The new relationships between the generations in the 1970s . New York, NY: Anchor Press.

Takooshian, H. (2015). Armenian Americans . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, July 22). American Armenians' History, Culture, Religion. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-armenians-history-culture-religion/

"American Armenians' History, Culture, Religion." IvyPanda , 22 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/american-armenians-history-culture-religion/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'American Armenians' History, Culture, Religion'. 22 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. "American Armenians' History, Culture, Religion." July 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-armenians-history-culture-religion/.

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Bibliography

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American Armenian Lifestyle Dilemma: Choices and Overload

In the diaspora, we live a dual identity existence. It is the hyphenated reality. In this country, we enjoy the freedom of the benchmark democracy of the modern world and have built a strong sustainable national heritage presence. The first 70 years of our post-genocide life was about building infrastructure and making the generational transfer from the survivors to those born in the diaspora. Since the independence of Armenia in 1991 and essentially since the earthquake in 1988, the diaspora has embraced an additional responsibility of assisting in the nation building process of a young democracy in Armenia after decades of oppression.

Life within the US diaspora is constantly full of challenges. We use convenient terms such as “diaspora,” but the existence and maintenance of the institution are complex and dependent on the continuous commitment of those who define it. At the core of these concerns is the ability to sustain what has been built for multiple generations. Parents worry about their children retaining their heritage; institutions are concerned about sustainability along with other threatening factors. Sociologists maintain that ethnic identity diminishes in a dispersed state after the first native born generation, beginning with the reduced use of the mother tongue and limited attraction to the infrastructural institutions such as the church and cultural groups. Armenians seem to have defied this logic with the fourth and fifth generations born on these shores. Certainly our clannish nature has been a contributor as Armenians almost obsessively look for each other wherever they settle. Another factor has been the continuous pattern of immigration that replenishes the depleted ranks due to assimilation. The migration of Armenians from Egypt in the late 50s and 60s and Lebanon and Syria in the late 60s and 70s provided the American Armenian community with a boost in active participants who filled many needs in the linguistic, cultural and political domains. This has “hidden” some of the obvious impact of second, third and fourth generations born in America. The last 20 years have seen immigrants from Baku and Armenia bring “reinforcements” to these shores. A third factor has certainly been the presence of a centralized institution such as the church that has provided access and diverse programming. These are some of the “Armenian” factors in our American-based life that have provided sustenance to our communities and identity. As a “hyphenated” community, we are also subject to the societal risks in our places of residence.

Regardless of the demographic makeup of the community in America (particularly in the eastern regions), our people live their lives in an American and Armenian reality. Unlike the west coast (especially Los Angeles), a small percentage of Armenian children in the eastern region attend Armenian day schools. The vast majority of families send their children to the public schools, or perhaps American private schools, and live in communities sparsely populated by Armenians. The Armenian life is a Friday-Sunday existence. This is when AYF meetings, ACYOA meetings, church services and Armenian family life take place. Of course, there are exceptions, but generally most of the pertinent activity is in the weekend window. It has been this way for years and, if anything, has become more challenging.

I grew up in a small town with no Armenians and was an American kid during the week. On Friday, we morphed into Armenians as activities flourished and family gatherings were plentiful. There were fewer time conflicts, but our parents made our faith and heritage a priority. On Monday, the reverse would take place. Our non-Armenian friends knew they we were rarely available on weekends as it was “Armenian time.” It worked well primarily because life was more simple back then, but the decision to participate still resided in the family. The alternatives were limited. Since that time, we have become more dispersed. Affluence and fear have driven Armenians further away from their traditional cultural centers. We may have lived in a town with no Armenians, but we were five to ten minutes from the church. Today, many travel 30 to 60 minutes, or they don’t make the trip at all. This requires our community to adopt new approaches to outreach, or we will accelerate assimilation. This has been the subject of past columns and will continue to be a central theme.

Let’s take a closer look at how lifestyles have changed for the typical American Armenian family. Two generations ago, most couples married in their early 20s, and children came shortly thereafter. Today, it is clear that with undergraduate education assumed and advanced degrees common, “settling in life” happens much later, typically in their 30s. With their personal lives maturing at a different rate, participating in Armenian community life takes on a different curve also. Most of the younger people that I have met are bright, educated and innovative but not typically “joiners” of organizations. There are a few core reasons. One frequently mentioned and again the subject of continuing dialogue is their identity with these legacy organizations. The organizations that are making the generational transfer have either managed to “reinvent” themselves for this generation without compromising their mission or establish entirely new groups that fit the social/flexible lifestyle of this generation. The AGBU YP and Armenian network groups are examples that have appeal. Legacy groups like the Armenian Relief Society (ARS) have also had success with smart recruiting. Others such as Homenetmen connect with immigrant families who identify with their previous locations.

Another contributor which is more problematic is the impact on the American family in today’s society. Face to face communication has been replaced by technology because it serves our craving for more efficiency. There was a time not too long ago when families sat at a table together for dinner. They didn’t simply satisfy their hunger, but also shared what was going on in their lives. Some call it bonding. It was an integral part of the family culture. This rarely happens today, because schedules are so overloaded that common time is a rarity. In fact, we have designed shared meals today out of our kitchens with the introduction of the “island” and “peninsula” that operate more like a diner counter with your parents as the short order cook. Many young people today use their “phones” primarily for non-verbal communication such as texting, social media and surfing the internet. Refrigerator doors have become more than a  climate barrier to your food. They are a bulletin board of your life. “Free time” is considered wasteful, and we wonder why anxiety and stress are problematic.

Is there any time left for God and our heritage?

There is no doubt that parenting is more challenging and far more complicated. Parents are more involved in the educational system. Peer pressure is significant and constant. Time is in short supply, and exhaustion is common. Despite our sociological changes, the basic role of parents to prepare their children for the future remains intact. We must acknowledge that we cannot decouple these behavioral lifestyle choices from the impact on participation in the Armenian community. With the complexity of our lives, our choices are forced into short term horizons. Is there any time left for God and our heritage? By the time the weekend arrives, families work to get caught up. Between entering family life later and the incredible density of commitments, community participation takes an unintended backseat. What is the long term impact of this dilemma? The most damaging aspect of this challenge is that we are not addressing it as a community. A serious discussion about the choices we make and collective support would make us all stronger and more effective. There is no avoiding it. If we choose to ignore the issues, we will continue to be a communal victim. Immigration is also not a cure. The children of immigrants from Armenia or the Middle East are generationally comparable to my father’s generation — the first born in this country from the survivors. As the generations continued, the impact of the American lifestyle has taken effect. The same will happen with successive generations of more recent arrivals. They simply are operating in a different window. The exceptions are those who are strong enough to do it all or have made conscious decisions to prioritize their faith and heritage. This is the core cause of why we see less students in our Sunday Schools and wide variations in attendance week to week. Choices!

Is it possible that our faith and heritage are simply not important to a growing segment of our community in the diaspora? If that is true, then we are failing. Leadership is required, but this week we are talking about the other side of the equation: the choices we make as parents. How can we help our friends, relatives and siblings make the right choices? We shouldn’t patronize those we care about; instead, we should have difficult discussions that will make their lives happier. That is respect and love.

One question I ask myself constantly is how do we convince people in their prime parenting years to be concerned about their legacy and impact? When you are older or become grandparents, we all think about the next generation and what we are leaving behind. This applies to family life but also to community life. Who thinks about their legacy when they are 40? Not many people I suspect, but that is when you have the greatest impact on your most significant gift to the future — your children. We all make mistakes parenting. It is the classic “earn while you learn” job. When my children were of youth sports age, I was active as a coach. One year, the leagues (basketball and baseball) faced a shortage of facilities and an increase of players. The leagues proposed Sunday morning games. I was deeply committed to the sports, but they had crossed a red line with me. I informed them that my son and I would not participate in any games Sunday morning. It was not one of my most popular comments. After vigorous debate and a few awkward moments, they found a solution by scheduling later in the day to avoid the Sunday morning. The league committed to no games before 2 pm. Our son developing a relationship with God and the Armenian church was of paramount importance. There were a few things I didn’t handle well, but that’s one that I am convinced made a difference in the life of our now married father of two next generation American Armenians. We always need to keep what is important in front of us. But how do we know what is important? This is where friendships and communal interaction can be beneficial. We can’t go through this alone. The overload feeling we fall into is not success. Make the choices with balance based on what is in the long term interests of your child’s development and your family’s happiness.

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“The leagues proposed Sunday morning games. I was deeply committed to the sports, but they had crossed a red line with me. I informed them that my son and I would not participate in any games Sunday morning.”

Stepan tsakis, I always felt I was the only person who felt that way.

It is nice to know there are others with the same mindset.

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Books | How ‘We Are All Armenian’…

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Books | how ‘we are all armenian’ collection gives voice to a range of experiences, editor aram mrjoian collects essays from 18 writers, all of whom have armenian ancestry, that offer different perspectives on ethnicity and identity. .

Regardless of the type of story being told, Mrjoian saw writers commenting on the Armenian Genocide and ensuing population displacement. He perceived a “constant demand for context, particularly historic context” within the varied works, though he understood the reason for it. 

“At least in my own experience, that was often an editorial demand coming not from my own writing but from the sense of what editors are looking for,” said the writer, who is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books and associate fiction editor at Guernica, during a recent phone call. 

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With that in mind, Mrjoian wanted to develop a project where Armenian writers didn’t have to explain Armenian history over and over again. And now it’s here: “We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora,” just published by the University of Texas Press, brings together essays from 18 writers who have Armenian ancestry and offer different perspectives on ethnicity and identity to the collection. 

“All of them understood the assignment right away,” says Mrjoian. “Even though I didn’t give anyone specific subject matter, all the essays came back completely different, which was really exciting.”

While the history of the Armenian Genocide might not be something that always needs to be explained, it’s part of what makes this collection important and necessary, says novelist Chris Bohjalian, author of such books as “The Sandcastle Girls,” “Midwives” and “The Flight Attendant.”

“Of the roughly ten million Armenians on the planet, fewer than 30 percent live in Armenia. Most of us are descendants of survivors of a Genocide who were robbed of everything, including their — our — homeland. We are a diaspora people,” says Bohjalian   in an email interview . “Moreover, because there are so few of us on the planet, we are a people who live on a tightrope: if we fall too far to one side, we risk assimilation and the loss of our heritage. If we fall to the other, we risk cultural banishment and remain forever the outsiders.”

Explaining why he decided to participate in the project, Bohjalian says this: “I cannot stress enough the demographic cataclysm today of having perhaps as many as three-fourths of our ancestors in the Ottoman Empire exterminated a little over a century ago. Our homeland, including Artsakh, is beleaguered both by the simple fact we are badly outnumbered by nation-states to the east and west that still do not want us to exist, and by the reality that it’s hard to get Western nations to pay attention to us. Try explaining the Lachin corridor linking Artsakh with Armenia to someone in, for instance, Washington, D.C. who cannot even find Armenia on a map or is unaware of the Armenian Genocide.”

Moreover, while Mrjoian was working on the book, a major event brought the historical context into the spotlight. In the fall of 2020, the 44-Day War (or the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War) over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Artsakh mobilized those in the global Armenian diaspora and rekindled calls for wider recognition of the Armenian Genocide. 

“At that time, too, I was putting everything together, writing my introduction, thinking this changes the way I write an introduction,” Mrjoian recalls, “This changes the way that people are going to read these essays.”

Moreover, the struggle didn’t end with a ceasefire. Since December 2022, the Armenians of Artsakh have been living under a blockade, as Azerbaijan closed off the Lachin Corridor, effectively leaving an estimated 120,000 people without access to food, medicine and other essentials. Despite calls from world leaders and international human rights organizations for Azerbaijan to end the blockade, it persisted through the winter and is still ongoing. 

But that’s not all that may change how readers digest these essays. In early February, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit portions of Turkey and Syria. The devastation includes regions of both countries that have been historic homes to Armenians and where there are still Armenian populations. 

In his essay, “Going Home Again,” Bohjalian writes of his own travels to Turkey, specifically his ancestral hometown of Kayseri. 

In our email interview, Bohjialian notes that, while he hasn’t heard of much damage to Kayseri as a result of the earthquake, he has previously visited cities that were severely impacted, like Adana, Gaziantep, Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa. 

“Among the small moments of grace in the devastation is this: the restored Armenian church in Diyarbakir, Surp Giragos, has been sheltering homeless earthquake survivors the past few weeks. (It experienced very little damage.),” he writes. “Surp Giragos is among the most beautiful churches I’ve seen anywhere. In January, it was a symbol for people who lost everything in 1915; in February, it became a haven for people who lost everything in 2023.”

Overall, though, the essays within “We Are All Armenian” point to the varied experiences within the diaspora. “Because we’re a global diaspora, we’re all experiencing elements of culture, elements of religion, food, philosophy, language differently in different parts of the world,” says Mrjoian. “It’s not going to look the same. It’s kind of hyper-local.”

And the breadth of experiences — including those who are multiethnic, multiracial and LGBTQ+, as well as those who didn’t grow up embedded in Armenian communities and don’t speak the language — is important to consider. Mrjoian says that he hopes the book might prompt conversations about inclusivity regarding ethnic heritage. 

“You can’t dictate that one person has a right to their heritage and one doesn’t,” says Mrjoian. “I’m hoping that when an audience sees this, they’ll see that it’s really meant to welcome people in and maybe some of the conversations around it might be difficult, but those conversations hopefully help us move forward and progress.”

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Norms, narratives, and scholarship on the armenian genocide.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2015

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse as sözde Ermeni sorunu (the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as 1915 olayları (the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

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Author's note: I thank Taner Akçam, Ayhan Aktar, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Keith David Watenpaugh, and the IJMES editors for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

1 Norms are defined as “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity.” See Katzenstein , Peter J. , “ Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security ,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics , ed. Katzenstein , Peter J. ( New York : Columbia University Press , 1996 ), 5 Google Scholar .

2 Dixon , Jennifer M. , “ Defending the Nation?: Maintaining Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide ,” South European Society and Politics 15 ( 2010 ): 467 –85 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Dixon , “ Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide: Change within Continuity ,” in Le Génocide des Arméniens: Cent ans de recherche 1915–2015 , ed. Becker , Annette et al. ( Paris : Armand Colin , 2015 ), 249 –56 Google Scholar .

3 See, for example, Bobelian , Michael , Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice ( New York : Simon & Schuster , 2009 ), 132 Google Scholar .

4 On Armenians' use of the term “genocide,” see Mouradian , Khatchig , “ From Yeghern to Genocide: Armenian Newspapers, Raphael Lemkin, and the Road to the UN Genocide Convention ,” Haigazian Armenological Review 29 ( 2009 ): 133 Google Scholar .

5 For an example of the argument that genocide is a legal concept, see Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Turkey, “Presentation by Ambassador Gündüz Aktan at the House Committee on International Relations on September 14, 2000,” accessed 2 June 2015, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/presentation-by-ambassador-gunduz-aktan-at-the-house-committee-on-international-relations-on-september-14_-2000_.en.mfa .

6 Akçam , Taner , The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire ( Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , 2012 ), xxix Google Scholar . For work that emphasizes the similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, see Dadrian , Vahakn N. , “ The Common Features of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Comparative Victimological Perspective ,” in Victimology: A New Focus , vol. 4 , ed. Drapkin , Israel and Viano , Emilio ( Lexington, Mass .: Lexington Books , 1973 ), 99 – 120 Google Scholar ; Dadrian , The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus ( New York : Berghahn Books , 1995 ) Google Scholar ; and Balakian , Peter , The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response ( New York : HarperCollins , 2003 ) Google Scholar .

7 On economic expropriation, see Kaiser , Hilmar , “ Armenian Property, Ottoman Law and Nationality Policies during the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1916 ,” in The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean , ed. Farschid , Olaf , Kropp , Manfred , and Dähne , Stephan ( Beirut : Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag , 2006 ), 49 – 71 Google Scholar ; Der Matossian , Bedross , “ The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of Armenian Capital at the End of the Ottoman Empire ,” European Journal of Turkish Studies ( 2011 ), accessed 29 May 2015, http://ejts.revues.org/4411 Google Scholar ; Üngör , Uğur Ümit and Polatel , Mehmet , Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property ( London and New York : Continuum , 2011 ) Google Scholar ; and Akçam , Taner and Kurt , Ümit , The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide ( New York : Berghahn Books , 2015 ) Google Scholar . On demographic engineering, see Şeker , Nesim , “ Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians ,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 ( 2007 ): 461 –74 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Dündar , Fuat , Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki'nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918) ( Istanbul : İletişim Yayınları , 2008 ) Google Scholar ; and Üngör , Uğur Ümit , The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2011 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

8 On gendered aspects of the genocide, see Sarafian , Ara , “ The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide ,” in In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century , ed. Bartov , Omer and Mack , Phyllis ( New York : Berghahn Books , 2001 ), 209 –21 Google Scholar ; Derderian , Katherine , “ Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 ,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19 ( 2005 ): 1 – 25 Google Scholar ; Bjørnlund , Matthias , “ ‘A Fate Worse than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide ,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century , ed. Herzog , Dagmar ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2009 ), 16 – 58 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Ekmekçioğlu , Lerna , “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide ,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 ( 2013 ): 522 –53 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and David Watenpaugh , Keith , “ ‘Are There any Children for Sale?’: Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children (1915–1922) ,” Journal of Human Rights 12 ( 2013 ): 283 –95 CrossRef Google Scholar .

9 For evidence of this, see Necef , Mehmet , “ The Turkish Media Debate on the Armenian Massacre ,” in Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates , ed. Jensen , Steven L. B. ( Copenhagen : The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies , 2003 ), 225 –62 Google Scholar ; Bayraktar , Seyhan , Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung ( Bielefeld : transcript Verlag , 2010 ) Google Scholar ; Erbal , Ayda , “ Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals ,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century , ed. Schwelling , Birgit ( Bielefeld : Transcript Verlag , 2012 ), 51 – 94 Google Scholar ; and Bakiner , Onur , “ Is Turkey Coming to Terms with Its Past? Politics of Memory and Majoritarian Conservatism ,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41 ( 2013 ): 691 – 708 CrossRef Google Scholar .

10 For example, see Aktar , Cengiz , “ Soykırım Ötesi Büyük Felaket ,” Radikal ( 2009 ), accessed 10 June 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/radikal2/soykirim_otesi_buyuk_felaket-933179 Google Scholar ; Temelkuran , Ece , Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide ( New York : Verso , 2010 ) Google Scholar ; and de Waal , Thomas , Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide ( New York : Oxford University Press , 2015 ) Google Scholar . For an example of the effects of the state's framing of “genocide” as a legal concept, see Can Dağlıoğlu , Emre , “ ‘1915’ in Tümüyle Tarihçilere Bırakılması Anlamlı Değil ,” Agos , 18 April 2015 , accessed 12 June 2015, http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/11319/1915in-tumuyle-tarihcilere-birakilmasi-anlamli-degil Google Scholar .

11 On the escalation of violence, see Bloxham , Donald , “ The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy ,” Past & Present 181 ( 2003 ): 141 –91 CrossRef Google Scholar . On “righteous” individuals, see Göçek , Fatma Müge , “ In Search of Just Turks in the Collective Violence Committed against the Armenians ,” in The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era ( London : I. B. Tauris , 2011 ), 223 –40 Google Scholar . On the “micropolitics” of violence, see Kaiser , “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno:’ The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–1916 ,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah , ed. Kieser , Hans-Lukas and Schaller , Dominik J. ( Zürich : Chronos , 2002 ), 129 –86 Google Scholar ; and Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey . On the victimization of other non-Muslim groups, see Gaunt , David , Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I ( Piscataway, N.J. : Gorgias Press , 2006 ) Google Scholar ; Bjørnlund , Matthias , “ The 1914 Cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a Case of Violent Turkification ,” Journal of Genocide Research 10 ( 2008 ): 41 – 57 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Schaller , Dominik J. and Zimmerer , Jürgen , ed., Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies ( London : Routledge , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

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• Volume 47, Issue 4
• Jennifer M. Dixon (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743815001002

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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Unfurling the rich tapestry of armenian culture.

This year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival will offer a window on Armenian visions of home

Ryan P. Smith

Correspondent

A modestly sized landlocked nation framed by the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian to the east, Armenia links the southernmost former Soviet Socialist Republics with the arid sprawl of the Middle East. Armenia’s own geography is heavily mountainous, its many ranges separated by sweeping plateaus of vivid green. The wind is stiff and the climate temperate, and the mountainsides teem with archaeological treasures of a long and meandering history.

Thousands of years ago, the land known as Armenia was roughly seven times the size of the current country. Yet even within the borders of contemporary Armenia, cathedrals, manuscript repositories, memorials and well-worn mountain paths are so dense as to offer the culturally and historically curious a seemingly endless array of avenues to explore.

This year, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be bringing deeply rooted Armenian culture to Washington, D.C. From food and handicrafts to music and dance, the festival, taking place in late June and early July, will provide an intimate look at an extremely complex nation. Catalonia , the autonomous region of northeast Spain, is featured alongside Armenia .

What exactly makes Armenia’s cultural landscape so fascinating?

Library of Congress Armenia area specialist Levon Avdoyan , Tufts Armenian architecture expert Christina Maranci , and the Smithsonian's Halle Butvin , curator of the festival's "Armenia: Creating Home" program explain the many nuances of the Armenian narrative.

What was Armenia’s early history like?

Given its strategic geographical status as a corridor between seas, Armenia spent much of its early history occupied by one of a host of neighboring superpowers. The period when Armenia was most able to thrive on its own terms, Levon Avodyan says, was when the powers surrounding it were evenly matched, and hence when none was able to dominate the region (historians call this principle Garsoïan’s Law , after Columbia University Armenia expert Nina Garsoïan ).

Foreign occupation was often brutal for the Armenian people. Yet it also resulted in the diversification of Armenian culture, and allowed Armenia to exert significant reciprocal influence on the cultures of its invaders. “Linguistically, you can show that this happened,” Avodoyan says. “Architecturally this happened.” He says Balkan cruciform churches may very well have their artistic roots in early Armenian designs.

What religious trends shaped Armenia?

It’s hard to say what life looked like in pre-Christian Armenia, Avdoyan admits, given that no Armenian written language existed to record historical events during that time. But there are certain things we can be reasonably sure about. Zoroastrianism, a pre-Islamic faith of Persian origin, predominated. But a wide array of regionally variant pagan belief systems also helped to define Armenian culture.

The spontaneous blending of religious beliefs was not uncommon. “Armenia was syncretistic,” Avdoyan says, meaning that the religious landscape was nonuniform and ever-changing . “The entire pagan world was syncretistic. ‘I like your god, we’re going to celebrate your god. Ah, Aphrodite sounds like our Arahit.’ That sort of thing.”

Armenia has long had strong ties with Christian religion. In fact, Armenia was the first nation ever to formally adopt Christianity as its official faith, in the early years of the fourth century A.D. According to many traditional sources, says Levon Avdoyan, “St. Gregory converted King Tiridates, and Tiridates proclaimed Christianity, and all was well.” Yet one hundred years after this supposedly smooth transition, acceptance of the new faith was still uneven, Avdoyan says, and the Armenian language arose as a means of helping the transition along.

“There was a plan put forth by King Vramshapu and the Catholicos (church patriarch) Sahak the Great to invent an alphabet so that they could further propagate the Christian faith,” he explains.

As the still-employed Greek-derived title “Catholicos” suggests, the Christian establishment that took hold in the fourth century was of a Greek orientation. But there is evidence of Christianity in Armenia even before then—more authentically Armenian Christianity adapted from Syriac beliefs coming in from the south. “From Tertullian’s testimony in the second century A.D.,” says Avdoyan, “we have some hints that a small Armenian state was Christian in around 257 A.D.”

Though this alternative take on Christianity was largely snuffed out by the early-fourth century pogroms of rabidly anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, Avdoyan says facets of it have endured to this day, likely including the Armenian custom of observing Christmas on January 6.

How did Armenia respond to the introduction of Christian beliefs? With the enshrinement of Christianity came a period characterized by what Avdoyan generously terms “relative stability” (major instances of conflict—including a still-famous battle of 451 AD that pitted Armenian nobles against invading Persians eager to reestablish Zoroastrianism as the official faith—continued to crop up). Yet the pagan lore of old did not evaporate entirely. Rather, in Christian Armenia, classic pagan myth was retrofitted to accord with the new faith.

“You can tell that some of these tales, about Ara the Beautiful , etc., have pagan antecedents but have been brought into the Christian world,” Avdoyan says. Old pagan themes remained, but the pagan names were changed to jibe with the Christian Bible.

The invention of an official language for the land of Armenia meant that religious tenets could be disseminated as never before. Armenia’s medieval period was characterized by the proliferation of ideas via richly detailed manuscripts.

What was special about medieval Armenia?

Armenian manuscripts are to this day world-renowned among medieval scholars. “They’re remarkable for their beauty,” Avdoyan says. Many have survived in such disparate places as the Matenadaran repository in Yerevan, the Armenian Catholic monasteries of San Lazzaro in Venice, and the Walters Art Museum in Maryland.

Historians define “medieval Armenia” loosely, but Avdoyan says most place its origin in the early fourth century, with the arrival of Christianity. Some, like Avodyan, carry it as far forward as the 16th century—or even beyond. “I put it with 1512,” Avdoyan says, “because that’s the date of the first published book. That’s the end of the manuscript tradition and the beginning of the print.”

What sets the manuscripts apart is their uniquely ornate illuminated lettering . “The Library of Congress recently bought a 1486 Armenian gospel book,” Avdoyan says, “and our conservationists got all excited because they noticed a pigment that didn’t exist in any other.” Discoveries like this are par for the course with Armenian manuscripts, which continue to draw academic fascination. “There’s still a lot to be learned about the pigments and styles.”

The structure of life in medieval Armenia was a far cry from what Westerners tend to picture when they hear the term “medieval.” A kind of feudalism did take hold for a time, Avdoyan says, but not that of lordships and knights. “Unlike feudalism in Europe, which was tied to the land,” he notes, “feudalism in Armenia was tied to the office. You had azats , the free, you had the nobles, and in a certain period you had the kings.” For a stretch of Armenian history, these divisions of office were rigidly enforced—everyone knew their place. “But by the ninth century, tenth century, it rather fell apart.”

One facet of Armenia’s medieval period that was more consistent was the majesty of the churches and other religious structures erected all across its mountainous topography. These creations are the focus of medieval Armenian art historian Christina Maranci.

Armenians take pride in their historic architecture. Why?

It is something of a rarity for a country’s distinctive architecture to inspire ardent national pride, but Christina Maranci says such is most definitely the case in Armenia. “Many Armenians will tell you about Armenian architecture,” she says. To this day, engineering is a highly revered discipline in Armenia, and many study it. “A lot of Armenians know very well how churches are built, and are proud of that.”

Maranci says that what makes Armenian art history so fascinating to study, even before the medieval period, is its simultaneous incorporation of outside techniques and refinement of its native ones. Before Christianity, she says, “you have what you would traditionally consider to be Near Eastern art—Assyrian art, Persian—but you also have evidence for Mediterranean classical traditions, like Hellenistic-looking sculpture and peristyles. Armenia provides a very useful complication of traditional categories of ancient art.”

But later architecture of the region—particularly the Christian architecture of the medieval period—is what it is best known for today.

How far back can we trace Armenian architecture?

With the dawn of national Christianity, Byzantine and Cappadocian influences began to take hold. And places of worship began to dot the land. “The first churches upon the conversion of Armenia to Christianity are largely basilicas,” Maranci notes. “They’re vaulted stone masonry structures, but they don’t use domes for the most part, and they don’t use the centralized planning” that many later Armenian churches claim as a hallmark.

By the seventh century, though, Maranci explains that Armenia began to embrace its own signature architectural style. “You have the domed centralized plan,” she says, which “is distinctive to Armenia and neighboring Georgia, and is distinct from Byzantine architecture, Syrian architecture and Cappadocian architecture.” Within the span of just a few decades, she says, centrally planned churches came to predominate in Armenia. And “it becomes ever more refined through the tenth century, eleventh century, and so on.”

As important in medieval Armenian church architecture as the churches themselves was their situation amid the natural flow of their surroundings. “The outside of the church was, from what we can tell, used in processions and ceremonies as well as the inside,” Maranci says. “In traditional Armenian churches, you see very clearly the way the church building is related to the landscape. That’s another piece that’s important.”

Many of these elegantly geometric models have endured in Armenian architecture through to the present day. Yet Maranci says that the Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1922 have exerted undeniable influences on Armenian architecture and art more broadly. “The recovery of medieval form now has to be mediated through this trauma,” she says. Modern Armenian art often subverts medieval forms to illustrate the annihilating effect of the bloodshed.

Moreover, since many Armenians emigrated out of the nation during or in the wake of these dark periods, diasporic Armenians have had to come up with their own takes on the traditional in new, unfamiliar environs. “You can see how American churches use prefab forms to replicate the Armenian churches,” she says by way of example. In lieu of Armenia’s incredibly sturdy rubble masonry technique—which dates back nearly two millennia—American communities have made do with plywood, drywall and reinforced concrete, improvising with their own materials yet staying true to the ancient architectural layouts.

What is significant about the Armenian diaspora(s)?

Many have heard the phrase “Armenian diaspora,” generally used as a blanket term to encompass those Armenians who fled the region around the time of the genocide and other killings. During and after World War I, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed—the Turkish government, for its part, disputes the death toll and denies that there was a genocide.

Avdoyan notes that, really, there was no one diaspora, but rather many distinct ones across a wide stretch of history. By using the singular term “diaspora,” Avdoyan believes we impute to the various immigrant groups of Armenia a sense of cohesion they do not possess.

“There is no central organization,” he says. “Each group has a different idea of what it means to be Armenian. Each one has a feeling that their Armenian-ness is more genuine or more pure. And it’s also generational.” The Armenians who fled the genocide have identities distinct from those of emigrants who left Armenia after the Lebanese Civil War, and distinct in a different way from those of the emigrants who have left Armenia since it secured its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. Avodoyan hopes that one day all the different diasporic generations will be able to come together for a cultural conference.

What aspects of Armenian culture will the Folklife Festival be highlighting?

Between the rich artistic and religious history of the Armenian homeland and the various cultural adaptations of diasporic Armenian populations worldwide, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage had its work cut out for it in selecting elements of Armenian culture to showcase at this year’s Folklife Festival. The Folklife team settled on two major themes to explore—feasting and craft. These will be presented through the lens of home, an essential concept throughout the Armenian narrative.

On every day of the festival, which runs from June 27-July 1 and July 4-July 8, a dedicated “demonstration kitchen” will hold hourly presentations of Armenian recipes in action. Festival curator Halle Butvin calls special attention to Armenian methods of preserving food: “cheesemaking, pickling, making jams and drying herbs and fruits.”

The demonstration kitchen will also be showing off recipes featuring foraged foods, in honor of the self-sufficient food-gathering common in mountainous Armenia, as well as foods tied to the time-honored ritual of coming together for feasting: “Armenian barbecue, tolma, lavash, cheese, different salads. . . some of the major staples of an Armenian feast.”

Linked to feasting is Armenia’s dedication to its national holidays. “Vardavar, a pagan water-throwing tradition takes place on July 8 and Festivalgoers will get a chance to participate,” Butvin says. She says celebrants can expect to learn how to make such treats as gata (sweet bread), pakhlava (filo pastry stuffed with chopped nuts) and sujukh (threaded walnuts dipped in mulberry or grape syrup) for the occasion.

Diasporic Armenian eats will be prepared as well as time-honored homeland fare. Since “Armenian cultural life really does revolve around the home,” Butvin says, “we’ll have the whole site oriented around that, with the hearth—the tonir —at the center.”

Tonirs , the clay ovens in which Armenian lavash bread is cooked, are traditionally made specially by highly skilled Armenian craftsmen. One such craftsman will be on site at the Folklife Festival, walking visitors through the process by which he creates high-performance high-temperature ovens from scratch.

Another featured craft which speaks to the value Armenians place on architecture is the stone carving technique known as khachkar. Khachkars are memorial steles carved with depictions of the cross, and are iconic features of Armenian places of worship. Visitors will get hands-on exposure to the art of khachkar, as well as other longstanding Armenian specialties like woodcarving and rugmaking.

Musically, guests can expect a piquant blend of Armenian jazz and folk tunes. Butvin is looking forward to seeing the camaraderie between the various acts in the lineup, who all know one another and will be building on each other’s music as the festival progresses. “They will play in different groupings,” Butvin says—guests can expect “a lot of exchanges and influences taking place between the artists.”

And what would music be without dance? Butvin says the dance instruction component of the Folklife Festival will tie in thematically with the feasting traditions emphasized among the culinary tents. “Usually you eat, drink, listen to music, and then dance once you’re feeling a little tipsy,” Butvin says. “That’s kind of the process of the feast.”

The emphasis of the Armenian portion of the festival on home and family will contrast well with the Catalonian activities’ stress on street life. “The whole Catalonian site is focused around the street and the plaza and this public space,” Butvin says, “whereas the Armenia side is really focused on the home itself. It will be an interesting difference, to look at the two.”

Butvin is hopeful the festival will show visitors the wonders of Armenian culture while also impressing upon them the degree to which it has spread and evolved all over the globe. “All of these different objects and traditions help to create a sense of home for Armenians,” she says—even those Armenians “who are in diaspora, who are trying to hold on to this sense of Armenian-ness.”

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival takes place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 27 to July 1, and July 4 to July 8, 2018. Featured programs are "Catalonia: Tradition and Creativity from the Mediterranean" and "Armenia: Creating Home."

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Ryan P. Smith | READ MORE

Ryan graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Science, Technology & Society and now writes for both Smithsonian Magazine and the World Bank's Connect4Climate division. He is also a published crossword constructor and a voracious consumer of movies and video games.

• Armenian Traditions And Customs You...

Armenian Traditions and Customs You Should Know

Armenian culture and its customs go far back in history. Armenians are often characterized as hospitable, friendly, and kind people who respect elders, have a gentle attitude to children, and have strong family values. Here are some of the customs travelers should know a bit about before visiting the country.

Armenians greet each other with a kiss and hold hands.

It’s always a good idea to be aware of the customs for greetings and farewells in a new place. In Armenia, visitors might notice locals kissing on the cheek when they meet, which is the most common greeting among friends and family. Additionally, it’s not uncommon for women to hold hands. This is not necessarily an indication that they are in a relationship; it’s simply a common way for close friends to show affection.

Armenians use the French word for “thank you”

Technically, the Armenian word for “thank you” is shnorakalutsyun . Instead of using this long word, many Armenian-speakers will use the French merci , along with the term of endearment, jan . The latter can’t be translated, but it expresses a tender attitude.

It’s OK to ask personal questions

Armenians are open-hearted and keep communication simple. Sometimes, this might mean they don’t leave a lot of personal space. Locals like to speak face-to-face and look straight into someone’s eye while making some kind of physical contact. It’s also customary to ask personal and detailed questions. It’s a perfectly normal thing to do in the country and isn’t considered rude.

Come hungry when invited to an Armenian family’s home

Just like any country in the Caucasus, Armenians are hospitable and love having guests at their homes—especially foreigners who are likely to be greeted with warmth and a table piled with as much food as it can hold. Moreover, you’ll be “forced” to try all the dishes. To not try everything would be considered insulting to the host, so starve for a while before going to an Armenian dinner to avoid embarrassment.

It’s OK to live with parents

Armenian parents are known to be protective, and it’s very common for adult children to live at home until they get married or possibly even for the rest of their lives. Parents usually pay for education, marriage, and all of their children’s other life events, which is a concept that might be completely foreign to many people from the Western part of the world. Moreover, if someone is traveling with their kids in Armenia, it’s normal for a local to stop by, compliment the kid, and ask questions. This is rarely anything concerning, but it’s another custom of which travelers should be aware.

Newborns are only introduced to close family for the first 40 days

Even though it’s kind of a superstition, many families still follow this custom and opt to not allow anyone to meet their newborns for 40 days. The only exception is very close relatives. The custom is rooted in safety and medical precautions, as newborns are quite vulnerable and might easily pick up bacteria.

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Newlyweds often jump over a fire

Armenian holidays consist of Christian and Pagan culture, which are both deeply rooted in Armenian customs and traditions. As people couldn’t forget all their favorite Pagan celebrations, the Armenian Apostolic Church has adopted some of the traditions and holidays. For example, during the holiday Trndez, newlyweds jump over an open fire to defend themselves against misfortune and evil.

Armenian girls eat a salty cookie to see their future husband

This might be another odd custom for many foreigners, but it’s a fun thing to do. On St. Sarkis Day, the Armenian version of Valentine’s Day, elderly women in the family bake an extremely salty cookie according to a special recipe. The single girls in the family eat it, and it’s believed that they will later dream of their future husbands. It could be a complete stranger or someone they know, but if he brings them a cup of water in the dream, they know it’s him.

Splashing water brings luck

Armenia has a limited water reservoir, and, therefore, locals know the worth of this natural resource. Many of the country’s traditions that involve water symbolize appreciation, life, and good luck. One of the most fun holidays is Vardavar, which has Pagan roots and celebrates the goddess of purity and water. On this day, everyone gets splashed with water in the streets of every Armenian city and town. It’s a way to get out of the normal routine and to purify the body—and have the time of your life.

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We Are All Armenian

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Voices from the Diaspora

Edited by Aram Mrjoian

224 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.70 in

Sales Date: March 14, 2023

• 40% off books sitewide with code UTXSUMMER
• Description

A collection of essays about Armenian identity and belonging in the diaspora. In the century since the Armenian Genocide, Armenian survivors and their descendants have written of a vast range of experiences using storytelling and activism, two important aspects of Armenian culture. Wrestling with questions of home and self, diasporan Armenian writers bear the burden of repeatedly telling their history, as it remains widely erased and obfuscated. Telling this history requires a tangled balance of contextualizing the past and reporting on the present, of respecting a culture even while feeling lost within it.

We Are All Armenian brings together established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer, multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement, assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.

Aram Mrjoian is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books , an associate fiction editor at Guernica , and a 2022 Creative Armenia–AGBU Fellow.

Each of these extraordinary essays is a life altered by a century-old genocide, illuminating not only the recognizable aspects of political violence but its hidden, cruel subtleties—how it always lingers, but lingers differently. As heavy and dazzling as a geode. ~Patrick Nathan, author of Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist

The greatest strength of We Are All Armenian is the diversity of its writers. The presence of multiracial Armenian, queer Armenian, and polyamorous Armenian voices alongside one another adds a bold richness that goes beyond simply being novel. Not only are these stories that many readers may have never heard before, but they also beautifully subvert preconceived notions about who and what constitutes the Armenian diaspora. The writers, who understand profoundly what it means to have one’s history erased or denied, thus ensure that other types of erasure are both confronted and avoided. ~Leila Emery, coeditor of My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora

The 18 essays in this collection delve into questions of Armenian identity, belonging and displacement from the perspective of a community whose past often goes unacknowledged. ~New York Times

Every essay from this compelling group of featured authors brings a unique and powerful perspective on what it means to search for one’s authentic identity when disconnected from homeland, language, and heritage. Textured and emotionally resonant, these entries ask the question What does it mean to be 'Armenian enough'? Together, the anthology honors the history of the lives lost and forever changed by the Armenian Genocide and resulting diaspora and charts a course forward through the power of telling and retelling important stories. It’s both a stunning achievement and a welcome addition to our literary record. ~Chicago Review of Books

Part party and part opera—both delightful and wrenching, altogether joyful...Each essay builds on the last, deepening the reader’s understanding of the multi-generational impact of genocide on families and prompting contemplation on notions of ethnicity. The essays do not flinch in the face of sometimes harrowing events, but every one also offers sweetness, grace, and resolve to face these truths and to move forward with hope and compassion. It’s an exquisite collection of essays. ~TriQuarterly

With passion and insight, the writers [in We Are All Armenian ] explore and express the joys of and obstacles to constructing an affiliation with their ethnic and diasporic communities that does not bind them to a prescribed mode of identity and belonging. Often inventive and surprising, these accounts of searching for association without unwelcome constraints will enrich the still-expanding narrative on expressive and analytic discourses of minority identities and commitments...Highly recommended. ~CHOICE

A lovely, much-needed compilation that presents a culture of great import, examining diasporic experiences in deeply-felt prose. ~Nowruz Journal

We Are All Armenian is an anthology precisely tuned to our time of dislocation and international migration, and to debates surrounding historical injustices. The anthology’s focus on stories of the Armenian diaspora, a global population of eleven million entering its second century, does not limit the book’s relevance but widens it: the contributors’ intersecting commitments and incisive articulations of diasporan subjectivity will make this book resonate with a broad audience in a world of many diasporas and dispossessed peoples who wish to salvage their many stories. ~Cultural Daily

Overall, though, the essays within We Are All Armenian point to the varied experiences within the diaspora. . . . And the breadth of experiences — including those who are multiethnic, multiracial and LGBTQ+, as well as those who didn’t grow up embedded in Armenian communities and don’t speak the language — is important to consider. Mrjoian says that he hopes the book might prompt conversations about inclusivity regarding ethnic heritage. ~The Orange County Register

• Editor’s Note
• Introduction
• How Armenian Funeral Halva Helped My Family Find Home in America (Liana Aghajanian)
• Hava Nagila (Naira Kuzmich)
• “Where Are You From? No, Where Are You Really From?” (Sophia Armen)
• An Inter/Racial Love History (Kohar Avakian)
• Language Lessons (Nancy Kricorian)
• A Good, Solid Name (Olivia Katrandjian)
• My Armenia: Imagining and Seeing (Chris McCormick)
• Inside the Walls: Reflections on Revolutionary Armenians (Nancy Agabian)
• Going Home Again (Chris Bohjalian)
• Lost and Found (Aline Ohanesian)
• A Letter to My Great-Grandson (Raffi Joe Wartanian)
• Open Wounds (Anna Gazmarian)
• Բառէրը-the Words (J. P. Der Boghossian)
• The Road to Belonging (Raffy Boudjikanian)
• The Story of My Body (Hrag Vartanian)
• Valley View: An Armenian Diasporic Account in Lieu of a Glendale Biennial Review (Mashinka Firunts Hakopian)
• Perspectives on Artsakh from a Black Armenian Angeleno (Carene Rose Mekertichyan)
• We Are All Armenian (Scout Tufankjian)
• Acknowledgments
• Reading List of Armenian Writers
• Notes on the Contributors

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Rupnik art dispute more nuanced than it seems, historian says

Israel, catholic leaders clash over gaza as a ‘just war’.

Palestinians flee southern Gaza on July 1, 2024, after an evacuation order from Israeli forces. (Credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP.)

ROME – In the latest sign of tension between Israel and Catholic leaders over the conflict in Gaza, the Israeli embassy to the Holy See has blasted a recent statement from a commission representing Church leaders in the Holy Land denying that Israel’s offensive can be described as a “just war.”

“It should be lamented that a group of people from the Catholic Church has decided to issue a document that, using religious pretext and linguistic stunts, does nothing else than de facto objecting [to] Israel’s right to defend itself from its enemies’ declared intentions to put an end to its existence,” the July 2 Israeli press release said.

The protest came in response to a statement from the Justice and Peace Commission of the Holy Land, which is sponsored by the Assembly of the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, bringing together the Latin, Greek Melkite, Maronite, Armenian, Syriac and Chaldean Catholic leadership of Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus.

The president of the assembly is Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem who’s considered a key adviser to Pope Francis and the Vatican on Middle Eastern affairs.

The commission’s statement, titled “Just War?”, amounts to a stinging criticism of the Israeli military operation on the Gaza Strip.

“We are outraged that political actors in Israel and abroad are mobilizing the theory of ‘just war’ in order to perpetuate and legitimate the ongoing war in Gaza,” it reads. “This theory is being used in a way in which it was never intended: to justify the death of tens of thousands, our friends and our neighbors.”

“There are those pretending that the war follows the rules of ‘proportionality’ by arguing that a war that continues until the bitter end might save the lives of Israelis in the future, therefore balancing the scales of the thousands of Palestinian lives being lost in the present,” the statement asserts. “In doing so, they privilege the security of hypothetical people in the future over the lives of living and breathing human beings who are being killed every day.”

“In short,” the commission said, “the manipulation of the language of just war theory is not only about words: it is having tangible, fatal results.”

In response, the Israeli embassy’s press release made four assertions about the ongoing conflict.

First, it asserts that the lone objective of the incursion is “to end Hamas rule in this territory” and to ensure that terrorist attacks such as the Oct. 7 assault which triggered the conflict do not happen again.

Second, the embassy claims that the Justice and Peace Commission engaged in “a false symmetry” by equating Hamas’s strategy of putting non-combatants at risk by deliberating embedding its forces in civilian areas with Israel’s efforts to protect civilian populations.

Third, the embassy says that the sense in which the commission uses the term “just war” is not consistent with international law, with which Israel seeks to comply. (The commission’s statement is largely focused on the concept of a “just war” in Catholic social teaching, originally rooted in concepts developed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.)

Fourth, the embassy insists that calling the conflict a “war in Gaza” is inaccurate, since Israeli is also facing attacks from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

“Hence the title ‘The war against Israel’s existence’ will describe last 9 months’ events far more realistically,” the press release says.

The exchange over the concept of a “just war” is the latest chapter in what has been a mounting clash between Catholic leaders, including senior Vatican officials, and Israeli leaders over the moral legitimacy of the conflict in Gaza.

In May, for example, Israeli Ambassador Raphael Schutz objected both to an essay published by L’Osservatore Romano , the Vatican newspaper, asserting that Zionism has roots in European colonialism, and also to a summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners hosted by the Vatican in which Yemeni journalist and human rights activist Tawakkol Karman referred to the Israeli offensive as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.”

In January, Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo di Segni used an address at the Jesuit-sponsored Gregorian University to assert that the tensions over Gaza have contributed to a “crisis” in Jewish-Catholic relations.

The new statement from the Israel embassy comes as Schutz is preparing to step down as the country’s ambassador to the Vatican, a role he’s held since 2021. He is the eighth Israeli envoy to the Holy Seer since diplomatic relations were launched in 1993.

The back-and-forth also comes against the backdrop of a new Israeli offensive in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, amid new evacuation orders issued by Israeli forces believed to have affected as many as 250,000 Palestinians in the targeted areas.

Israel has accused Hamas of “systematically violating international law while using civilian infrastructure and the civilian population as human shields” during the assault.

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