13:29, 7 January, 2022
YEREVAN, JANUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Armed Forces sent a peacekeeping unit (100 servicemen) to Kazakhstan as part of the CSTO peacekeeping mission, the Defense Ministry said in a statement.
“During the mission the Armenian peacekeeping unit will carry out functions protecting exclusively buildings and infrastructures of strategic significance”, the ministry’s statement says.
If you're crossing Greek and Roman ruins off your list, then Armenia and its ruins should be next on your list.
Today Armenia is a small post-Soviet country in the Caucasus mountains. In antiquity, Greater Armenia was much later and has existed off and on in different forms since long before the Roman Empire existed (and long after).
Despite being largely forgotten, Armenia is very much worth a visit and is full of things to see and do in its small but ancient land. Believe it or not but Armenia is filled with archeological mysteries and even has its own Stonehenge.
During Roman times there was an Armenian state in this greater region. At times it was an independent client state of the Roman Empire, sometimes it was influenced by the powerful Parthian Empire and the succeeding Sasanian Empire. These empires were the counterweights to the Roman Empire and were centered in modern-day Iran. For periods of time parts of Armenia were part of the Roman Empire – and briefly, all of it was.
For most of this period, it was a buffer state and a bone of contention between the powerful Roman and Parthian/Sasanian Empires.
In 114 AD Emperor Trajan was able to conquer and incorporate the independent Greater Armenia into the Roman Empire. Later on, it was divided between the Romans and the Sasanians. It would go on to be a battleground between the surviving Eastern Romans (Byzantines) and the Sasanians.
As Armenia was the frontier of the Roman Empire, there are some Roman ruins to be found. The ruins one finds here are about as far into the ancient frontier as one can find.
The Temple of Garni is a Greco-Roman colonnaded temple in Armenia. Today it is the most famous pre-Christian structure in Armenia.
Then the temple was built, Greater Armenia was a client state of the Roman Empire. It is linked to the Armenian king Tiridates I's visit to Roman in 66 AD. There he was crowned by Roman emperor Nero (that Nero).
The Armenian city of Artaxata had been destroyed by the Roman general Gnaeus Domitus Corbulo. So Nero provided 50 million drachmas and Roman craftsmen to rebuild.
It is built on top of an earlier Uratian temple (Urartu is considered the first Armenian state that existed in the 9th century BC).
The Temple of Garni was probably dedicated to the sun god Mihr. Armenia became the first country in the world to convert to Christianity and it was then converted to the royal summer house.
Some sources claim it was not a temple, but rather a tomb and that is why it survived the destruction of pagan structures as they converted to Christianity. If it is a temple, it is the only pagan temple in the Caucusus.
It collapsed in 1679 with an earthquake that rocked the region. Later on, under Soviet rule, it was reconstructed between 1969 and 1975. Today it is very easy to get to and is only a short drive from the capital, Yeveren.
The temple complex is complete with Roman-style baths and is considered one of the countries top attractions today.
Recently, (in 2018) archeologists discovered the easternmost Roman aqueduct. The aqueduct is unfinished and probably dates from the second century when the Romans briefly conquered Armenia and had control of the city of Artaxata (the old Armenian capital).
The aqueduct is located near Khor Virap close to the border with Turkey. After the region fell outside Roman control construction ceased and it was abandoned.
The archeologists noted:
“The unfinished aqueduct of Artaxata is proof of a failed Roman Imperialism in Armenia… If finished, the monumental arches and the abundance of running water would have turned Artaxata into a Roman city.”
There are numerous tours to all the famous sites in Armenia that can be booked on the day in the center of the capital city Yerevan. If one would like to plan ahead, private tours can be organized (as well as for consultation of where to go) through Kantar Hostel in Yerevan.
While there, add the Areni-1 winery to one's bucket list – it is a 6100-year-old winery only discovered in 2007. It is one of the oldest known wineries in the world today.
21:17, 5 January, 2022
YEREVAN, 5 JANUARY, ARMENPRESS. By the decision of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Karen Manukyan has been appointed as Deputy Governor of Shirak province, ARMENPRESS reports the decision of the Prime Minister is published on the website of the Government of Armenia .
https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1072350.html?fbclid=IwAR3ucSIBdKv1hlAXHyojj_RrcBXZdKkjdnSJamfbe1EIYWiprXXZP1zsb74
20:24, 3 January, 2022
YEREVAN, 3 JANUARY, ARMENPRESS. France, which has recently taken over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, will continue to act in favor of peace in the region, establishment of stability, as well as strengthening of cooperation between Armenia and the European Union, ARMENPRESS reports, the Embassy of France said.
“The French Ambassador and the whole personnel of the Embassy wish peace, happiness, prosperity for the Armenian people in 2022. France, which has recently taken over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, will continue to act in favor of peace in the region, establishment of stability, as well as strengthening of cooperation between Armenia and the European Union”, reads the statement.
Targeted for genocide and dispossession, reduced to exiles and deportees and fighting for survival and freedom, Armenians were facing the nation’s darkest moments from 1915 to 1919. Yet New Year and Christmas came, as it always did, occasioning memories of brighter days, even offering glimmers of hope. On the roads of deportation, in concentration camps and in the trenches, families and friends embraced, prayers were said and, if possible, Mass was celebrated.
This article takes us on a journey to Christmas in the time of genocide. Mining survivor memoirs and accounts, I offer snippets of often fleeting moments of celebration, hope and resilience as the New Year tolled and Armenian Christmas beckoned.
Today, the holiday season is a reminder of the losses left in the wake of the 44-day war on Artsakh—arguably the darkest period of Armenian history since World War I. It is in times such as this, that one can channel the resilience and resistance of one’s ancestors.
We stand on the shoulders of generations that repelled the deepest darkness with resistance and celebration. If they could do it, so can we.
1916: Celebrating Christmas in Marsovan and concentration camps
In January 1916, the Dildilian and Der Haroutiounian families prepared to secretly celebrate Armenian Christmas at the latter’s house, on the outskirts of Marsovan (modern day Merzifon, Turkey). This was their first Christmas since they had evaded deportation by converting to Islam. The occasion was immortalized in a rare photograph that is part of the collection of the Dildilians, famed photographers of everyday life in the Ottoman Empire. In his book, Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home, scholar Armen T. Marsoobian identifies and reconstructs the trajectories of the family members depicted in the photograph.1
The Dildilian and the Der Haroutiounian families prepared to secretly celebrate Armenian Christmas in January 1916. (Photo from the Dildilian Collection. The author thanks Prof. Armen T. Marsoobian for the photograph.)
Around the same time, more than 800 miles south of Marsovan, pharmacist Hagop Arsenian of Ovacık was among the survivors who greeted the New Year on the banks of the Euphrates River in the Syrian desert.2 Within days of arriving at the Meskeneh concentration camp, he fell severely ill, lost his mother (he buried her “among all the other refugees there” on December 22), bandits robbed him of his clothes and the gold coins that same evening, and yet another re-deportation loomed. In his memoir Towards Golgotha3, he recounts:
December 30, 1915. The gendarmes became active again and without any consideration for the sick and dying, they began dismantling the tents. I did not have the energy to sit, much less to walk, since I was still in a period of convalescence after my disease and in dire need of rest. But to whom was I to plead my case?
He had to comply “and joined the caravan towards unknown destinations.”
As the last day of 1915 dawned, Arsenian was once again on the deportation roads, after having camped overnight near an Arab village. “I was feeling extremely weak, the weather was exceptionally cold, and I was afraid of having a relapse.” Still, he managed to survive and the convoy reached the Dipsi transit camp by the end of the day. He writes:
January 1, 1916. On the first day of this new year, as customary, we woke up at dawn and witnessed the beautiful sunrise and welcomed the new year. With Father Arsen and Hapet Effendi Ghazarian and his brothers, Zakar Agha and other villagers, we gathered in our tent, in that deserted corner of Syria, to celebrate the new year after surviving one of the darkest chapters of the Armenian deportation. On this occasion, we exchanged good wishes and hoped that the New Year would be a good one.
It was a beautiful day, Arsenian recalled. So much so that “we took it to be a good omen and a sign for better days.” The next day, Arsenian’s aunt died. Still ailing, Arsenian “wrapped myself well and, leaning on a cane, accompanied Father Arsen, who undertook the funeral rites in a low profile ceremony. Thus we surrendered another member of our family to the treacherous desert sand…. We were haunted by a nightmare that very soon each one of us would be sharing the same fate.”
The re-deportation continued. On Armenian Christmas Eve (January 5), Arsenian arrived in the Abuharar camp “exhausted” and “in a defeated state.” He remembers:
The following day was Christmas Day. The blessed believers wanted to attend Mass on the occasion of Holy Christmas, with the hope of receiving some spiritual consolation. In that huge refugee camp… we chose a spot to celebrate mass and requested a clergyman from Akshehir to conduct the service. Of our fellow compatriots from the Ovajik Church were Mihran Papazian, Vagharshag and others who assisted in the Mass, thus filling us with a sense of joy, hope and continuity. On that day there was no Sevkiyet [deportation].
1917: Celebrating the New Year in Belemedik in Hiding
Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian welcomed New Year in 1917 in Belemedik, a village near Adana. He was in hiding with the Armenian intellectual Teotig (Teotoros Labdjindjian), both working for the German railway company. “Like me, most of these Armenian refugees were registered in the company’s official ledgers under false names… nevertheless the police found informers to reveal the identity of some of them,” he wrote after the Great War. In his memoirs, which he began writing in the immediate aftermath of the war and completed years later, he contrasted New Year’s celebrations in Belemedik among the Germans, the prisoners of war and the Armenians who were in hiding:
The Germans in Belemedik celebrated New Year’s 1917 with great pomp: there was plenty of food and drink, including beer and wine and even champagne—hundreds of glasses of champagne were emptied in toasts to the ultimate victory of Germany. We Armenians, however, passed the festive days within the confines of our huts, mourning and feeling like orphans. The hundreds of Russian, French, and Italian prisoners of war in Belemedik also spent the New Year in a melancholy frame of mind. But we Armenians felt not just melancholy but grief; the prisoners of war had the hope of seeing their loved ones again, but our beloved relatives had been martyred and had gone to eternity leaving us inconsolable.
We who were left alive felt like pitiful wrecks, somehow still dragging our useless selves on; we envied those who had died … who, having paid their debt, were now resting forever. Meanwhile we remembered happy New Year celebrations of the past, with tables laden with fruit and anushabour; surrounded by our loved ones, we had heartily wished one another Happy New Year and Merry Christmas. Would we ever see the old, happy days again?4
The answer to this question was somewhat positive for some members of the Der Haroutiounian and Dildilian families, for Hagop Arsenian, and for Balakian himself. They survived and, scattered around the globe, helped rebuild their communities. With their writings and photographs, they also kept alive the memory of the people who did not survive to see another Christmas, and the places that remained inaccessible behind the borders of the Turkish Republic.
1919: First New Year after Ottoman Turkish Defeat
Karnig Panian was dragged into an orphanage in Antoura (modern-day Lebanon), where the administrators followed a policy of systematic Turkification. In this notorious institution conceived by Cemal Pasha, who reigned supreme over Ottoman Syria, Armenian children were forced to speak Turkish only, were circumcised, given Muslim names and subjected to religious and political indoctrination. Panian’s memoir and multiple other accounts that corroborate it paint a grim picture of abuse and terror that lasted throughout the war. With the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Syria late in the fall of 1918, the orphanage administrators packed and fled, and the children who had survived were now free. “We once again felt like a part of humanity, a part of the Armenian nation,” writes Panian in his memoir. The orphans were thrilled when, a few months later, Santa Claus came. Panian narrates:
On New Year’s Eve, the staff organized a celebration. There were delicacies, songs, a beautiful dance performed by one of the teachers, and even a visit from Santa Claus. He gave us all stockings full of confections, raisins, walnuts, almonds, and dried fruit. There was no limit to the orphans’ joy. We remembered how back home, on New Year’s Day, we would go from home to home, gathering gifts. Those old, happy days seemed to be coming back.5
Here it is again: the same references to “old, happy days.” As if in response to Grigoris Balakian’s question, Panian, a child survivor, looked to the future with optimism and hope. Hope that would make rebuilding the nation—largely on the shoulders of orphans and widows—possible.
Panian, whose Armenian identity was targeted for erasure, became a celebrated educator at the Armenian Lyceum (Djemaran) in Beirut. His daughter Houry Boyamian is the principal of St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown, MA. And when on December 20, I saw the images of the school’s Christmas celebration and Santa’s visit on Ms. Boyamian’s Facebook page, I imagined her father, as a child survivor, celebrating with Santa more than a century ago, and then embarking on the next difficult task: rebuilding the nation.
Annual Christmas party at St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School, December 20, 2021
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1 Armen T. Marsoobian, Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home: The Dildilian Photography Collection (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 220-246.
2 For a detailed exploration of the concentration camps in the region, see Khatchig Mouradian, The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021).
3 Hagop Arsenian, Towards Golgotha: The Memoirs of Hagop Arsenian, a Genocide Survivor, trans. Arda Arsenian Ekmekji (Beirut: Haigazian University Press, 2011), 109-118.
4 Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, trans. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag (New York: Knopf, 2001), 324-325.
5 Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, trans. Simon Beugekian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 149-151.
Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, winner of numerous prestigious international competitions, will perform in Amsterdam. The concert by the Armenian cellist will take place at the Royal Concertgebouw Concert Hall in on December 27, Orer.eu reports.
To note, the Concertgebouw is one of the world's greatest concert halls famed for its amazing acoustic. The Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performs there as do some of the biggest names in classical music.
Some nine hundred concerts and other events per year take place in the Concertgebouw, for a public of over 700,000, making it one of the most-visited concert halls in the world.
Deputy of the Milli Mejlis of Azerbaijan Gudrat Hasanguliyev proposed to ‘open casinos in Karabakh and Zangezur’ during a discussion on the bill on tourism, Azerbaijani presses report.
According to him, there are many casinos around the world, ‘but there are no casinos operating here’. “I believe it should be allowed to open casinos in Karabakh and Zangezur,” he added.
Apparently, Hasanguliyev is referring to the occupied sector of Nagorno-Karabakh and the proclaimed ‘Eastern Zangezur’ territory.
Armenian media personality, actor, and producer David (Davit) Gharibyan chatted with Powerjournalist Markos Papadatos on November 24 about his latest endeavors.
Regarding his future plans, he said, “We live in a time when the future is connected with the present in a rapidly changing exponential pattern and if everything goes according to plan, I will soon move to France to implement new fashion projects. I will continue to work in my country, combining it with French.”
“Let me inform you that the TV series ‘Ari Parenq’ is currently being broadcast in the USA and Armenia, of which I am one of the producers and there are plans to shoot ‘Ari Parenq 2’ in the future, or another TV series, already in the humorous genre, which will involve well-known TikTokers in Armenia,” he elaborated.
“I would also like to hold an award ceremony, which I will talk about in the future. I will continue my cooperation with my Bulgarian colleagues. I was very impressed by the Prince of Morocco, Mullah Ismail, with whom my telephone conversation was very encouraging and promising in terms of innovative cooperation. That’s all,” he said.
David Gharibyan and Nasko Lazarov. Photo Courtesy of hiLIFR
He opened up about some of his proudest moments of 2021. “One of the memorable days of this year is my visit to Bulgaria within the framework of ‘Mr. Bulgaria,’ where I was invited as a member of the jury. During that time, thanks to my good friend Nasko Lazarov, I met a number of new friends and colleagues, including Adrian Sina, the lead singer of Romanian Accent, the talented Romanian designer Catalin Botezatu, and the beautiful Bulgarian singer Andrea, as well as my compatriot, King of Poker Roger Hayrapetyan. I have a great desire to invite them to Armenia to get acquainted with our culture and traditions,” he said.
“I was very happy to go back to Barcelona, Spain, 10 years later, to visit my friends and to enjoy the Spanish fiestas, as well as my long trip to France, the most impressive moment of which was meeting my uncle in Paris, whom I had not seen for 30 years,” he said.
On his daily motivations, he said, “I do not want to sound arrogant, but I want to open a new creative page on the “Canvas of Unknownness” of space and time, weave my tapestry, from which warmth and light will be delivered, use my colors in the palette, leave my mark for the future.”
Photo Coutesy of hiLIFR
For his fans and supporters, Gharibyan said, “I think people in the field of art create for the sake of humanity, the well-being of people, without fans, it will be like a private house, without inhabitants, it will lose its role and significance. Dear fans, the breath and presence of each of you leaves its contribution to my works, it is a caring food for further creation. Know the truth, I always need your support.”
“I wish all the inhabitants of the Earth peace and health. No wars and epidemics. Good luck to you,” he concluded.
For more information on actor, producer, and media personality David (Davit) Gharibyan, check out his IMDb page, and follow him on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and check out his official website.
David Gharibyan and family. Photo Courtesy of David Gharibyan
PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenian Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan believes that "whatever is happening lately with local governments is fraught with deep dangers to the basis of democracy, the right to vote."
There have been many cases recently when criminal cases are initiated against the leaders of the political forces that won local elections. Arrests and detentions happen too. On December 16, former mayor of Vanadzor Mamikon Aslanyan became the latest politician to be arrested.
"Extremely dangerous interventions are carried out against local government officials, elected by the citizens of the Republic of Armenia, through political and law enforcement processes, in connection with which the public is either not given proper explanations or no explanations are given at all," the Ombudsman said.
"I remind everyone that the right to vote in local government elections is guaranteed by Article 48 of the Armenian Constitution, in accordance with Armenia's international obligations."