Author: Karabekian Emil

David Sarkisyan obituary | Culture | The Guardian

February 4, 2010

David Sarkisyan in his cluttered office

David Sarkisyan, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the charismatic
director of the Russian State Museum of Architecture (MUAR). By using
its resources for explorations of the past and present, he became one of
the most significant figures on the Russian architectural scene.

A repository for hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and
artefacts, the museum was founded in 1934, and until 2002 was known as
the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, after Aleksei Shchusev, the
architect of, among other buildings, the Lenin Mausoleum. In the
post-communist era, major changes took place at the museum. First, a
collection of 364 old master drawings looted in Bremen in 1945 by Viktor
Baldin, the museum’s head for 25 years, was brought to light amid great
controversy. Then, the MUAR’s massive archive was relocated from the
suburban Donskoy monastery into the main museum premises in central
Moscow where, in dire conditions because of a severe lack of funds, they
continue to be kept.

Sarkisyan was appointed as director of the MUAR at the turn of the
millennium. In its main galleries in the 18th-century Talyzin mansion on
Vozdvizhenka Street, he presented Russia’s architectural history, with
particular emphasis on the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s.
When lack of funds prevented the restoration of a dilapidated part of
these premises, Sarkisyan made a virtue out of its ruinous condition.
Unheated, windowless and using rough-sawn boards laid as a walkway
across the exposed brick vaults, the appropriately named temporary
exhibition space (The Ruins) was opened by Sarkisyan in freezing winter
weather as a temporary exhibition space. It quickly became one of the
most sought-after spaces in Moscow, hosting fascinating, edgy
exhibitions visited by audiences wrapped in their overcoats.

In 2005, Sarkisyan also involved the MUAR in the First Biennale of
Contemporary Art in Moscow, and developed a series of exhibitions
introducing Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and other contemporary architects
to the Russian public, thanks to shrewd alliances with western
institutions such as Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts. In 2002, he was
responsible for the Russian contribution to the Venice Architectural
Biennale and, two years later, he curated the Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000
show.

Sarkisyan’s flamboyant yet deeply committed leadership established the
MUAR as a thriving centre for exhibitions and public events and ensured
dedicated, high-profile advocacy for the preservation of historic
architecture in Russia. With a group of fledgling preservationist
associations active in efforts to protect Moscow’s heritage, Sarkisyan
led campaigns against the demolition of the 1960s hotels Intourist and
Rossia, the Voentorg department store, and the gutting of the Detsky Mir
store.

The house that Konstantin Melnikov built in 1929 He was one of the main
forces pushing for the restoration of Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin House,
a landmark of constructivism which remains in a dire condition.
Sarkisyan also adamantly opposed the erection of the Gazprom tower in St
Petersburg.

His death is likely to have a significant impact on the fate of another
modernist masterpiece, the house that the architect Konstantin Melnikov
built for himself in Moscow in 1929. Sarkisyan was a passionate
supporter of one of Melnikov’s granddaughters in her fight against the
oligarch Sergei Gordeev’s project to create a private foundation in
charge of the house and its collections, and, together with many
intellectuals and architects, proposed that the house should be the
focus of a state museum devoted to this unique building and the career
of its architect.

Sarkisyan’s outspoken criticism of the fate of buildings of historic
significance in Moscow – from the demolition of the hotel
Moskva, which was replaced by a wan copy camouflaging a new structure,
to the insertion of a spurious historical fake within the uncompleted
shell of the 18th-century Tsaritsyno palace – made him no
friends within the municipality. An outspoken critic of the mayor Yuri
Luzhkov’s decisions concerning the fate of the city’s built heritage,
Sarkisyan had biting words to use against the transformation of Moscow
into "a symbiosis of Disneyland, Las Vegas and a Turkish resort". It is
reported that his burial in the Armenian cemetery of Moscow was barred
by city officials, a clear indication that Sarkisyan’s views could still
upset the bureaucracy, even from beyond the grave.

Born in Yerevan, Armenia, Sarkisyan studied biology and human physiology
at Moscow State University. His first career, in pharmacology, produced
innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. He then moved on to the
world of cinema, shooting close to 20 documentaries, including the
acclaimed Comrade Kollontai and Her Lovers (1996). In 1991, he was first
assistant director during the filming of Yuri Klimenko and Rustam
Khamdamov’s Anna Karamazoff, starring Jeanne Moreau. The end of that
year saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then wrote film criticism
for several Russian newspapers and, in 1994, founded the Nashchokin’s
House gallery in Moscow.

A visit to Sarkisyan in his office at the MUAR was an exotic experience.
A dark grotto, filled beyond capacity with posters, movie memorabilia,
piled-up books, Stalinist kitsch, children’s toys, and works of art of
all kinds, it hosted vibrant and frequently uproarious meetings of
leading intellectuals and architects. Frequently sleeping on the
premises, the director would often greet his guests in his pyjamas.

Sarkisyan was a brilliant museum director, an exceptional cultural
entrepreneur, a gifted curator and a committed defender of true and just
causes, fighting a desperate rearguard action for the preservation and
professional restoration of many historical landmarks from both
pre-revolutionary and Soviet times. The expression of feeling prompted
by his death could prove to be a turning point in the public awareness
of Russia’s most creative recent past.

Sarkisyan had married a fellow student while at university. They were
divorced in the 1990s.

– David Ashotovich Sarkisyan, pharmacologist, film-maker and
architectural conservationist, born 23 September 1947; died 7 January
2010

This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 18.15 GMT on Thursday 4
February 2010. A version appeared on p42 of the Obituaries section of
the Guardian on Friday 5 February 2010.

U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL’S STATEMENT ON POSSIBILITY OF WAR IN CAUCASUS WAS MEANT FOR BAKU

PanARMENIAN.Net
04.02.2010 19:30 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Progress in Armenia-Turkey rapprochement, mentioned
in U.S. intelligence official’s testimony before the Senate Committee
was not meant as a compliment to Turkey, director of Armenian Center
for National and International Studies (ACNIS), Richard Giragosian
stated.

The statement of the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis
Blair on the possibility of war in Caucasus was meant for Azerbaijan,
as the only country opposed to Armenia-Turkey rapprochement, Richard
Giragosian noted, adding, "Every word is being carefully chosen in
a statement of that scale."

"Turkey’s attitude was never mentioned in the statement, which might
suggest it is not of major importance to US," he pointed out.

NEW MATHEMATICS DATA HAVE BEEN REPORTED BY RESEARCHERS AT YEREVAN STATE UNIVERSITY

News of Science
January 24, 2010

"We prove that for any odd number n>= 1003, every non-cyclic subgroup
of the 2-generator free Burnside group of exponent. n contains a
subgroup isomorphic to the free Burnside group of exponent n. and
infinite rank," scientists writing in the journal Izvestiya Mathematics
report.

"Various families of relatively free n-periodic subgroups are
constructed in free periodic groups of odd exponent n>= 665," wrote
V.S. Atabekian and colleagues, Yerevan State University.

The researchers concluded: "For the same groups, we describe a
monomorphism tau such that a word A is an elementary period of rank
alpha if and only if its image tau(A) is ail elementary period of
rank alpha + 1."

Atabekian and colleagues published their study in Izvestiya
Mathematics (On subgroups of free Burnside groups of odd exponent n >=
1003. Izvestiya Mathematics, 2009;73(5):861-892).

Additional information can be obtained by contacting V.S. Atabekian,
Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia.

The publisher of the journal Izvestiya Mathematics can be contacted at:
London Mathematical Society Russian Acad Sciences, C, O Turpion Ltd,
Turpin Distribution Services, Blackhorse Rd., Letchworth SG6 1HN,
Herts, England.

OPEN DIALOGUE BETWEEN ARMENIA, GEORGIA, RA PREMIER STATES

news.am
Feb 4 2010
Armenia

The problems of the Armenian population in Javakhk (a Georgian
region densely populated with Armenians) were raised at the January
26 sitting of the Armenian-Georgian intergovernmental commission.

During a question in the Armenian Parliament on February 3, RA Prime
Minister Tigran Sargsyan reported that the "the Armenian side was
not the only one to raise the problems, but our Georgian partners
are seeking to resolve the problems."

The RA Premier pointed out that an open dialogue between the sides
will allow them to gradually resolve the problems.

T. Sargsyan expressed the confidence that the results will be produced
within the next few years.

Among the agreements are ones on the renovation and Armenian churches
in Georgia, creation of necessary conditions for Armenian language
teachers and so on.

ARMENIA TO MAKE DEBUT APPEARANCE AT LA TIMES TRAVEL SHOW

Armradio.am
04.02.2010 12:02

For the first time in the history of the Los Angeles Times Travel
and Adventure Show, the Republics of Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh
(Artsakh) will be represented-in the main Exhibition Hall, on-stage
with cultural performances, and with a photo travelogue, the Armenian
American Chamber of Commerce informs.

The tourism offices of Armenia and Karabakh will share a large
"Welcome to Armenia" booth in the Exhibition Hall of the Travel Show,
which organizers estimate will be seen by as many as 50,000 people
over the course of the two-day show.

Armenia’s participation is co-sponsored by the Armenian American
Chamber of Commerce (AACC), located in Glendale, Calif., the Armenian
Tourism Development Agency (ATDA), based in Yerevan, Armenia, and
the Consulate General of the Republic of Armenia, in Los Angeles.

Armenia will also be represented on the "Global Beat Stage" with a
music and dance performance on each day of the show. The Gevorkian
Dance Academy will perform modern and fold dances in traditional
attire, and the Armenian music and dance group Duo Images will perform,
as well.

And there is a "Destination Workshop" featuring a slide show travelogue
about Armenia and Karabakh the first day of the show, Feb.

13.

This slide show, entitled "Welcome to Armenia: Ancient Nation, New
Republic," will be presented by Matthew Karanian and Robert Kurkjian,
the authors of Armenia’s first-ever commercial travel guidebook
dedicated solely to Armenia. The show features spectacular photography
of the people, vistas, and historic sites of Armenia and Karabakh.

In addition to showcasing the beauty of Armenia and Karabakh in
photographs, Karanian and Kurkjian will discuss the current state of
tourism in the two republics and explain some of the logistics of
getting there and getting around. They will also discuss Armenia’s
prospects for developing as an eco-tourism destination. Their guidebook
on Armenia, "The Stone Garden Guide: Armenia and Karabagh," is the
best-selling guide to the country.

"This is a huge event for Armenia, but also especially for Karabakh,"
says Zaven Kazazian, a member of the AACC. "This is a rare opportunity
to showcase Armenians at one of the largest travel shows in the world,"
he said.

Participation in the travel show caps a decade of growth in Armenia’s
tourism market, according to the Armenian Consul General G.

Hovhannissian. "Armenia attaches a special importance to tourism,
and has declared it to be a priority sector for the country’s economic
development," he said. "This is a joint undertaking [by the government
and the private sector] and I am sure the Armenia booth will attract
a lot of visitors," he added.

Approximately 650,000 tourists traveled to Armenia in 2009-a ten-fold
increase over the number who visited just a decade ago. More than a
million visitors are projected to annually travel to Armenia by 2020.

The event is a milestone for the development of tourism in Armenia,
says Nick Hacopian a member of the AACC and the Chair of the committee
that organized Armenia’s participation in the travel show. "This
is the largest travel event in the US, and our presence will help
showcase Armenia to a vast new audience," he said.

BRITAIN AND GENOCIDE
Martin Shaw

The Morung Express
Feb 1, 2010

The official annual commemoration of a century of genocide and its
victims should be accompanied by a responsible awareness of Britain’s
own historical record

A man wears an Iraq protest t-shirt as he walks past British police
officers outside the venue of the Iraq Inquiry in London, on the day
Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke. An unrepentant Tony
Blair defended his decision to join the United States in attacking
Iraq, arguing Friday before a panel investigating the war that the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks made the threat of weapons of mass destruction
impossible to ignore. (AP Photo)

The date of the liberation of the Nazi concentration-camp at Auschwitz,
27 January 1945, has since 2001 been marked in Britain as a moment
for the remembrance of the victims of the Nazi holocaust – and, by
gradual extension, of all those subjected to genocidal assault over
the last century. The annual commemoration of "Holocaust Memorial Day",
now in its tenth year, has become an established part of the national
political calendar: the highlights include educational programmes and
exhibitions, and a series of events attended by survivors of genocide,
leading politicians and representatives of religious groups – most
of them taking place under the auspices of a charitable trust which
works throughout the year (the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust).

Britain is the locus of these activities, but what of its own
relationship to the histories and practices being commemorated? Tony
Blair’s reply to a parliamentary request in June 1999 that invited
him to institute such a day is revealing here. Britain’s then prime
minister said: "I am determined to ensure that the horrendous crimes
against humanity committed during the Holocaust are never forgotten.

The ethnic cleansing and killing that has taken place in Europe in
recent weeks are a stark example of the need for vigilance." The
reference was to the war of March-June 1999 over the contested
post-Yugoslav province of Kosovo, when Blair had been among the
Nato leaders most committed to securing the return to Kosovo of
approximately one million Kosovo Albanians expelled by Serbian military
forces on the authority of Slobodan Milosevic. Thus, holocaust-memorial
day remembers genocide that other nations have committed – whether the
Nazi extermination of the Jews or the Serbian expulsion of the Kosovo
Albanians – and against which this country stands as a "vigilant"
and if necessary armed protector of the innocent.

The implication of so placing Britain in relation to acts of genocide
is that there is no need for the country to engage in (for example)
the national self-criticism that produced the commemoration of victims
of Nazism in Germany, or which in Australia and the United States has
produced official recognition of crimes perpetrated against indigenous
people in the course of colonisation; nor need for academic debate
about Britain’s connections to the history of genocide, which has
preoccupied intellectuals and scholars in these and other countries.

True, the institution of holocaust-memorial day did provoke some
discussion among scholars of the holocaust. One of those who opposed it
suggested that "the day will act as a convenient opportunity for the
government to present itself as morally upright, thereby occluding
its involvement in contemporary ethnic, religious or other forms
of discrimination"; another, David Cesarani, warned that it would
reinforce the British people’s "rather self-satisfied perception of
the Second World War as unambiguously a ‘good’ war from which this
country emerged triumphant and morally vindicated." Instead, Cesarani
argued, the British should recognise that "(the) ambiguity of Britain’s
response to Nazi tyranny and racism is lodged in our heritage."

The genocidal moment These criticisms still resound. For indeed,
a wider examination of Britain’s relationship to genocide makes
clear that the problem ranges wider than the holocaust, and often far
deeper than "ambiguity". The modern English state itself was formed
and secured in part through episodes of genocidal violence against
internal enemies (among them the Normans’ murderous dispersal of the
Anglo-Saxon peasantry in Yorkshire in 1069-70, the massacre of Jews
at York in 1190, Oliver Cromwell’s slaughter of Irish civilians in
1649-50). In a more recent historical perspective, the flipside of
Britain’s claimed peaceful "gradualism" is what Leon Trotsky called
"the history of violent changes which the British governing classes
have made in the life of other nations."

Britain’s colonisation of the "new world", for example, was punctuated
by what the historian Dirk Moses has called "genocidal moments". The
phenomenon of "settler colonialism" in north America and Australia
generally involved forcibly displacing indigenous peoples, and
localised genocidal massacres were quite common. British authorities
in London and the colonies willed settlement knowing that it foretold
the often-brutal removal of the indigenous inhabitants, even if they
sometimes condemned the specific means that settlers adopted. The
current Australian government headed by Kevin Rudd has apologised to
the indigenous peoples, whereas in Britain the dominant attitude is
that what happened is a "local" problem that has no implications for
the settlers’ country of origin or that country’s state policy.

The British state was not a direct perpetrator in the high-genocidal
period of European history – the first half of the 20th century –
but its "humanitarian" stance offered but meagre practical support
to victims (Armenians in Ottoman Turkey from 1915, Jews during the
Nazis’ "final solution"). At times, however, it encouraged or endorsed
genocidal acts (as during the Greek army’s rampage through Anatolia
in 1919-22 and the often brutal expulsion of German populations from
Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1945). Britain’s aerial bombing of German
cities in 1943-45 was not directly genocidal, but it invoked comparably
destructive means and the principle of "collective punishment" (and,
like the United States’s firebombing of Japan’s cities, showed how
close degenerate war can come to genocide).

The British state was also deeply implicated in the mutually
destructive violence of the Indian partition of 1947, in which 12
million people were forced from their homes and at least 250,000 died.

This violence – now widely seen as genocidal – was exacerbated by
the British partition-plan, which was devised and implemented with
disregard for its likely catastrophic consequences. In Palestine in
1948, the British stood by as Zionist forces terrorised the majority of
the Arab population into flight in order to create as large as possible
a Jewish-majority state. The United Nations’s own partition-plan
(notwithstanding its genocide-convention that was to be approved at
the end of 1947) is a reminder that responsibility for the disaster
was international, but Britain – as the contemporary mandate power –
had a particular share.

In the era after the cold war, Britain (like other western states)
proclaimed a new determination to prevent genocide. Yet the record is
distinctly unimpressive: Britain may not bear the shame of facilitating
a particular horrific massacre (as the Dutch do for Srebrenica
in 1995), but it has hardly spearheaded effective responses. The
Conservative government of John Major (1990-97) adopted a notably
anti-interventionist and even cynical stance towards genocide. It
disregarded Saddam Hussein’s terrorising of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991
until shamed into action (Major notoriously remarked: "I do not
recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection");
it then exerted itself (including at the United Nations) to block
effective international responses to genocide in Bosnia (1992-95)
and Rwanda (1994).

The ("New") Labour government elected in May 1997 and headed by Tony
Blair took a different approach. Blair and his first-term (1997-2001)
foreign secretary Robin Cook were among the foremost advocates of
action to halt Serbian persecution of the Kosovo Albanians. Yet
the high-altitude bombing with which the war was prosecuted – the
only tactic Nato states could agree on – allowed where it did not
provoke Slobodan Milosevic to escalate to the murderous expulsion
of almost the whole Albanian population of Kosovo. Nato’s intense
campaign eventually restored the displaced Kosovars to their homes,
but was followed by a failure to prevent the revenge expulsions of
Serbs from most of the province.

Britain became in this period the major donor of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) government that had secured its rule after the genocide;
but Labour failed to oppose the RPF’s own aggression, amounting
in some places to genocidal massacre, in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC). The British government, in invading Iraq in 2003
and failing to administer the country properly afterwards, bears
great responsibility for creating the circumstances in murderous
attacks were inflicted (not least by the Sunni-based "resistance"
against Shi’a and other non-Sunni Iraqis, terrorising them out of
areas they controlled). The low-grade genocidal conflict created
a situation where around 1.9 million Iraqis (the UNHCR estimates)
became refugees; a number exceeded by the 2.6 million internally
displaced. The gravest of all charges against Tony Blair (and George
W Bush) may be that they have a clear responsibility for this outcome.

The reflective moment David Cesarani’s judgment that "the Holocaust
is a part of British history" must, therefore, be extended. The wider
history of genocide has touched and been touched by British state and
society in many different ways. It cannot – with reference once more
to Tony Blair’s statement of June 1999 – be assumed that "other"
countries are the problem and Britain part of the solution. The
idea of "bad/guilty" and "good/vigilant" nations – which often lies
at the heart of genocidal practice – is not much help in answering
genocide. Rather, it must be recognised that entire nations never
stand unequivocally on one side of the historical process: complexity
and ambiguity are the norm.

British governments and people have been part of the problem as
often as they have been part of the solution. British citizens have
responsibilities that go beyond vigilance; for example, to investigate
the reasons why their state and social institutions have not always
been vigilant, and why indeed they have sometimes been complicit in
genocide. The lessons of the historical record are varied, but they
leave no reasons for complacency.

Martin Shaw delivered the annual war-studies lecture at King’s
College, London on 26 January 2010. The lecture – entitled "Britain
and Genocide: Parameters of National Responsibility" – contains a
fuller version of the argument presented here.

ALL RESIDENTS OF THE VILLAGE ISPAS WERE NAMED RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS
By Anna Harhalia, Chernivtsi

The Day Weekly Digest
Tuesday, 2 February 2010

On Jan. 27, 2010, the entire world commemorated Holocaust victims

VASYLYNA DENYS AND IVAN SHTEFIUK, WHO HELPED THEIR PARENTS RESCUE
JEWS WHEN THEY WERE CHILDREN, LOOKING AT THE PHOTOS FROM THEIR
GRANDCHILDREN’S TRIP TO ISRAEL

In 1991, when Ukraine just gained independence, President Leonid
Kravchuk came to Babyn Yar to say words of grief and compassion and
apologized before Jews on behalf of the entire Ukrainian people for the
crime committed by the German occupants on the territory of Ukraine.

There were thousands of Ukrainians who risked their lives and
sacrificed themselves, rescued and hid Jews – representatives of
an ethnic group with whom our people have lived side by side for
centuries. Some of these Ukrainians are now named Righteous among
the Nations. This title, according to the Israeli law "On the Memory
of the Catastrophe," is conferred on non-Jews, who in the years of
Nazi occupation of Europe rescued Jews from persecution. The Day
is carrying two stories about the Righteous among the Nations – one
from Chernivtsi and the other one from Kirovohrad, while there are
thousands of them. Let us commemorate and thank these people.

The village Ispas of Vyzhnytsia raion, Chernivtsi oblast, is located on
the picturesque bank of the Cheremosh River. The village is populous;
at the beginning of the previous century, over 2,000 people resided
there, which was a significant figure in those times.

Newcomers were attracted by the favorable location of Ispas, which
lies on the road going from Chernivtsi to Vyzhnytsia and further to
the Ivano-Frankivsk region and Galicia, which was part of another
state at the time. So, besides Ukrainians, Ispas was a place of
residence for Romanian families, Poles, Jews, and Armenians. They
all treated each other in a friendly way. Houses of families with
different ethnic background stood side-by-side, so women went to
their neighbors to borrow matches or a pinch of salt and exchanged
recipes of national dishes, while their children attended the same
school and played with each other after classes.

"At school I sat at one desk with a Jewish girl, Rivka Herstel,"
says Vasylyna Denys, recalling her childhood years. "As we lived
close, we often came to see each other: Rivka’s mother treated us to
kartoplianyky (potato pancakes). At the time, all of us wore national
costumes, so we, as girls of any time, liked to exchange clothes. We
hid in my house behind the stove and exchanged our clothes. I remember
that Rivka was fond of my embroidered shirts."

The peaceful life of the Ispas residents was ruined by World War II.

The region was again occupied by Romania, an ally of Hitler’s Germany,
and the persecution of Jews started. In July 1941, local members of
the pro-Fascist organization Kuzi organized a bloody massacre in the
villages Milieve and Banyliv, which were near Ispas.

"From there a band of 20 men, armed with pitchforks, scythes, and axes
(I remember that only one of them was carrying a rifle) rushed to
our village," recalls Tanasii Shtefiuk, an eyewitness of those events.

His father Ivan Shtefiuk was the first to learn the news.

Wheelchair-bound, this man enjoyed great authority among the
villagers. He immediately sent his children for the village headman,
priest, and other respectful men. They had to decide together how to
defend their Jewish co-villagers.

The negotiations with the aggressors took place in the house which
is still standing in one of the village’s central streets.

"The men were refusing to leave for a long while," Tanasii says. "They
boasted about how they had killed Jews in their villages: their
narrations still make blood curdle. They tried to instigate my father
and other residents of Ispas to give them a possibility to ‘purify’
our village, too. But our men held their own ground and succeeded
in making the murderers go away. In spite of that, just in case,
the villagers hid the Jews for a couple of days. I remember that two
girls were hiding in our threshing barn, which stood in the garden,
and my mother brought food and warm clothes to them."

Finally, 15 Jewish families were rescued: 2,000 residents of Ispas
risked their lives to save 100 people.

The members of the International Tolerance Foundation, which conducts
surveys on the history of the Holocaust in different countries of the
world, learned about the deed of the village’s residents. The center
initiated erecting a monument to "the collective righteous": the
ceremony of laying foundation of the future monument was held in 2008.

The foundation did not limit itself to this effort only. Children
from the Israeli city Sderot visited Ispas, while grandchildren of
Ispas residents who saved their Jewish co-villagers in wartime went
to Israel in exchange. All the residents of the village were named
Righteous among the Nations.

Turkish Prime Minister: EU should not become a Christian club
31.01.2010 16:54 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ No matter what they do, or what kind of obstacles
they put in front of us, we will keep walking, patiently, Turkish
Premier Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an said in an interview with Euronews TV
channel, commenting on EU membership talks’ future.

`There is, certainly, an end to this. That will be the moment at which
all the EU members say `We are not accepting Turkey.’ We will not stop
until they say this,’ he stressed.

Emphasizing Turkey’s determination to gain full membership in the
European Union, Erdogan slammed French and German leaders for putting
obstacles in Turkey’s way.

Speaking on religious and cultural differences, Erdogan said, `EU
should not become a Christian club. The EU should not take part in a
campaign of Islamophobia,’ he concluded, addressing a warning to any
country taking such a stance.

EU-Turkey negotiations: After four decades in the EU’s waiting room,
accession negotiations with Turkey were opened on 3 October 2005.
According to the mutually agreed negotiating framework, these
negotiations are "an open-ended process, the outcome of which cannot
be guaranteed". At the same time, analysts tend to point out that
there has been no case in EU history where accession negotiations,
once started, have not led to an offer of full membership.

Several analysts also recall that the term "negotiation" is slightly
misleading, since, during the accession process, European law (ie the
acquis) is to be adopted rather than negotiated.

Outside the immediate framework of the accession negotiations, Turkey
is expected by the EU to normalize its ties with all of its neighbors,
primarily Greece, Cyprus and Armenia, before joining the Union. Ankara
must also do its best to reconfigure European public opinion in its
favor.

Globe and Mail –

Krzysztof Penderecki grows an unfinished symphony

Composer has built what he believes is the largest arboretum in Eastern Europe

By Robert Everett-Green

Published on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010 2:58PM EST Last updated on Sunday,
Jan. 31, 2010 3:12PM EST

`I always had my roots in the past,’ says Krzysztof Penderecki, the
Polish composer who figured prominently in the postwar avant-garde
before embracing less contentious sounds. Actually, he has deep roots
in the present as well if you count the thousands of trees he has
planted on his 70-acre estate near Krakow.

Penderecki, who is in Toronto this week for six concerts (including an
Esprit Orchestra show Friday) and several speaking events, has written
lots of music in many genres, including 10 oratorios, four operas,
eight symphonies and 15 concertos. Over the past four decades, he has
also built what he believes is the largest arboretum in Eastern
Europe.

`It’s my second passion, after music,’ he says. `I have about 1,700
species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate. It’s
like a park, organized into collections. I have an Italian formal
garden, a Japanese garden with a Japanese bridge, and two labyrinths.
… The struggle to shape a big park is like making a symphony – an
unfinished symphony, since it will have to be carried on after me, by
my granddaughter perhaps.’

Big projects come naturally to the 76-year-old composer, whose
catalogue is studded with works about pivotal historical events. His
St. Luke Passion, and his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, made
his name known internationally in the early sixties and helped to thaw
Poland’s restrictive cultural scene. `The communists saw what we did
in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the
West, so they tolerated it,’ he says.

Since then, he has oscillated `between the sacred and the profane,
between God and the devil,’ as he says in a 1998 book of lectures
called The Labyrinth of Time. The sacred includes most of the works on
Soundstreams concerts Saturday and Sunday; the profane includes operas
such as Ubu Rex (1986) and Phaedra, which he is writing for St.
Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.

Penderecki grew up in a part of southeastern Poland that could be
called remote if so many nations hadn’t sent armies through it. He had
an Armenian grandmother and a German grandfather, and his father was a
Greek Orthodox lawyer who played in string quartets. The small town
where the Pendereckis lived was 70 per cent Jewish, mostly Hassidic;
the synagogue was near his house.

Memories of that community came to Penderecki as he wrote his latest
oratorio, a Kaddish for the Lodz ghetto, wiped out by the Nazis in
August, 1944. The piece, part of which appears on Soundstreams
concerts, includes settings of Polish poems by Abramek Cytryn, a
Jewish teenager in the ghetto.

`They’re very beautiful and fantastic and deep, because he knew he was
going to die,’ Penderecki says. These days, he is busy setting
19th-century Polish poems to music for a piece to commemorate Chopin’s
bicentenary, although in general he finds Polish a hard language for
music: Phaedra’s libretto will probably be in German or Russian.

No language is needed to appreciate Penderecki’s arboretum, which is
maintained by five full-time workers and which he says he will
eventually open to the public. He continues to hunt down variants of
the species he already has with a fervour that taxes his wallet and
sometimes annoys his wife.

He started planting the second and larger of his labyrinths four years
ago, using a design planned but not executed for a 14th-century French
church. In the garden, as in the concert hall, the past still feeds
Penderecki’s imagination.

Soundstreams Canada and the University of Toronto present music by
Krzysztof Penderecki, performed by the Polish Chamber Choir, the Elmer
Iseler Singers and the Toronto Children’s Chorus Saturday and Sunday
at Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church.

esctoday.com
31/Jan at 18:55

Ha yk Kasparov bids to represent Armenia in Oslo

Another hopeful aiming to represent Armenia in Oslo is Hayk Kasparov.
This year marks Hayk’s second attempt to represent his country in
Eurovision, as he already participated at the 2009 Armenian selection
with the song Give an answer. His entry for 2010 is entitled Du gites
(You know).

The song has been composed by Hayk Kasparov himself, penned by Sergey
Gregoryan and produced by Ashot Barseghyan. Du gites features
traditional folk elements such as Armenian instruments -used for
example for the country’s entry at Eurovision 2009 Jan jan- and is
sung in Armenian.

You can listen to the song here .

Hayk Kasparov participated at the 2009 Armenian national final with
the song Give an answer, which received nil points.

Thanks to Yerevan Jan for the submission of the information.