The Rebirth of Armenia

[Tigranakert]

The Rebirth of Armenia

National Geographic - 2004

By Frank Viviano
Photographs by Alexandra Avakian


Soldiers serve as honorary godfathers for 200 children being baptized at Tatev Monastery, part of celebrations in 2001 marking Armenia's 1,700 years as a Christian nation. Mass baptisms became a familiar scene in Armenia in the years following the country's independence from the Soviet Union, which tried to muzzle religion during its 70-year rule. For more than a decade the Armenian Apostolic Church allowed such communal ceremonies in order to accommodate the large numbers of Armenians returning to their religious roots, but last year the church announced that it no longer sanctioned mass baptisms.

We had purchased four maps, with four radically different versions of the route to Amaras, on the assumption that one of them might bear some slim connection to reality. Gevorg Melkonian, a veteran guide to the remote backcountry of the Caucasus, pulled the car over every half hour, and we stared at the maps in turn, trying to make sense of our location.

It was a hopeless task. All four maps were exercises in fiction, and every road sign had been blasted into illegible shreds by shrapnel and tank fire. In the end we relied on dead reckoning, lurching south at a seven-mile (11-kilometer) an-hour crawl through occasional mud holes so deep and slick that Gevorg's Russian-manufactured four-by-four spun in 180-degree fishtails.

At the village of Majkalashen, a lone farmer turned up mounds of rich black soil amid vineyards in April bud and cottony orchards of flowering apricot, his waist and shoulders hitched to a plow mule. The landscape might have been lost to time had it not been for an International Red Cross marker less than 300 yards (270 meters) from the farmer. "Minefields," Gevorg explained.

This is the insurgent nation of Nagorno-Karabakh: forever Armenian in the eyes of its 130,000 embattled residents. A breakaway province of Azerbaijan, according to international law. An independent state since 1991 by its own unilateral declaration, diplomatically recognized by no foreign government. And the setting of a six-year conflict that killed as many as 25,000 Azeris and 5,000 Armenians before an uneasy truce, still broken regularly by gunfire, was declared in 1994.

This is also the template of Armenian history, a 3,000-year chronicle of defiance and survival.

Two hours beyond Majkalashen we crested a ridge and wove down earthen switchbacks into the Amaras valley. The fourth-century Monastery of St. Gregory the Illuminator, the patron saint of Armenians, stood above a creek bed, utterly deserted, engulfed in the silence of gnarled mulberry trees.

We climbed through an aperture in the bullet-riddled stone rampart that surrounded the monastery. The rampart's inside wall had been fitted with cells for the monks; it took very little imagination to visualize them steadily transcribing texts and teaching the classics of antiquity to novitiates. The monastic complex at Amaras housed the first school established by Armenians in Karabakh, a foundation shrine of their educational traditions and written language.

The monastery's later annals are a catalog of desecrations. It was sacked by Persians in the fifth century, Arabs in the seventh, and Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors in the thirteenth. A century and a half later came Tamerlane, riding a furious wind of conquest from Samarqand to the Mediterranean; determined to outdo the Mongols, he razed the entire complex and had its stones thrown into a river. According to oral tradition, the surviving monks waited until Tamerlane was out of sight, then pulled the ruins from the water and rebuilt their monastery, stone by stone.

I took the tortuous road to Amaras because its monastery had played a key role in the Armenians' distant past. But Nagorno-Karabakh also spoke directly to the 21st century. The rebellion against Azerbaijan was the first of the deadly conflicts to erupt in the ruins of the Soviet Union as its empire disintegrated, the first post–Cold War war, fought on the battlefields of ethnic nationalism and antipathy that have redesigned the world's map in the past decade.

In Stepanakert, Karabakh's largest city, Azeri forces had hit the central high school with "19 missiles, 4 heavy artillery shells, and 9 bombs," Karen Andreyan, the principal, told me. We visited a classroom where 15-year-olds in a compulsory military training program demonstrated their speed taking apart and reassembling Kalashnikov assault rifles. They were down to an average of 20 seconds.

Andreyan was proud of them. But he was prouder yet that the school had remained in operation throughout the war. "We taught literature classes, music, math, science, history, and geography in underground tunnels."

A very old story, Armenians will tell you. Armenia's early contemporaries—the Hittites and the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians and Phrygians, the Lydians and Medes—vanished long ago. But the Armenians are still present. The longer I traveled among them, the more I recognized that my journey was an inquiry into an ancient drama—the cycle of disaster and regeneration embodied in the tale of Noah, whose ark, According to the Old Testament, came to rest in Armenia after the Flood.

At every turn in the Armenian landscape, the echoes of that primeval drama can still be heard. History for Armenians has never been a matter of detached experience, lost in the currents of change. It is an unbroken cultural memory that reaches back three millennia, an identity so tenacious that it has weathered every imperial rise and fall from Babylon to perestroika.

Inscriptions in old Persian make the earliest recorded allusion to a land known as Armina in 518 b.c. But under their own name, the Hai (even today, in Armenian, the nation is called Hayastan), they had settled in what is now known as the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia centuries earlier. Legend has it that the Hai are descended from a renowned archer, Hayk, a great-great-grandson of Noah who escaped the doomed city of Babel before its celebrated tower fell.

Already a thousand years before the birth of Christ, the theme of survival is central to the Armenian identity. Already its origins are shrouded in antique mists. After that the mists only grow denser, and the saga of Armenian longevity becomes a riddle. What is Armenia?

The straightforward answer in the year 2004 is that it's a nation of three million citizens in the southern reaches of the Caucasus Mountains, 11,500 square miles (30,000 square kilometers) of stony highland roughly the size of Belgium or Maryland. Landlocked and earthquake ridden, it lies squarely on one of history's most venerable trade routes—the land bridge from Europe to Asia—now bordered by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran.

But the borders of this Armenia only date back to 1921, when Soviet Russia annexed part of a short-lived republic that was born in the ashes of World War I, allotting Nagorno-Karabakh to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan and establishing the current Armenian capital at Yerevan. For the previous five and a half centuries, Armenia did not even exist as a state; it was a geographic term with little political meaning, referring to a people who had been parceled out among the territorial claims of the Ottoman Turks, the Persians, and the Russians.

Turn the historic clock back to the epoch of Julius Caesar's Rome, the first century before Christ, and Armenia is an empire under Tigranes the Great, whose realm extends from the Caspian Sea to the Holy Land. Turn it forward again, to the ninth century, and the giant Armenia of Caesar's day has been carved up into provincial satrapies of Byzantium and the Arab caliphate. Then come the relentless Turkic invasions that gradually loosen the Byzantine grip, and in a development that would seem utterly implausible for another nation, the Kingdom of Armenia effectively packs its bags in the 12th century and moves several hundred miles west to the region of Cilicia along the Mediterranean coast.

Eight centuries later, in 2001, two French academics published a historical atlas intended to make cartographic sense of Armenia's constant metamorphosis. The task required no fewer than 60 separate maps, yet the authors still felt obliged to apologize for a lack of precision.

The sole constant in their atlas is the towering presence of Mount Ararat, the geographic fulcrum on which all the maps turn, the centerpiece of Armenia's collective imagination. As a Turkish military zone, it is strictly off-limits to Armenians.

You are looking at the great Armenian paradox," Jivan Tabibian said. We stood at the second-floor window of the Foreign Ministry building in Yerevan, watching clouds scuttle across the mountain's ice-capped 16,854-foot (5,138-meter) crown. Tabibian, a diplomat whose portfolio includes ambassadorships to four countries and two international organizations, was discussing a policy initiative when he abruptly fell silent, gazing at Ararat. It's impossible not to be distracted by Ararat in Yerevan. Despite its enormous mass, the great peak seems to float weightlessly over the city, engaged in permanent dialogue with Little Ararat, its 12,782-foot (3,896-meter) neighbor.

The vast snowy brow of Ararat glowers, pronounces, with hallucinatory power. Its name is derived from that of a Bronze Age god, Ara, whose talismanic cult of death and rebirth mirrored the seasonal transitions of Ararat from lifeless winter to fertile spring. Little Ararat, by contrast, is an exercise in calm, rational idealism, a volcanic cone so perfectly shaped that it suggests not so much what a mountain is as what a mountain ought to be.

You can't ponder the two Ararats for long without drifting into philosophical reflection, and the Armenians have been pondering them since the birth of civilization.

The philosopher in Jivan Tabibian maintains that his people's identity is inextricably bound to the experience of loss, to the serial reorderings of the map that have often stranded their most hallowed landmarks in someone else's state. Like the Monastery of St. Gregory the Illuminator deep in the hills of Nagorno-Karabakh, Mount Ararat lies outside the contemporary Armenian Republic, beyond the closed frontiers of a hostile Turkey.

"The paradox embodied in that mountain," Tabibian said, "has to do with our sense of place," the concept that is so essential to most national identities. "We are not place bound"—an impossibility, given Armenia's ceaseless traumas, metamorphoses, and peregrinations—"but we are intensely place conscious."

Later I repeated Tabibian's enigmatic words to Vartan Oskanian, the Republic of Armenia's foreign minister. And he too offered a philosopher's reflection on Ararat. "Every morning we look at it," he said. "It's only 25 miles (40 kilometers) from this building, and we feel we can almost touch it. But we can't go there. Ararat is our pride and our frustration. Our history. The unfulfilled dreams that drive us."

The paradox of Armenian identity may be even more acute for those who do not watch the sun set over Ararat each evening: the diasporans who account for four million of the estimated seven million Armenians alive today. As a foreign correspondent, I had chanced on their churches or tombstones in Singapore and Hong Kong, Cairo and Jerusalem, Moscow, Venice, and Naples. There are Armenian enclaves in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, Armenian-owned vineyards in California, Armenian pop stars and intellectuals in New York City and Paris.

Most are descendants of the greatest catastrophe in their people's history: the WWI-era massacres in the Ottoman Empire that were the murderous 20th century's first major experience of genocide. Ostensibly provoked by a militant surge of Armenian nationalism against the repressive Ottoman government —and despite the fact that tens of thousands of Armenians were loyally serving in the Ottoman army, which was allied with Germany—the government crackdown in 1915 grew into an organized effort to exterminate an entire community.

In 1913 the empire had an Armenian population of about two million, according to parish records of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Fewer than 100,000 remained in 1920. Estimates of the dead in what is now Turkey range from 600,000 to 1.5 million. Except for a short time after WWI, no Turkish government has ever acknowledged that a systematic slaughter of Armenians occurred.

Three generations later, the events of the massacre still had violent repercussions; beginning in 1973 and continuing over two decades, dozens of Turkish diplomats and nationals were murdered, allegedly by Armenian terrorists.

[Tigranakert]

Re: The Rebirth of Armenia

The survivors of the 1915 massacre were forced into an exodus that carried them to the distant corners of the globe, where they and their descendants proved to be a wandering tribe of high achievers. Diaspora Armenians were the developers of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), plastic surgery, and the single-handled water faucet. In a terrible irony, an ethnic Armenian even designed the Soviet MiG warplanes that were used by Azerbaijan to bomb Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Three anchors moor the diasporans to their ancestral land, endowing them with Tabibian's place consciousness: the drama of survival, to be sure, the sheer militant defiance of 15-year-olds assembling Kalashnikovs. But also Armenian faith, and that Armenian philosopher who stands beside the Armenian warrior, teaching science and literature in a bomb shelter.

A set of imposing steel doors fills nearly an entire wall on the second floor of the Pontifical Residence at Etchmiadzin, the Mother See of the Armenian Apostolic Church, 12 miles west of Yerevan. A single set of keys exists to open them; it is in the sole possession of His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians. Beyond the doors is a large onyx tablet, on which the 36 original letters of the Armenian alphabet are written in 20-carat gold. "Those letters are the 36 warriors who always lead us to victory," the catholicos told me.

Karekin II is a 53-year-old man with degrees in theology from three European institutions and a boundless store of energy. Since October 1999 he has been the 132nd successor of St. Gregory the Illuminator, who baptized King Tiridates III in a.d. 301 and made Armenia the world's first officially Christian state. Under portraits of his predecessors in a book-lined office, the catholicos spoke of efforts to attract more young people to religious vocations and of his hopes for the reunification of the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity. Pope John Paul II was among 37 church leaders from around the world who were his guests in 2001, during the 1,700th anniversary of Christianity as the state religion. "We have a warm, brotherly relationship," he said. Then the conversation returned to the tablet locked up on the second floor, with its golden Armenian alphabet.

"St. Mesrob gave us the ability to speak to God with his letters," the catholicos said. "It is through that conversation that we have maintained our identity as a people, and have survived as a nation."

Mesrob Mashtots was a courtier and military figure who became an itinerant priest, a congenital wanderer driven by an obsession with ideas. In short, a classic Armenian. Born sometime around a.d. 360, he is revered as a national saint, not as a soldier but as an educator. Mashtots gave Armenians their alphabet.

His birthplace was in a small village west of Ararat near Lake Van in present-day Turkey. From childhood, Mashtots was fascinated with language, becoming so proficient in Greek that he quickly rose to a powerful government advisory post. But court life didn't suit him. At the age of 35 he set off into the wilderness, traveling by foot across Asia Minor. A decade into his wanderings, the story has it, the hand of God appeared before him, burning 36 letters of fire into the wall of a cave.

For 35 more years until his death in 440, Mashtots recruited teams of monks to translate the religious, scientific, and literary masterpieces of the ancient world into this new alphabet. Much of their work was conducted in the monastery at Amaras, amid the endless succession of calamities that defined Armenia 15 centuries ago and defines it still, a dozen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Svetlana Gasparian is walking home, over a trash-littered wasteland that was a leafy park before the Soviet collapse, when I ask if she has a few minutes to talk. I want to know how people live in today's Yerevan, I explain. Svetlana hesitates, then she nods her head and beckons me to follow.

She is 37, a widow since 1996 with two daughters and a son, all under 12. Their home is a rented room 15 feet (4.6 meters) long by 10 feet (3 meters) wide in the bowels of a gargantuan housing complex on the capital's periphery—seven clusters of high-rise apartment towers built in the 1970s to accommodate 60,000 residents. On the corridor where the Gasparians live, 30 families are packed into 30 rooms, served by a single working toilet. With tattered blankets hung from a rope line, Svetlana has divided their 150 square feet (14 square meters) into a kitchen cubicle and two tiny rooms, with three narrow beds arranged along the walls and a table wedged into a corner. The kitchen sink is also the family bath. "Life could be difficult in Soviet times," she says. "But never like this."

The apartment has no heat in a city where winter temperatures can dip to 10�F (-12�C). The rent is 5,000 Armenian drams a month, approximately nine U.S. dollars. "We're about to be evicted," she says, "because we can't come up with that much. I have no idea what we'll do." Her monthly welfare check, as an unemployed nurse and single mother of three, is 8,000 drams.

In a world where living standards for most former citizens of the defunct Soviet Union have sunk precipitously, nowhere has the decline been more agonizing than in Armenia.

When dawn broke on December 7, 1988, Armenia's scientific institutes were among the most advanced in the entire Soviet bloc. Its farms, vineyards, and factories produced some of the highest quality foods and consumer goods available to a closed market of 286 million people that extended from the Russian Pacific to the Black Sea and the Baltic. Armenia was the California of Soviet high technology, the Italy of Soviet shoe manufacturing, the France of Soviet-made cognac.

Within three years Armenia was to be the scene of unremitting devastation. As in so many other moments in the immense stretch of Armenian history, the turnabout had a biblical resonance, as though it were the act of an angry Old Testament God. At 11:41 a.m. that December morning in 1988, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale leveled the industrial cities of northern Armenia. When the quake's pall of dust began to clear a few days later, more than 25,000 people were dead.

It was also in 1988 that the first skirmishes erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh between the region's ethnic Armenians and the police and military forces of Soviet Azerbaijan. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union tumbled into political dissolution, and on September 21 Armenians voted to become an independent state. What few observers foresaw is that its transcontinental Soviet market would also evaporate with numbing abruptness—or that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would lead to a strangling blockade on Armenia imposed by Azerbaijan and Turkey, its two principal doors to the outside world, a blockade that has not yet been lifted.

By 1994 the former Soviet Union's France, Italy, and California had declined into an impoverished backwater swarming with organized crime gangs and haunted with shuttered factories.

"The power stations shut down," engineer Vahe Aghabegians remembers. "High-rise apartment buildings were totally dark at night. Gasoline was a memory. There were no cars on the streets. The only source of heat came from wood fires. In mid-January trees began to disappear from the parks and boulevards."

In desperation the Armenian government reactivated a temperamental Soviet nuclear reactor in 1994. An agreement was worked out with Iran for oil deliveries and shipments of critical supplies. But when the electricity came back on, people like Svetlana Gasparian could no longer pay for it.

Many Yerevan apartments remained dark for another reason. Armenia's National Statistical Service reported in March 2002 that the republic's population had plummeted by 800,000 since the last Soviet census in 1989. The service's director conceded that there were imperfections in the count, and that the actual loss was closer to one million. Roughly a quarter of the nation had joined the Armenian diaspora.

Vahe Aghabegians is determined to reverse the flow. Born in Iran, educated in Massachusetts, he built a prosperous life in the U.S. as a computer expert in the booming 1980s. For reasons even he can't pin down—"Armenian reasons," he says, leaving it at that—he began paying regular visits to Yerevan in 1992.

In 1998, when he turned 45, he convinced his wife, Odette, who is also Iran born and American educated, to move with their two sons to Armenia, where he now serves as an unpaid high-technology adviser to the government. Odette is the proprietor of a Yerevan travel agency. They were drawn here, as it were, by the ancient gravitational pull of Ararat, by an unfulfilled yearning.

Vahe's dream is to shepherd Armenia into the 21st-century industrial world, an ambition he shares with Foreign Minister Oskanian, who has provided office space for the dream. The idea is to build on the Singaporean model, to emulate the development of another small nation with few resources into a pivotal regional power in information technology.

"The wherewithal is here, the belief in education, the intellectual capacity," Vahe says. As he speaks, half a dozen young people sit transfixed before computer screens. "Too late," his local critics say. The number of researchers employed in Armenia's once respected scientific institutes dropped from 20,000 in 1990 to 5,000 in 1995, they note.

"A few years ago, I too felt that Armenia had no future," countered Anna Simonian, a 25-year-old media consultant, when I sought the opinion of someone from the IT generation. A graduate of the American University of Armenia, which was created in 1991 as the nation's first institution to provide further education in business administration, Simonian is convinced there are new prospects. "A lot of computer programmers who had been working as bartenders are slowly returning to programming again," she says.

Between 1998 and 2000, the UN estimates, annual technology-related exports from Armenia rose by 25 percent to $250 million. Vahe Aghabegians reads the UN reports closely. A Singaporean Yerevan is his Ararat.

One morning, lost in my own philosophical reflections as I walked through central Yerevan, I heard the murmur of a cello chorus rising from the ghostly hulk of a concrete music hall that had opened in the 1970s and was all but abandoned after the Soviet implosion. Inside, the main stage and seating area were unlit and empty and ripe with the odor of advancing mold. The cellos had been joined by violins, and, turning a corner, I finally saw them in a small glass-enclosed room perched on the building's crumbling rear terrace, two dozen young musicians furiously sweeping their bows under the baton of Aram Gharabekian, artistic director and principal conductor of the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia.

In 1997, he told me later, "we started with nothing. There weren't even enough chairs for my musicians. We held administrative meetings sitting on benches in the main city square. My secretary had no paper to take notes."

By 1998 the orchestra had recorded its own compact disc. By 2003 it had performed on three continents. Gharabekian's explanation? "We couldn't settle for competence, for just being good. We worked, always, toward the very highest international level. That was the only way doors would open for us."

Eventually 93 interviews filled the notebooks that recorded my Armenian journey. I found that almost all of them mirrored the orchestra's tale, the tale of Noah, the epic of survival—with that long view toward something more than merely surviving, toward a shimmering summit just beyond the limits of despair.

For the first five years after the city of Leninakan was shattered in the 1988 earthquake, Hakob Barseghian waited patiently, even longingly, for death. "My wife was gone. My son was gone. What was there to live for?"

But in its arbitrary, inscrutable way, death refused to claim him. On a spring morning in 1993 Barseghian took a deep breath and stepped outside the 25-foot (7.6-meter) long aluminum shipping container that had been his home through the long black night of grief—the insistent grief that has marked so many dark episodes in Armenian history and set the scene just as insistently for improbable tales of renewal.

He began scouring the rubble of Leninakan, which had reassumed its pre-Soviet name, Gyumri, for usable parts. Nuts and bolts, steel cylinders and canisters, valves carefully pried from a wrecked automobile. He carried them back to his metal container in the ruins. Then he set about reinventing civilization. Not the kind of civilization defined by architectural monuments or orchestras. That would come later, Barseghian was certain; it always had for Armenians. Trained as an industrial engineer for industries that no longer existed, he began with the basics, with elemental machines suited to the elemental needs of a shattered city. He designed and built a meat grinder, a food blender, a pedal-driven sausage stuffer, equipment for smoking and curing, coarse and fine slicers.

In a dog-eared botany textbook, Barseghian learned that the mountain pastures of northern Armenia boast one of the Earth's most extensive varieties of wild herbs. He started collecting them, and he invented machines to dry and cut garlic and horseradish, cumin and basil, chamomile and tarragon, rose hips and thyme. Then he invented machines to package and seal medicinal teas.

When I visited him, three food-processing plants were humming along the walls of the expanded aluminum container, each machine's function and design explained in meticulously drafted blueprints. "Forgive us our faults, dear Lord," Hakob Barseghian prayed over a lunch of cured meats and chamomile tea prepared for his guests. "Lead us into the heavenly kingdom and bring your mercy to those who need it."

Apart from his five years of paralyzing sorrow, when even a prayer was beyond him, he says, "I have always been an optimist. I have always been a believer."

[UrMistake]

Re: The Rebirth of Armenia

Thank you,your post is a very valuable material..

[Haykakan]

Re: The Rebirth of Armenia

That is from a old issue of national geographic magazine. I still have that copy.

[ashot24]

Re: The Rebirth of Armenia

Indeed an amazing article. What year is it from?

[Tigranakert]

Re: The Rebirth of Armenia

2004