kumkap

it's been some time since i had a chance to log in. things are getting testy in here! thank you. you will keep your mouth shut from now on. that is a bold assumption to make. if this were the case how am i able to read the armenian section of agos and the other istanbul armenian newspapers zhamanak and marmara that arrive at my house? how was i able to read the 900 page Յիշատակարան Էւէրէկ-ֆէնէսէի (Paris 1963) that I read before I actually visited the place in Cappadokia? tell that to the gomidas institute (http://www.gomidas.org/) i have been to yerevan too. i was there for over two months, where i stayed with my mother's horaquyr's family in malatya-sepastia. i heard some very fine armenian music there to be sure, some of the best i've heard. however, please look at this picture: this is a picture of a group called "spiritual sounds of central asia" that will performing at ucla royce hall. look at it closely because the instruments you see in that picture are exactly the same ones (tar, qyamancha, dhol, and yes duduk) that i saw musicians playing in armenia. and these are azerbaijani, uzbek, whatever whatever musicians. so next time an idiot like you tells me that armenian oud music is turkish and not real armenian music i will look at this picture and remember what a clown you are. traditional eastern armenian music is allowed to sound just like azeri music but western armenian music is not armenian at all because it has an oud in it. correction, that is eastern armenian culture, and those are eastern armenian/persian instruments you are talking about. btw real armenian music, is that what we're going to hear at the spirit of armenia concert at the hollywood bowl? since i'm boycotting the concert, can somebody tell me how many kanuns, tars, qyamanchas, and santurs you hear, versus the number of guitars, mandolins, and pianos/keyboards? thank you for the music history lesson. and what language do you think qanun comes from? really? i had no idea. i learn so much from you. every court musician was blind i guess. and udi hrant played in the sultan's palaces (though he lived after the fall of the ottoman empire). gimme a break. my cousin's father-in-law was friends with udi hrant in istanbul and i have his eagle-quill risha in my room. thanks. you want to know something else about hrant? he gave a concert in soviet armenia one time, to a packed audience that gave him a standing ovation. i respect people of that era's understanding of music, not yours. you still did not convince me that armenian music can not be played on oud (remind me to make that armenian oud thread). and you did not pay attention to what i said, which was that oud is an instrument that is used in armenian music, just as other instruments we do not know the exact origins of are. so far as i can tell, it is not armenian to you simply because it was popular with western armenians. but as you know if you have heard some of udi hrant's oud playing, the oud can be a very soulful, melancholic instrument, and as such it is very apt instrument for expressing the grief and sorrow of the genocide survivor generation. you can not take the armenianness away from those people. besides najarian, whose website you showed, the best maker of ouds was onnik gharibyan, who was the student of the great greek maker manol. these are like the stradivarius of ouds. it doesn't need to be for the greeks to play it. it is a staple of the greek, especially rembetika music. that is my whole point. boo hoo. i used a non-armenian word to describe something. maybe you should send him over to yerevan and have him teach them to say harts chiga instead of problem chqa, aghpaman instead of zibili vedro, baghbaghag instead of marozhni, and so on and so on. anyway, be careful what you say about my kind. we are the ones who built all the churches here in LA, fresno, detroit, boston, new york, and we are the ones singing the sharagans on sunday mornings while you guys are going around gangbanging in glendale and burbank to rabiz music and the women come to church dressed as sluts. we are the reason why in the places where your kind have not yet brought the mafia thug culture of hayastan armenians still have a good reputation. and we are the reason (kerkorian - not grigorian, manougian-simone, najarians) people in hayastan have roads to drive on and schools to go to, otherwise probably the whole country would have left by now. they say there are 50,000 migrants from hayastan in istanbul and other parts of turkey now. instead of helping them like they are now maybe the bolsahyes should give them the same treatment armenians from greece, syria, lebanon, etc. received when they tried to immigrate to their "homeland" in the 40s and 50s. since just like they do wherever else they go they are ruining the good reputation armenians have worked to build over a long period there, it would be a great satisfaction to see them all turned over to the turkish police and sent back where they came from. maybe they can do that to you and the rest of your ilk too. bye!

your first point is good, your second one is another illogical and ignorant one. an instrument is not armenian unless sayat nova played it? (he might not have even been armenian, some say he was persian). then there would be only one armenian instrument (qyamancha). oud is an instrument that is used in armenian music, and there are many good examples of armenian music with oud, you just don't know about them obviously (maybe i'll start a new thread for oud). it's a thousand times more suitable to armenian music than guitar for example (for reasons i explained in another thread about the scales used in armenian music), and is no less armenian than qyamancha, tar, kanun, santur, saz, zurna and other instruments that are shared by many people that are close geographically to armenians. oud is usually attributed to the persians (though they have a different name for it and call it barbat). if this is the case then that puts it in a class with tar, kemence, santur and other persian instruments. in the end though it is hard to say which instrument belongs to who (how would you prove it?) kurds and turks also play duduk. they call it mey (not ney, that's different). when i was in van i heard the kurds there playing it. what we do know is that oud was one of the most popular instruments among western armenians. you can see this by looking at this website: armenian oud you have a bias against western armenian speakers. apparently that bias extends to anything common to western armenian culture as well. the fact that oud was popular among western armenians is what makes it not armenian to you. but while some of your points about language are fair, your musical knowledge is not so good. for example, in another thread you said: please, write about it. the dance is called TAMZARA, which is a village between Sabin Karahisar and Giresun/Kerasounta in the Pontic Mountains (i've been there, it's a very tiny village that's easy to miss). TOMARZA is the village my grandmother was born in, it's near Gesaria/Kayseri. she played oud by the way. the reason you know the song is from tamzara and not tomarza is because the dance is in 9/8, which is a rhythm specific to pontic greek and laz music. so the clarinet is kak too? you must not like greek music very much. greeks were the best clarinet players - i could listen to vassilis saleas' clarinet playing for the rest of my life and not get bored. and there is nothing that is turkified or arabized about that music. it is 100% greek. granada is pretty far you're right. how about thessaloniki, athens, or constantinople though. still too far from yerevan? trust me i would much rather be listening to music in those places than the keyboard hell of yerevan. yerevan was a total sleepy town until less than a hundred years ago. until then constantinople and tiflis were the centers of armenian culture. that's why the music in yerevan is either russian influenced or keyboard garbage. people like tatoul altounian had to come from bolis to teach them armenian music. and let's not forget about gomidas (note the correct spelling) from kutahya and ganatchian from tekirdağ. can somebody tell the people in armenia that i don't want to listen to cello, violin, viola, trumpet, trombone, bassoon, piano, and all the other european symphony orchestra instruments the russians made soviet armenians play. nor do i want to listen to guitar-playing bob dylan and simon and garfunkel copycats, or r&b wannabes like hayko the eurovision clown. and i certainly don't want to listen to a keyboard that makes a kanun or a tar sound. that's what i hear from the bands that supposedly play armenian music and weddings and dances here in LA. everything keyboard. you want a kanun sound? then go learn the kanun, idiot. don't bring a stupid keyboard. until armenians stop selling out and start playing their own instruments i will listen to today's virtuosos of those instruments whether they be persian, greek, turkish, arab or whatever. btw those instruments you mentioned are armenian true, but with the exception of kanun, zurna, and maybe saz, armenians in ottoman territory from the aegean to dikranagerd and van did not play tar, kamancha (which is persian kamancha), duduk etc. those are armenian-persian instruments. armenians in those areas played ud, kanun, violin, clarnet, etc (you can tell from old photos where they are also all wearing fezes), and in the cosmopolitan cities armenians were some of the best musicians on those instruments. in bolis, selanik, izmir they had kamancha but not the persian kamancha eastern armenians play. they had klasik kemence, which can also be very beautiful when played by a master. in the black sea area where my grandfather's side was from (trabzon, samsun, sinop) they have even a different kemence with a even more different sound, sevdzov/karadeniz kemence they call it. they also use the bagpipe there a lot (tulum they call it). when i went to hamshen and hopa i asked the hamshentsis i met what their music is like and they said it is heavily sevdzov kemence and tulum. some real kanun playing: this kid is just 20 yrs old. i doubt there is an armenian musician today that can play half as good as this: and that is really sad because in the old days armenians were the best musicians on those instruments and were the teachers of all the turkish musicians. now days there are a hundred armenian rock bands but not a single decent kanun or saz player (please somebody if there is let me know). and you know why this is? it's because we have self-appointed culture police who know nothing about music like people in this forum going around kicking and screaming about everything turkish and arab, not realizing that if armenians get rid of everything that turks also have they will have lost a large part of their culture. who needs turks when armenians themselves destroy their own culture. well at least it's not completely hopeless. here is ara dinkjian and arto tuncboyaciyan from a live performance in athens in 1995 with the greek singer eleftheria arvanitaki, playing TAMZARA with ara on the oud. it's kind of a large file but for our keyboard enthusiasts out there it's worth the wait: notice the COMPLETE ABSENCE OF ANY KEYBOARD: http://putstuff.putfile.com/93769/1385557/3

this is a response to some of the posts in this thread as well as posts made elsewhere in this forum by people who posted in this thread: in my case i learned armenian before turkish so don't worry. you know what they say, inch kan lezu kides aytkan mart es. watching some armenians hysterical reactions to anything turkish is like witnessing Pavlov's dog experiment. i guess we should stop eating dolma, sarma, kofte, and all the other things our grandparents made for us (my grandma made a delicious karni yarik today btw. mmm). we should also stop saying things like "bas barab" (bom bosh), "lep letsun" (dop dolu), "sep sev" (sim siyah), "arudur yelav" (alishverishe cikti), "klukhnis chi prner" (kafalarimiz tutmuyor), "khelk@ klukhn 'e" (akli bashinda), "peshen vazel" (peshinden koshmak) and a thousand other identical phrases in turkish that are part of colloquial armenian, both western and eastern ("qez a kashel" or whatever it is - sana cekmish). even grammatical structures like "desadz pan@s" (görduğum sey) and "yertalik degh" (gidecek yer) which are identical in turkish should be totally excised from the language. turkish is much closer in grammatical structure to colloquial western armenian (and probably even eastern armenian) than english. i learned this after teaching in one of the armenian schools here in LA. the kids there translate from english into armenian word for word when they write or speak in armenian, and it comes out totally wrong. if they only translated word for word from turkish they would get it (mostly) right. anyway, so all those examples i gave above are wrong armenian. fine, no argument from me. and western armenian doesn't pronounce armenian phonemes correctly. (by the way they don't pronounce "է" correctly in armenia, they pronounce it like "ա" for some weird reason). but actually my goal is not to speak armenian 100% correctly. it's to preserve as much as possible the slice of armenian life that that existed in the places my family came from. that's because a genocide took place and a very rich and diverse culture was destroyed. therefore i will speak armenian the way i heard it from the older generations of my family (who came from places like yozgat, gesaria, trabzon), eat the dishes they ate, and listen to the kind of music they listened to. not what sergey sergeyan or vladimir vladimiryan in armenia tells me is armenian. armenians lived across a wide geographical area for many thousands of years. there has never been one armenian culture or language. so mashdots created the alphabet based on how it was spoken back then. did you ever consider that while the alphabet he created might have been the perfect match for the armenian spoken in taron in the 4th century, maybe it wasn't for the armenian spoken in other parts of armenia, say more western areas closer to the greek-speaking world. and maybe it never was, since there is a greek component to the ethnogenesis of the armenians and greek doesn't have some of the kartvelian phonetic features that appear in armenian. in the 4th century, was the armenian spoken in caesarea the same as the armenian spoken in artsakh? i doubt it. armenians seem to be the only people who are so intolerant of one another. does a texan talk the same as a new yorker? does a londoner talk the same way as a geordie (someone from newcastle, nr. scotland)? no. does it matter? no! they're not trying to change the way eachother speaks and they're also not trying to speak english the way it was spoken in the 12th century. this is probably why armenians are in the position they are today and we have forums like this where they come and whine about everything, turk this, arab that, jew this, bolsahye that, ad nauseum. the armenian government raced to the front of the line to join the anglo-judeo occupation/genocide of iraq, even though there is (or should i say "was") a large armenian community living comfortably there who begged them not to since it would make them seem like a fifth-column and turn them into targets for the insurgency. bravo roa, a second western armenian speaking community has been destroyed because of this ankliagan-hreagan tashnagtsutiun (the first one was palestine), and this is deemed something worthy of being a part of. with armenian soldiers helping them out in iraq, now the neocons can devote more resources to war with iran and syria and lebanon, which will be great for roa and armenians in general. we don't need our relationship with iran, they're moslem and we have our christian brothers the georgians to help us. right. inch vor e, tek ker @rek inkzinknit ha

wow, very beautiful voice - reminds me of feyruz a little. thanks sassun. how can i get the cd here in the u.s.?

there is nothing that is not armenian about these songs. it's just the words that are the problem. a taksim is just an improvistation (solo improvisation). they are usually played at the beginning of a song by one musician as a way of setting the tone for the piece. so in fact if you ever hear a duduk solo as the intro to a song this can be considered a taksim. "huseyni" refers to the makam/mugham, i.e. the scale that the musician is improvising on. when i first learned about this stuff i was surprised to find out that huseyni is actually one of the most common scale in traditional armenian songs (it's just that it's the turkish/arabic name for that scale). for example sari gyalin is in huseyni. or if you have that shoghaken ensemble cd armenia anthology, find the song ishkhanabar, that's in huseyni. the distinguishing characteristics of huseyni are the second and seventh notes of the scale. if we take E as the tonic, the second note is neither F nor F# but a note in between those two notes (they call this a quarter tone in english), then G A B, the quarter tone between C and C#, D , then E again. (if the phrase is descending it might be C instead of that quarter tone). but the bottom line is if you don't play those quarter tones it doesn't sound right, it sounds flat. that's what makes it sound like a duduk playing. hicaz is also very common. if you know the sayat nova song qyamancha that's in hicaz. again, though these scales exist in armenian and greek music the terminology was taken from turkish/arabic, but this would have been necessary in a place like istanbul were there many cultures and they would have needed to agree on the terminology. it's not like we haven't borrowed musical terms from german, french, italian into armenian. the other thing to remember is that in the old days and still today, to be considered a good musician you need to be able to play a good taksim. that's probably why hagopian put those tracks on his cd.

you contradict yourself. you say: music of ottoman armenians is not armenian because it is ottoman, which is mutually exclusive of armenian. (here is your first error, but never mind). but music of khachaturian is armenian because the armenian musician or artist can be influenced by foreign culture and still be armenian. by this logic ottoman armenians can be influenced by ottoman culture and still be armenian. why is khachaturian armenian when he received practically his entire musical education in moscow or st. petersburg or whatever and composed music for european style symphony orchestras which don't contain any armenian instruments, but the armenian composer of istanbul whose musical education comes from the armenian church, composes for orchestras which use native instruments, is not armenian? so far, you are against armenians learning native instruments, in favor of promoting bob dylan and simon and garfunkel copycats (where did that come from anyway, russians started doing it so you guys started copying them?), and hagopian's music is ottoman and not even western armenian. wrong! it is not ottoman, but is western armenian. you just showed you have no clue what western armenian is. you think i'm going to listen to someone from a redneck hellhole like texas telling me what western armenian is? lol. howdy padner! when you've been to van, ani, kars, ardahan, artvin, hemsin, trabzon, ordu, sabin karahisar, arapgir, agn, yeprad ked, kharpert, malatya, gurun, gesaria, zeytun, marash, antep, adana, tarsus, izmir, and bolis like i have then maybe you can tell me what western armenian is.

i don't listen to hagopian either, only occasionally if they play a song i want to learn (they do have an enormous repertoire). i prefer to listen to the old masters or today's conservatory trained musicians on those instruments. i merely used him as an example of the difference between that generation and this one, in the sense there was an interest in learning the traditional instruments back then whereas now it seems the younger generation are more interested in being rock stars and fitting in with the music they hear coming from american popular culture. say what you want about it though hagopian represents what the musical taste of armenians (mostly ottoman armenians) who settled in america in the early 20th c. was. if you think hagopian is too turkish-influenced you should listen to the cd "Armenians on 8th Ave.", which is made up of recordings of actual armenian musicians who performed in new york night clubs in the 30s, 40s, 50s. this is music that was popular among everyone living in the cosmopolitan centers of ottoman turkey, armenians, turks, greeks, jews, etc. it's actually a great irony that this music could be criticized as being too ottoman and too orientalized since armenians made enormous contributions to ottoman music. in fact the one area where the contributions of armenians to ottoman society is not denied, is music. you will regularly hear turks themselves say that in the old days, all the great masters of the traditional instruments were armenian. in istanbul they would perform in the sultan's palaces or gazinos into the early hours of the morning, then go home, put a shabig on and sing in church. this is no coincidence. ottoman music is an interesting subject (to me anyway) because it's really a synthesis of many musical traditions: persian, arabic, byzantine, armenian, gypsy, other balkan etc. the names of the makams (scales) tend to come from persian and arabic (names like huzzam, hijaz, nihavent, etc., though they are closely related to the byzantine octoechos system), a lot of the rhythmic characteristics (i.e. unusual times signatures) from greek and bulgarian music, the lyricism from armenian music (this is one theory why armenian composers were so successful), and compositional forms from places as far as romania. after hrant dink was murdered, bbc-turkish carried an over 20 minute long program on the "The Armenian composers [of Istanbul] from past to present": Geçmisten günümüze Ermeni bestekârlar (this is a really good program and i wish they would translate it into armenian and english so armenians could listen to it) one of the many names mentioned in this program is hampartzum limonciyan, who was chief musician of the armenian church in istanbul in the 18th-19th c. and devised his own system of musical notation. he tried to model it after the medieval armenian khaz system (whose key then as today was still lost), in order to put the sharagans into writing. it soon became the notation system used in ottoman classical music, and if i remember correctly even jews were using it to write their religious music down. if this was the notation system used to sing sharagans in the church, then the notes which its symbols represent are the same as those you hear in ottoman classical music, which is based on the makam/mugham system of scales. these are scales and modes that have quarter tones which don't exist in western tempered scales and give the music that oriental quality you are talking about - of course the instruments themselves also play an important role in creating that sound, but you need to understand the rules of the makam/mugham system in order to play those instruments. "hampartzum notakrutiun" eventually fell out of favor once european staff notation was introduced but i'm told there are still a few armenian churches in istanbul that still use it. some people in turkey seem to have created this website about it. well, as we all know the ottoman armenians are gone, and i guess so is their music. but to me this is more reason to preserve it. but armenians seem to want to deny that any part of their culture is oriental. greeks don't do this. here are a couple of young greek guys in new york who play ottoman classical. this is because like armenians greeks were very prominent in ottoman classical music and they feel that it is part of their musical heritage. the same is true of armenians however. it's not the best recording but if you have a chance take a listen to them playing the greek composer kemenceci vasiliaki's kurdilihicazkar pesrev on this page

i don't. this is what i don't like about the new generation of armenians. it's all about trying to westernize armenian music so that armenians convince themselves and others that they fit in with american/european culture. what is so great about an armenian musician that just tries to copy bob dylan-style american folk music on the guitar. putting armenian words to some music does not make the music armenian. guitar is not an armenian instrument. neither is piano. why? because you can't play armenian meldodies correctly on them. they are only designed for playing western tempered scales. you can't play the quarter tones that make armenian music armenian. these quarter tones are in any good duduk playing and they are in the sharagans too. the armenian instruments are duduk and other winds (zurna, shvi, etc), kamancha, tar, kanun, santur, ud, etc. if you are a musically inclined person, learn one of those instruments. find somebody from the older generation in your community who knows one of those instruments and learn from them. do it before it's too late, they won't be here forever. i know armenian-american 'kef music' isn't everyone's cup of tea, but look at richard hagopian, khachig kazarian, and jack chalikian for example, now in their 60s and 70s. they were born in places like fresno, detroit, and new york. their parents came from places like erzerum, van, adapazar after the genocide. like today's generation they grew up with and were influenced by all kinds of other music, jazz, rock and roll, etc. but they grew up listening to their parents' music in the house and learned ud, clarinet, kanun, mostly by themselves, just by listening. they didn't try make the music more palatable to western ears, they tried to be as faithful to the traditions of the music as they could. and considering the lack of resources (no ipods, downloading mp3s, youtube, etc.) they did an outstanding job. they were a hit. armenians came out in droves to hear them play and do shurchbar. this generation should worry less about fitting in musically and be more interested in seeking out the roots of their musical heritage.

you are not wrong in what you're saying but this piece doesn't have the feel of something in basic 6/8 and i think if you try to play this piece just by counting 3's you'll get confused. listening to the bass tells you where the downbeats are but by simple arithmetic of course you are right.

it is definitely not in 3/4. it's as i said earlier up in the thread, 3+3+4+5, 3+3+4+5, etc. listen to it again and count it out.

well that is definitely a saz next to him in the video and he does play saz on that album, but yes he is principally a tar player. but what you said is actually what i was thinking, that saz in vernacular armenian probably meant any stringed instrument that is plucked, or maybe even any instrument.

well what do you know, surik himself has an album called "Khosir Im Sazs" http://www.narek.com/store/product.php?pro...at=0&page=1 i wonder what he would say about the matter. personally i don't care whether it is or not, and i think it's probably impossible to say for sure anyway. one thing is for sure qyamancha and tar are the same instruments in persian music as they are in armenian music and persians will probably tell you it's persian and give you proof of it too. same thing for kanun. but who cares? and what is primitive about saz. it's just a long-necked lute with three courses of strings that are plucked, not that different from tar actually. i think what this shows though is that what is considered armenian, what is considered persian, what is considered turkish, greek, kurdish, assyrian, etc. is sometimes arbitrary. before there was a roa or soviet armenia i'm sure armenians played saz and didn't worry about whether this or that instrument is armenian, turkish, persian etc. just like before there was a field of linguistics people in our part of the world didn't think of languages - and therefore people - as being european or semitic. i mean c'mon, armenians are white europeans but assyrians are dark-skinned semites? i think what happened is probably there was a point in time in soviet armenia when people in the "ministry of culture" or whatever it was decided ok this is armenian, that is not. just like today with western armenian speakers being made to feel their armenian is incorrect/corrupted. for example somebody must have decided that 7/8, 9/8, and 10/8 are not armenian rhythms or something, because it seems like every armenian song from armenia is in 6/8 (which gets boring sometimes). and yet the armenian musicians in america who preserved the songs from their towns and villages in ottoman turkey do play songs in these rhythms. this shows that the gray areas between cultures get lost when you go from age of empires to age of nation states.

ha, i'm glad you asked that. i had to work it out myself but believe me it took several listenings. there seems to be a certain class of this anatolian folk music that has unusual time signatures like this, some even more complicated than that one. as far as saz goes though saying an instrument is persian or turkish or something else doesn't automatically rule it out as not armenian (by the way i doubt turks brought the saz from central asia, i'm pretty sure it was in anatolia before they arrived). tar and kemence are probably persian also, kanun is probably arabic in origin, but those instruments are very prevalent in traditional armenian music. actually we wouldn't have too much choice of instruments if we ruled out everything that wasn't strictly armenian, there wouldn't be any of the beautiful music of khachatur avetisian for example. by the way mos jan if you look at the second video of surik you posted in the other thread, there is actually a saz next to him, in addition to an oud, which was also very popular amongst the ottoman armenians. he is a master of all those instruments, it's too bad there aren't many more like him, and we are using synthesizers and electric guitars to play our traditional music.

are you interested in armenian songs, or music that was popular with armenians back then? if it's the second one, you don't even need to make a cd. just get them this one: http://www.amazon.com/Armenians-8th-Avenue...s/dp/B0000031GC the armenians living in those areas back then were almost all from areas in turkey today and their music was whatever was popular in the cities and towns they came from. back then, there were numerous night clubs in new york and hotels in the catskill mountains where armenians, turks, and greeks played together, all the same kind of music, mostly sung in turkish. the instruments were mostly kanun, ud, violin, clarinet, darbukka, def. i don't think they even used duduk, which in reality is an eastern armenian thing. the melodies were based in the makam/mugham system of scales, and there were no synthesizers, drum machines, electric or bass guitars like in tata's russian polka music, hayko's wannabe r&b eurovision song, or any other garbage that passes for armenian music nowadays. popular musicians besides the vosbikians were marko melkon, udi hrant, artie barsamian. later came richard hagopian, chick ganimian, hachig kazarian, onnik dinkjian, john berberian, who are still popular on the east coast today.

are there any well known armenian saz players? the reason i ask is it seems to be a strictly turkish thing, yet i've seen the word saz used in armenian poetry. are they referring to a different instrument maybe? here are some examples: http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtMu_TrwlCk http://youtube.com/watch?v=msP2dFbAKa4 the second video brings up another question i have: this song has an interesting rhythmic structure (compound meter of 3+3+4+5, 3+3+4+5, etc.). is there anything similar in armenian music? a dance like tamzara has a 9/8 rhythm (really a 4+5), but that's fairly common in anatolian music.

Artaxias' idea of civilized people: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4189154.stm Last Updated: Friday, 26 August 2005, 16:20 GMT 17:20 UK Greek outrage over drunken Brits The Greek tourism minister is to hold emergency talks on the holiday island of Zakynthos on Monday amid outrage at the behaviour of British tourists. Photographs in the Greek and UK press have shown young drunken Britons having sex in bars and other public places. The island's MP, Dimitrios Varvarigos. has called for tourists committing acts of gross indecency to be put on trial and jailed for up to three years. Those who have gone home should be sent back to Greece for trial, he says. Bad reputation The photos splashed across papers last week were taken in the resort of Laganas on the island's south coast, which used to be better known as a nocturnal breeding ground for loggerhead turtles. But, over the past two years, it has become a favoured destination for British teenagers in search of sun, sand and cheap alcohol. The town has seen behaviour including drunken orgies, vomiting in the streets and frequent fights. Police have closed down several of the most notorious nightclubs. Laganas was formerly noted for its loggerhead turtles Young Britons already had a bad reputation in Greece after similar behaviour in resorts on the islands of Rhodes and Crete. The town's deputy mayor, Stavros Papadatos, blamed holiday reps and the Greek proprietors of hundreds of bars and clubs in Laganas for encouraging drunkenness. "Every night each one of them must make around 1,000 euros (£700) organising pub crawls. It's on those crawls that young British girls and boys appear to lose their minds," he said, according to a report in the Guardian. Of the tourists shown in the papers committing indecent acts, Mr Varvarigos said: "We're talking about a lot of people. "As many as possible should be located, extradited if need be, and made to bear the consequences," he insisted. "Under Greek law that might mean prison sentences of two or three years." -- Meanwhile in Greece, a revival is taking place but it's not the kind Artaxias will like very much. In fact, he hates this. The Greek Ministry of Culture establishes the Medimuses project, whose mission statement is: -- All i can say is, don't expect me to cry when we find out that Artaxias has been bludgeoned to death by the skinhead mob in Moscow he is trying to convince he deserves to belong to. Artaxias: See, i am one of you! Please accept me, I am your long lost white brother. See my bleached blond hair? And see, i just got my nose done so it's turned up like yours! skinhead: Then why do you still look just like a Chechen, Dagestani, Azeri, Turk? Artaxias: Because I used to be white thousands of years ago just like you but the Arabs came and turned me into the miserable swarthy wretch that i am. skinhead: Sure, and thousands of years ago I used to be a black african too. Russia for Russians only. Die filthy rag. [repeated stabbings followed by bleeding to death].

iraqis are mongrelized but americans and pretty much everyone else in the world is not? you just showed a very disturbing side of yourself. maybe you should sign up for the u.s. military or israeli defense forces. kill 'em all, as they say. maybe you can push the button when they decide to nuke the middle east. but oops, armenia is only a few hundred kilometers from iraq! yeah, and it's not the arabs wielding it, it's the wannabe semites. i don't get this one. what's jewspeak about showing that byzantines and arabs culturally interacted with eachother? jewspeak is most of what you've said so far about arabs. you sound like daniel pipes or bernard lewis. do you want them to go after iran and syria too? that would be great for armenia, wouldn't it? i wouldn't be so sure. armenians sure like leaving armenia, and they sure like the new religions from the west that help them get out of doing military service, don't they.

still not sure why ossetians are european but persian and indic peoples are not. yes and i have been myself from day one too. we'll pretend that syriac/aramaic wasn't important to the spread of christianity, especially the armenian kind. your concept of "ours" is a total figment of your imagination. greek is indo-european, syriac is semitic. was there an enormous civilizational divide between those people at the time of jesus, or even later on when the arabs came on the scene between the byzantines and the arabs? nobody was even aware of the existence of an indo-european language family until early last century, let alone the ancient mediterranean world. back then a foreign language was a foreign language, nobody thought about whether it was indo-european or not. arabs interacted with greeks (who interacted with egyptians who interacted with mesopotamians) who interacted with persians who interacted with indians who interacted with chinese etc. etc. and i suppose hellenistic civilization dropped out of the sky. god sent the indo-european man down to earth to bring learning and enlightenment to the world. you don't seem to be able to grasp the most basic principle of christianity: it is a universalist religion, which is why it has spread so widely and why the jews hate christians so much. it destroys their monopoly on chosenness. if it only was meant for one race of people, it would cease to be christianity. therefore, it is in europe? ah, so you support turkish entry into the e.u. never say never. what your post shows is that you seem to know a lot about indo-european origins/history but are completely ignorant about other civilizations. and what you are ignorant about you think does not exist. probably true but that's meaningless today. we're not going to travel back in time by creating a single culture among all of today's i.e. speakers. even the turks couldn't do that with their central asian brethren, as much as they tried, after the fall of the soviet union. so who's we? did you appoint yourself spokesperson for the armenian culture police? no quibble from me on your point about turks. but arabs never did anything to us. if all the genocide survivors ended up in europe and the u.s., no one outside armenia would speak armenian. i can see this in my own family: the ones who grew up in the middle east speak armenian, the ones who didn't don't. are you talking about armenia during the arab conquest. i don't think it was any worse than the other periods of foreign rule.

black music is what britney spears, justin timberlake, christina aguilera and all those other spoiled white kids make their riches off of. they're just very good at copying. i suppose the first humans appeared in ireland as well. sure. that's why there's an indian restaurant on every corner in britain. you enjoy your hamburgers and hot dogs and i'll stick to the food my anatolian grandmother makes. the maltese language is filthy because it's semitic or because it's guttural? armenian sounds guttural to most english speakers. i've heard some people say it sounds like arabic or persian. the ones that still speak armenian unlike their distant cousins here in america who have rejoined their long lost european brothers. so what you're really saying is that the genocide was actually a good thing! it got rid of all the impurities in the nordic gene pool of armenians. now that's a good one. it upgraded it to such an extent that everyone who could leave after '91 became credit card fraudsters, gangbangers driving their fancy cars around their ghetto neighborhoods, and arms smugglers boasting of ties to al qaeda who made neat work destroying the excellent reputation armenian genocide survivors (mostly western armenians) and their progeny built up for all of us in places like boston, detroit, wisconsin, fresno, in the 90 or so years since they first came here. cilician armenians during this period were far closer culturally to greeks, syriacs, copts, etc. (all of whom lived in or contiguous to the islamic world) than they were to western europeans. otherwise why would the crusaders have slaughtered so many eastern christians? it's a serious question, why would christians speaking an indo-european language in constantinople be slaughtered by christians from western europe along their journey to liberate the holy land from the muslims? the barbarian occupation you are talking about was a central asian one, not a middle eastern one. the dark ages in spain was the period before the muslims arrived. spain's most enlightened period intellectually and culturally was under the moors. it was never the same after the christians reconquered it. the evidence suggests that the people living around mt. ararat traded with the mesopotamians. for example the mesopotamians traded with them for wine.

i hesitate to write this artaxias because i know you blow me out of the water in terms of knowledge of history, etc., but saying that we are european, does this mean we have more in common with say the english, the french, the swedes, than we do with a persian, a lebanese arab, or even a kurd? does this mean we can't jump, suck at basketball, play a boring, dull style of soccer that the brazilians run rings around, can't dance, play music based on nice, neat tempered scales in 4/4 time, copy other people's music (mainly blacks), and eat bland, tasteless food. greeks, bulgarians, serbs is about as far into europe as i care to liken armenians to. europe is a well-defined geographical area but "european" is too vague a concept to be meaningful. does it mean way of thinking, food, music, approach to family life, language? i see the arguments that armenians are european, but the reality is that historically armenians have born very little resemblence culturally to the people living in the territorial area known as europe. this is true today too - i do not think armenians living in syria, iran, turkey, iraq, egypt, view themselves as european either. they are not cultural hermits in their countries, living in a bubble, they are fully a part of the cultural fabric of the societies they live in. is this all because armenians in those countries have lost their european culture and become islamized? maybe. but at the same time we don't ask to what extent 70 years of soviet rule changed armenian culture. did soviet armenia preserve the anatolian armenian culture that the victims of the genocide belonged to? i find the european armenian convention declaration very bizarre. how far do you have to go back to arrive at a time when armenians were european? armenians living in the u.s., europe, and the russian empire is a recent phenomenon. for the bulk of their history, when not independent armenians lived under roman, persian, byzantine, arab, and turkish empires, all empires of the ancient and modern near eastern world. was king artaxias, living in the second century b.c., a european? what about tigran the great, was he a white european from the north conquering the middle east? well, certainly they were indo-europeans, but mesopotamian sources say that the babylonians, sumerians, traded with a "people of ararat". so did the "people of ararat" have more in common with the ancestors of anglo-saxons let's say, with whom they had no contact at all, than they did with the mesopotamians (ancestors of today's iraqis), who they traded with? so how far do you have to go back? probably by the time you get past all the periods of foreign rule you're at a time when there was nothing going on in europe! frequently it's pointed out that armenian is an indo-european language. well, so are persian, pashtun, urdu, hindi, and sanskrit. nobody is going around claiming those people are european. armenians are christian? well, christianity is not a european religion. to me, that christianity is identified with europeans is an indication that an act of cultural theft has taken place. read the bible from cover to cover and you will not encounter a single white european in the entire narrative. not a single event related in the bible takes place in europe. instead the events take place in what is now egypt, iraq, syria, jordan, israel, iran, turkey, etc. the existence of armenians is a reminder to the world of the true origins of christianity. it was middle eastern civilization that gave rise to the spread of christianity. but starting with the crusades and right up to today, western europeans (which includes americans) have shown they have a racialized understanding of christianity. otherwise they would not have slaughtered all those eastern christians. this turns christianity into something like judaism - salvation and sharing in the kingdom of god only for one ethnic or racial group. specialists of indo-european linguists who are proponents of the anatolian-farming hypothesis of indo-european origins tell us that all the european languages (with a few exceptions) descend from a single language that was spoken in anatolia thousands of years ago. this means that the languages of the people who were living in what is western europe today were gradually replaced by languages spoken by people originating from anatolia who migrated into europe. it is also thought that these anatolian migrants introduced agriculture into europe, which means that europeans were hunter-gatherers until people from the middle east introduced farming to them. to me, anatolia has much stronger historical and cultural links with mesopotamia, persia, the levant, north africa, etc. than it does with western europe. thus middle easterners in a sense gave europeans their language, agriculture, and their religion. i think that by convincing ourselves and others that we are european we are abetting this act of cultural appropriation. instead we have to reassert the early foundations of christianity and remind the "western world" of the cultural debt they owe to middle-eastern people. teach them some respect. what western europeans have done over the last 600 years, conquering and exterminating other peoples (native americans, africans, australians, the list goes on) and even laying waste to countries (iraq) that gave rise to western civilization thousands of years ago, while carrying the banner of christianity, is a disgrace to christianity as a religion. we have now the u.s., a country of european origins lead by a "born-again christian", having invaded and occupied iraq, the land of ancient mesopotamia, killing tens of thousands of people, and treating their deaths as if they were roadkill. americans think they are there to bring "civilization" to iraq, and that they need to teach middle-easterners "western values". but who are the barbarians? how can they even think that when the earliest signs of a settled human civilization comes from iraq (mesopotamia)? the earliest of examples of writing come from there. the first law code was written there. agriculture is thought to have started there. abraham was born there. today, people in positions of power (militarily, economically, culturally) are trying to create a world of black and white. but that's not the way things are in reality and this is in fact a disguised tactic of domination. take a look at this link: http://www.macfdn.org/programs/fel/fellows...roudi_maria.htm she's a greek scholar who won a macarthur genius grant recently for studying the cultural interactions between the byzantines and the arabs. this shows you that the borders between rival civilizations are very much blurred. those of us that inhabit those border areas (as armenians do) are the ones that stand the most to lose from ensconcing ourselves on one side or the other. we should do whatever we need to do to guarantee our security, but be very careful not to surrender our cultural sovereignty to something we are tricked into thinking we belong to. just as an example, integrating into european stuctures means the imposition of stronger freedom of religion laws in armenia. do we want more baptists and jehovas in our country? check out this link. the following is the mission statement of a series of musical workshops that take place every year in crete, greece. it kind of gets the point i am trying to make across, especially since armenians inhabit the world it is describing: kind of a rambling post i know but i gave you some of my ideas.

i agree with avivi. it is wrong to try to equate the armenian genocide with the jewish holocaust. they're totally different. with the holocaust, jews were killed in an area of europe where they lived in large numbers. where the german army could not reach, jews were not threatened. and while they were being killed in germany, poland, etc., jews living in north africa, the levant, yemen, iraq, iran, and turkey, continued living in the centuries-old judeo-islamic societies that had helped to preserve the jewish semitic culture and religion throughout their 2000-year condition of exile. in the case if the armenian genocide, armenians were savagely murdered without the benefit of modern technology in their own ancestral homeland by the descendents of nomadic invaders who arrived approx. 900 years earlier from central asia. the armenians were not spread out in dozens of countries around the world, probably 90% of the world armenian population was centered in the towns and villages of central and eastern ottoman turkey, as well as its metropolitan centers such as istanbul and izmir. today, israel is a country that is militarily stronger than the sum of its (self-created) enemies combined and has reaped enormous benfits from the generous reparations scheme imposed on and agreed to by the succesor german government to the nazi regime. the jewish nation state exists because of the jewish holocaust. armenia on the other hand is a country that exists in spite of the armenian genocide, as it could have very well been overrun by the kemalist army in 1920. it is sandwiched between and economically blockaded by the successor governments to the turkish regime responsible for the genocide, who not only have never indemnified the victim nation for their predecessor's crimes but also deny that an act of race murder occurred, and even distort the history of anatolia by excluding armenians from the public consciousness and destroying the vestiges of their uninterrupted millenia-old presence on that land. yup, pinhas avivi, i'm glad you're standing up for the truth.

ZNet The Real AIPAC Spy Ring Story--it Was All About Iran by Doug Ireland ; Direland ; August 07, 2005 Here's what the stories in today's Washington Post and New York Times on the new indictments of the two AIPAC spies aren't telling you: their espionage was principally about helping to prepare an attack by Israel on Iran. And one of the Israeli embassy officials who knows all about AIPAC's role in helping plan the attack on Iran has been whisked out of the country and out of the reach of U.S. prosecutors, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reports this morning. The neo-cons in the Pentagon had long been arguing for an attack on Iran to take out its nuclear facilities that had the potential to be converted for development of nuclear weapons. Wolfie's man Doug Feith had been particularly assiduous in pressing the case for a "forward strategy" against Iran. Feith's views are madly extremist, and Jim Zogby collected them in an April profile of Feith that should scare the pants off of anyone rational. (Feith's been a major activist for years with the viciously anti-Arab crazies of the ZOA, the Zionist Organization of America). When, for purely electoral reasons with the Iraq occupation going so disastrously, the White House decided against a direct attack by the U.S. on Iran, the neo-cons went to Plan B -- an attack on Iran by proxy, from Israel. The principal classified documents leaked to Israel through AIPAC -- the leaks that that began the investigation of the AIPAC spy ring, which has been going on now for over a year -- concerned Iran. They were leaked by Feith's deputy, Larry Franklin, also now under a five-count indictment for spying. The plan for an Israeli attack on Iran has been long envisioned -- both in Washington and by Sharon's government -- but this attack is now in a highy advanced state of planning and could come as quickly as Sharon snaps his fingers to order it. Back on March 13, the London Times -- in a report that was largely ignored in the U.S. -- reported that: "The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave 'initial authorisation' for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert," The London Times went on to describe how " Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets from 69 Squadron, using bunker-busting bombs to penetrate underground facilities. The plans have been discussed with American officials who are said to have indicated provisionally that they would not stand in Israel’s way if all international efforts to halt Iranian nuclear projects failed...." And, the Times added, "US officials warned last week that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities by Israeli or American forces had not been ruled out should the issue become deadlocked at the United Nations." Just a few weeks before that revelation of the concretization of Israeli plans for the Iran attack, Bush let the cat out of the bag in an off-the-cuff remark captured by London's Daily Telegraph, in a February 18 article headlined, "AMERICA WOULD BACK ISRAEL ATTACK ON IRAN." The Telegraph reported that Bush said: "Clearly, if I was the leader of Israel and I'd listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well. And in that Israel is our ally, and in that we've made a very strong commitment to support Israel, we will support Israel if her security is threatened." ) Noting that Bush had gone off the reservations and failed to follow his handlers' brefing to stick to the agreed-on script, the Telegraph dryly noted: "His comments appeared to be a departure from the administration's line that there are no plans to attack at present and that Washington backs European diplomatic efforts. The remarks may have reflected Mr Bush's personal thinking on an issue causing deep concern in Washington...." Bush's slip-of-the-tongue that revealed his real intentions was front-page news in Le Monde and other European dailies -- but got no attention in the Stateside major media. At the time Feith's deputy Franklin (and, today's indictments say, two other as yet unidentified Pentagon officials) were passing the classified documents on Iran to AIPAC for transmission to Israel, the White House had not yet given the green light to Sharon -- indeed, the Iran attack was in a holding pattern pending the outcome of negotiations over Teheran's nuke capacity being led by the European powers which, unlike the U.S., have diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even so, U.S. fingerprints were all over the Israelis' Iran attack, which had long been envisioned by U.S. policy-makers. The respected Israeli daily Ha'aretz spelled it out last September 13, reporting: "The Clinton administration laid the foundation for that option [of attacking Iran] by giving the Rabin government the okay to purchase, with coupons, the F-15I (dubbed "Thunder" in Israel). The Bush administration will complete the task by agreeing to give Israel air-to-surface munitions that will breach the mysteries of the nuclear network in the depths of Isfahan and other sites, far more concealed than the reactor that is on worldwide display at Bushehr. What the Americans are unable to do, because of European, United Nations and Congressional pressure, Israel will do." The indictment of the two senior AIPAC staffers follows the indictment in may of Feith's footpad Larry Franklin. Franklin worked in the Office of Special Plans, run by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who reported to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The OSP functioned as a "shadow" intelligence service on Iraq, and provided much of the information to the White House that was used to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Some wags have called it "Feith-based intelligence", since much of that intelligence and information has now been proven to be utterly false. At the beginning of May, Franklin was arrested by the FBI for the passing of classified documents to two AIPAC staffers, who were then to pass them to Israel. The documents in question concerned Iran. One of the two newly-indicted AIPACers isn't just anybody. Steve Rosen, 63, is the man who built AIPAC into the $40 million dollar Capitol Hill powerhouse it is today. Buried in a Washington Post profile of AIPAC from May 19 is the skinny on Rosen as the power behind the scenes at AIPAC. Said the Post: "For more than two decades, Rosen has been a mainstay of AIPAC and the architect of the group's ever-increasing clout. Though Rosen was listed below Executive Director Howard Kohr on AIPAC's organizational chart, people familiar with AIPAC's history say that Kohr is a protege of Rosen's and got that job with his help. Kohr declined to be interviewed about Rosen. 'He [Rosen] is a quiet guy,' said M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, another pro-Israel group, and a former AIPAC employee. 'But everyone knows he's the brains behind the outfit.'" Now, just what is AIPAC, you may well ask? AIPAC is the enforcer of the knee-jerk support for the Israeli government which characterizes the political and governing classes in this country, -- Israel is the real third rail of American politics: touch it with criticism, no matter how carefully couched, and you die. Both the Democratic and Republican parties fall all over themselves to kiss AIPAC's boots -- because AIPAC and its well-filled war-chest helps make sure they toe the line on Israel, and has been responsible for the defeat of a significant number of politicians over the years who dared to criticize Israeli policies. Earlier this year, AIPAC played a major role in destroying the candidacy of Tim Roemer for chairman of the DNC. There's an in-depth, critical profile of AIPAC by RightWeb's Michael Flynn that gives an in-depth look at AIPAC's arm-and-leg-breaking political style. And the newly indicted Rosen is The Man Behind the Curtain. Even though he formally resigned from AIPAC, the organization is paying his legal bills, and Rosen is still pulling the strings. The reason for putting some daylight between Rosen and AIPAC is that the puissant political arm-twister is deathly afraid it will be forced to register as a foreign lobby, as the Jewish weeily The Forward reported earlier this year. Americans don't like the sight of their elected officials pocketing campaign cash from foreign governments, and AIPAC fears being forced to register formally as a lobbyist for Israel would thus diminish their clout on Capitol Hill. Bush won't make AIPAC register, and the spinless Democratic Congressional leadership won't lead the charge to make them do so either. But today's indictments of string-puller Rosen and his AIPAC colleague for spying on the U.S. gives progressives who want to see a peaceful, two-state, land-for-peace solution between Israel and Palestine a strategic opening to press loudly for AIPAC's formal shil registration as a shil for the government that built the Israeli Wall of Shame. It's a measure long past due. One of the Israeli diplomats the feds want to question about the activities of the AIPAC spy ring has been quietly spirited out of the country, Ha'aretz reports this morning. "The Israeli diplomat in Washington who met several times with Franklin has been identified as Naor Gilon head of the political department at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and a specialist on proliferation issues. Gilon returned to Israel a few days ago as part of a long-scheduled rotation according to an Israeli official in Washington. U.S. investigators want to question Gilon and other Israeli diplomats about their contacts with Franklin officials said.," according to the Israeli daily.

yes, and the most interesting thing was that his grandfather (or great-grandfather, i forget) was not just one of the first armenians to settle in fresno, but one of the first of anyone to settle in fresno. i think the melkonian family background is one of the most interesting things about his story.

basically, from people i've talked to, the book leaves out some information. but it is a riveting, emotional book nonetheless that you will not be able to put down.

how much do you know about monte melkonian?