Eddie

I am trying now to convert to writing in Armenian, not just reading in this beautiful language. So please treat this test generously and do not take too much offence at my appalling spelling. Having re-mastered comprehension late, it will take me a long time to master spelling.... Forgive me also for just testing out whether my fonts work¬ Միթէ սույն գրութիւնս պիտի Հայերէն տարերով արտատպուի համացանցի էջէրուն: The r seems to be a problem. I shall attend to it. Let me post this and see if it has worked...

I am commencing a little comment on this monumental, indescribably rich and rewarding epic. Does anyone know if there ever was a Turkish language variant? Among the scores of Armenian ones, has there ever been recorded a Turkish variant perhaps serving Armenian communities whose language had been suppressed by the colonisers? Best regards Eddie

I submitted this a few minutes ago in the space Ara Sanjian had generated but it seems not to have gone through. So here we go again. Here my take on Erdogan's remarks. We should not allow the issue to be buried. These are opening salvos. Let me preface my submission with my profound condolences to all the families who suffered such terrible loss in the recent Turkish mining disaster. Eddie Erdogan’s condolences to the Armenian people – fine words butter no parsnips A sideways glance at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement of ‘condolences to the grandchildren’ of the Armenian dead of 1915 could be readily welcomed and applauded. Some Armenians could even feel better, less bitter, less entrenched in anti-Turkish sentiment on hearing the Prime Minister of a resurgent imperial Turkey speak so about the Armenian dead, in such an unprecedented and compassionate manner. But the deeper truth of the Turkish Prime Minister’s pronouncement reveals a disappointing pedestrianism. It lacks any novel, radical or courageous dimension. Albeit laced with touching humanist sentiment, Erdogan appears engaged in no more than an opening gambit to undermine what in 2015 will be powerful global commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. His remarks appear designed particularly to ease what will likely be huge pressure on Turkey from both Europe and America where significant Armenian lobbies are insistently urging recognition of the Genocide on its up-coming 100th anniversary. Erdogan’s statement that has been translated into numerous languages is worth examination. Its employment of fine humanist turns of phrase are significantly revealing both of denied truths and of the limits and the actual designs of his statement. ‘It is our hope and belief’ says Erdogan, ‘that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners, will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner.’ A fine sentiment and in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations a moving and indeed unprecedented one for the explicit Turkish state/elite recognition that the Armenian people are indeed and contrary to much shameless historical fabrication, one of the ‘peoples’ of the ‘ancient and unique geography’ enclosed today within the borders of a modern Turkish Republic. But fine words butter no parsnips. Action alone, not words, can produce conditions necessary for ‘mature’ and ‘decent’ discourse between Armenian and Turk. And the fact is Turkish state/elite actions prohibit such discourse. I Erodogan’s statement contains no hint, even of the slimmest kind of any action, of any change in Turkish state policy that blocks and even punishes mature and decent discourse. And here, be clear, we do not talk of land claims or reparations for 1915. We refer only to the necessity for greater freedoms and democratic rights for all the peoples who ‘share’ ‘customs’, ‘manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography.’ Where are proposals to halt the widespread denigration of Armenians in Turkey? Where even a hint to root out embedded extreme nationalist Turkish hostility to Armenians that leads to the murder of a Hrant Dink or to the ugly sight of Turkish politicians insulting an opponent for allegedly having Armenian ancestry. Where a hint of a friendly invitation into the open public sphere for Armenians forcibly converted to Islam, to the tens of thousands of hidden Armenians, who fear being engulfed in tidal wave of xenophobic Turkish nationalism? The ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes to one another’ that Erdogan expresses hopes for demands that the national rights of all the peoples of this ‘ancient and unique geography’ be protected; the right to schooling in their own languages, the freedom for their educational institutions to function without unending obstruction, the freedom of their social and welfare organizations from endless hostile pressure and threats that come often with calls to confiscate their properties. For ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse and relations, due respect has to be accorded to the cultural and historical legacy of the different peoples of the region. Not words but concrete proposals for action alone can signal honest intent. Where the hint for the need to properly protect Armenian architectural and other monuments surviving within Turkish state borders, the call to reverse the systematic destruction and to properly identify the Armenian origins of those that survive? Where a suggestion that the ceaseless destruction of a rich cultural legacy, a destruction that is part of the falsification of the history of the region, where the suggestion that this will be brought to an end? Where the acknowledgement of the Armenian contribution to the cultural and economic development of this ‘unique and ancient geography’ during the era of the Ottoman Empire? Where even the faintest note of Armenian enrichment of the Turkish state’s economic, social and cultural history? Erdogan raises no sound against the ceaseless falsification and distortion of Armenian history that striving to wipe them out of the region or diminish them there a humiliate them altogether demonizing them before the Turkish masses and so strangling all prospect of ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse. ‘Decency’ and ‘maturity’ be furthermore cannot be sustained in the face of the Turkish state’s blockade of Armenia and of its collaboration with a hostile and aggressive Azerbaijani elite intent on demolishing the last remaining portions of an Armenian homeland, home indeed to a large segment of the grandchildren of 1915. All these are vital ingredients for equal and humane relations in, let us not fear repetition here, this ‘shared’ ‘unique and ancient geography’. II Let us be clear! It is not the case of greedy and ungrateful Armenians seizing upon an unprecedented and generous Turkish declaration to table unreasonable extremist demands. No! All the above flows directly from Erdogan’s words that, correctly and explicitly, put an equal mark between Turk and Armenian and between ‘all ethnicities’ that ‘lost their lives’ during the period 1914-1918. But this equal sign mean nothing if there is no enlargement of national, cultural, historical and democratic space that would allow all ‘ethnicities’ who share ‘customs and manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography’ to walk tall and proud. Yes! Compassionate and humane relations must be mutual. Armenian pundits, intellectuals and politicians, social and national leaders and Churchmen have their obligation and responsibility to cast aside Armenian variants of chauvinist dismissal of the history of the Turkish people, so manifest in ugly everyday discourse, in the Armenian media, on the Armenian social media, discussion lists as well as text and history books. First and foremost it is beholden on Armenians to abandon claims of collective Turkish responsibility for the 1915 Genocide, to abandon claims that the Turkish common people today can be held responsible for and accountable for the historical crimes of Ottoman Empire’s elites, of the Young Turks and the Turkish state. Whilst Armenians are responsible for clearing up Augean stables of their own making, it requires stating in bold that much of their prejudice and bigotry is reaction to relentless hostile machination and denial by the Turkish state and its elite that has taken not a single step to ease the pain of a people so ‘inhumanely’ uprooted (‘relocated’ in the words of Erdogan’s mealy mouthed speech writers) and denied any right of return or compensation, even moral compensation, let alone material! III A Turkish politician does not speak as Erdogan did without calculation. He is in deep trouble and these troubles will mount in the run up to 2015. Even as his remarks may ease pressure from Europe and America, they risk raising the ire of extreme Turkish nationalism that remains a dominant force in Turkish society. But the benefits perhaps outweigh potential losses. Erdogan has to cope with the challenge of the formidable Gulenists (who have their own stand on the Armenian question), steer clear of their damaging corruption charges, resolve debilitating internal elite battles and negotiate increasingly difficult economic waters, as well deal with the Kurdish Question. Here his remarks on the Armenian Genocide can serve to dam up troubles from other sources. Erdogan can hope to at least begin to dim the chances of a potentially dangerous European and American succumbing to the Armenian lobby. Europe and the USA have of course never been concerned with the plight of Armenians, nor will they ever be. But in the run up to 2015, even a genuflection in that direction official Genocide Recognition could offer a declining Europe and America a new stick with which to meddle in the affairs of resurgent Turkey. Erdogan’s speech can begin to neutralize this stick. Erdogan can also hope to neutralize an already immobile Armenian state. In the run up to 2015 Armenian elites too will come under immense pressure to more actively take up the many existing long term consequences of the Genocide, something that it has obstinately refused to do. Hints and suggestions of conciliatory official Turkish regret will suffice to embolden these elites in their flagrant refusal to go beyond words, in their flat failure to table significant issues for discussion with the Turkish state. * * * * * * It is clear that Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement has no genuine intent to encourage ‘compassionate and humane’ relationships between Turk and Armenian. The existing status quo in Turkey is not conducive, by any standard, to flourishing ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes’ between the many different nationalities inhabiting the region and the statement has nothing to indicate that this status quo is designed to change. It’s alas the same old story underlined again by the fact that Erdogan is once again advancing the notion of ‘a joint historical commission’ of scholars and researchers to establish the truth of 1915. What better way to package away all the continuing consequences of the Genocide, to store it out of sight, in the world of ivory tower academia, as far away from concrete, wide, open democratic discussion that would actually deal with historical consequences and generate the mature and good relations between us all that we all desire. Prove us wrong and we will be delighted. Orhan Dink, brother of murdered Hrant, made his own wise evaluation. Though ‘some might say’ that it came late’ Erdogan’s statement and his condolences are ‘a first step’, a ‘most basic brick’ to ‘build democracy in Turkey’. Genuine condolences are indeed a first and necessary step to democracy. Prove to us then Mr Erdogan that yours are genuine. Extend, enhance and multiply democratic rights in Turkey, rights that accord equality and respect, freedom and dignity to all national groups in within your jurisdiction. Carry through the tranche of measures indicated above, measures that have been tabled many times over the years. Then and only then, can we together begin the process that, as Orhan put it, to bring ‘both societies to normalization.’ Only then will the idea of a historical commission acquire positive quality, only that is, after taking the concrete measures to overcome the still painful legacies of 1915. Eddie Arnavoudian

The topic may appear dated, but is not so. Erdogan's remarks were an opening salvo. Here something I contributed at the time of his remarks and submit now to the forum now prefacing it with my condolences to the all the families who suffered loss from the recent mining disaster in Turkey. Erdogan’s condolences to the Armenian people – fine words butter no parsnips A sideways glance at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement of ‘condolences to the grandchildren’ of the Armenian dead of 1915 could be readily welcomed and applauded. Some Armenians could even feel better, less bitter, less entrenched in anti-Turkish sentiment on hearing the Prime Minister of a resurgent imperial Turkey speak so about the Armenian dead, in such an unprecedented and compassionate manner. But the deeper truth of the Turkish Prime Minister’s pronouncement reveals a disappointing pedestrianism. It lacks any novel, radical or courageous dimension. Albeit laced with touching humanist sentiment, Erdogan appears engaged in no more than an opening gambit to undermine what in 2015 will be powerful global commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. His remarks appear designed particularly to ease what will likely be huge pressure on Turkey from both Europe and America where significant Armenian lobbies are insistently urging recognition of the Genocide on its up-coming 100th anniversary. Erdogan’s statement that has been translated into numerous languages is worth examination. Its employment of fine humanist turns of phrase are significantly revealing both of denied truths and of the limits and the actual designs of his statement. ‘It is our hope and belief’ says Erdogan, ‘that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners, will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner.’ A fine sentiment and in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations a moving and indeed unprecedented one for the explicit Turkish state/elite recognition that the Armenian people are indeed and contrary to much shameless historical fabrication, one of the ‘peoples’ of the ‘ancient and unique geography’ enclosed today within the borders of a modern Turkish Republic. But fine words butter no parsnips. Action alone, not words, can produce conditions necessary for ‘mature’ and ‘decent’ discourse between Armenian and Turk. And the fact is Turkish state/elite actions prohibit such discourse. I Erodogan’s statement contains no hint, even of the slimmest kind of any action, of any change in Turkish state policy that blocks and even punishes mature and decent discourse. And here, be clear, we do not talk of land claims or reparations for 1915. We refer only to the necessity for greater freedoms and democratic rights for all the peoples who ‘share’ ‘customs’, ‘manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography.’ Where are proposals to halt the widespread denigration of Armenians in Turkey? Where even a hint to root out embedded extreme nationalist Turkish hostility to Armenians that leads to the murder of a Hrant Dink or to the ugly sight of Turkish politicians insulting an opponent for allegedly having Armenian ancestry. Where a hint of a friendly invitation into the open public sphere for Armenians forcibly converted to Islam, to the tens of thousands of hidden Armenians, who fear being engulfed in tidal wave of xenophobic Turkish nationalism? The ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes to one another’ that Erdogan expresses hopes for demands that the national rights of all the peoples of this ‘ancient and unique geography’ be protected; the right to schooling in their own languages, the freedom for their educational institutions to function without unending obstruction, the freedom of their social and welfare organizations from endless hostile pressure and threats that come often with calls to confiscate their properties. For ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse and relations, due respect has to be accorded to the cultural and historical legacy of the different peoples of the region. Not words but concrete proposals for action alone can signal honest intent. Where the hint for the need to properly protect Armenian architectural and other monuments surviving within Turkish state borders, the call to reverse the systematic destruction and to properly identify the Armenian origins of those that survive? Where a suggestion that the ceaseless destruction of a rich cultural legacy, a destruction that is part of the falsification of the history of the region, where the suggestion that this will be brought to an end? Where the acknowledgement of the Armenian contribution to the cultural and economic development of this ‘unique and ancient geography’ during the era of the Ottoman Empire? Where even the faintest note of Armenian enrichment of the Turkish state’s economic, social and cultural history? Erdogan raises no sound against the ceaseless falsification and distortion of Armenian history that striving to wipe them out of the region or diminish them there a humiliate them altogether demonizing them before the Turkish masses and so strangling all prospect of ‘decent’ and ‘mature’ discourse. ‘Decency’ and ‘maturity’ be furthermore cannot be sustained in the face of the Turkish state’s blockade of Armenia and of its collaboration with a hostile and aggressive Azerbaijani elite intent on demolishing the last remaining portions of an Armenian homeland, home indeed to a large segment of the grandchildren of 1915. All these are vital ingredients for equal and humane relations in, let us not fear repetition here, this ‘shared’ ‘unique and ancient geography’. II Let us be clear! It is not the case of greedy and ungrateful Armenians seizing upon an unprecedented and generous Turkish declaration to table unreasonable extremist demands. No! All the above flows directly from Erdogan’s words that, correctly and explicitly, put an equal mark between Turk and Armenian and between ‘all ethnicities’ that ‘lost their lives’ during the period 1914-1918. But this equal sign mean nothing if there is no enlargement of national, cultural, historical and democratic space that would allow all ‘ethnicities’ who share ‘customs and manners’ and a ‘unique and ancient geography’ to walk tall and proud. Yes! Compassionate and humane relations must be mutual. Armenian pundits, intellectuals and politicians, social and national leaders and Churchmen have their obligation and responsibility to cast aside Armenian variants of chauvinist dismissal of the history of the Turkish people, so manifest in ugly everyday discourse, in the Armenian media, on the Armenian social media, discussion lists as well as text and history books. First and foremost it is beholden on Armenians to abandon claims of collective Turkish responsibility for the 1915 Genocide, to abandon claims that the Turkish common people today can be held responsible for and accountable for the historical crimes of Ottoman Empire’s elites, of the Young Turks and the Turkish state. Whilst Armenians are responsible for clearing up Augean stables of their own making, it requires stating in bold that much of their prejudice and bigotry is reaction to relentless hostile machination and denial by the Turkish state and its elite that has taken not a single step to ease the pain of a people so ‘inhumanely’ uprooted (‘relocated’ in the words of Erdogan’s mealy mouthed speech writers) and denied any right of return or compensation, even moral compensation, let alone material! III A Turkish politician does not speak as Erdogan did without calculation. He is in deep trouble and these troubles will mount in the run up to 2015. Even as his remarks may ease pressure from Europe and America, they risk raising the ire of extreme Turkish nationalism that remains a dominant force in Turkish society. But the benefits perhaps outweigh potential losses. Erdogan has to cope with the challenge of the formidable Gulenists (who have their own stand on the Armenian question), steer clear of their damaging corruption charges, resolve debilitating internal elite battles and negotiate increasingly difficult economic waters, as well deal with the Kurdish Question. Here his remarks on the Armenian Genocide can serve to dam up troubles from other sources. Erdogan can hope to at least begin to dim the chances of a potentially dangerous European and American succumbing to the Armenian lobby. Europe and the USA have of course never been concerned with the plight of Armenians, nor will they ever be. But in the run up to 2015, even a genuflection in that direction official Genocide Recognition could offer a declining Europe and America a new stick with which to meddle in the affairs of resurgent Turkey. Erdogan’s speech can begin to neutralize this stick. Erdogan can also hope to neutralize an already immobile Armenian state. In the run up to 2015 Armenian elites too will come under immense pressure to more actively take up the many existing long term consequences of the Genocide, something that it has obstinately refused to do. Hints and suggestions of conciliatory official Turkish regret will suffice to embolden these elites in their flagrant refusal to go beyond words, in their flat failure to table significant issues for discussion with the Turkish state. * * * * * * It is clear that Erdogan’s 23 April 2014 statement has no genuine intent to encourage ‘compassionate and humane’ relationships between Turk and Armenian. The existing status quo in Turkey is not conducive, by any standard, to flourishing ‘compassion and mutually humane attitudes’ between the many different nationalities inhabiting the region and the statement has nothing to indicate that this status quo is designed to change. It’s alas the same old story underlined again by the fact that Erdogan is once again advancing the notion of ‘a joint historical commission’ of scholars and researchers to establish the truth of 1915. What better way to package away all the continuing consequences of the Genocide, to store it out of sight, in the world of ivory tower academia, as far away from concrete, wide, open democratic discussion that would actually deal with historical consequences and generate the mature and good relations between us all that we all desire. Prove us wrong and we will be delighted. Orhan Dink, brother of murdered Hrant, made his own wise evaluation. Though ‘some might say’ that it came late’ Erdogan’s statement and his condolences are ‘a first step’, a ‘most basic brick’ to ‘build democracy in Turkey’. Genuine condolences are indeed a first and necessary step to democracy. Prove to us then Mr Erdogan that yours are genuine. Extend, enhance and multiply democratic rights in Turkey, rights that accord equality and respect, freedom and dignity to all national groups in within your jurisdiction. Carry through the tranche of measures indicated above, measures that have been tabled many times over the years. Then and only then, can we together begin the process that, as Orhan put it, to bring ‘both societies to normalization.’ Only then will the idea of a historical commission acquire positive quality, only that is, after taking the concrete measures to overcome the still painful legacies of 1915. Eddie Arnavoudian

Food for deathly thought Here a question to consider: was the Soviet Armenian experience, in one particular aspect an enormous and indubitable register of cultural, social, economic and demographic attainment, a mere cosmetic edifice obscuring the truth of yet another seven decades of inexorable national shrinkage, decades during which the presence of an Armenian population in historic Armenian homelands throughout Asia Minor and the Caucuses continued to decline and brought now to the precipice of elimination. For centuries, but closest to our times from the mid-19th, one the most striking demographic and geo-political trends in Asia Minor and the Caucuses has been the steady, irreversible diminution of its Armenian communities and the equally steady shrinkage of the territorial space they inhabit. Armenian populations across historic Armenia have been systematically uprooted and removed, cleared out with all signs of their presence ruthlessly cut to pieces. Those who remain have been herded into a tiny, inhospitable territorial space – the current Republic of Armenia - that allows for no sustainable independent nationhood. Take a look at a demographic and geo-political map and you will see the shocking truth…the sure disappearance of the Armenian people from Asia Minor and the Caucuses that for thousands of years been their homeland. The Genocide finally cleansed historic western Armenia of most of its Armenian population whilst the post-Genocide Turkish Republic headed by Kemal Ataturk completed the process during the 1930s and 1940s. Besides eradicating an Armenian presence from western Armenia, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey also reduced the once substantial Armenian presence in Istanbul to a shadow of its glorious past. Systematic discrimination against national minorities threatens to drive remaining Armenian communities to extinction. From a map of Asia Minor and the Caucuses that showed substantial Armenian communities across the region, Armenians today appear isolated to a rump, escape from which seems the sole chance of human survival. The Soviet Armenian age, despite a population growth that touched 3 million, did nothing to stem or reverse demographic and geographic collapse. On the contrary, this period appears to mark a further stage in this process, operating particularly in the Caucuses. Parallel with the Soviet Armenian cultural and demographic flourish, through the Caucuses during the same period, a long-established Armenian presence underwent a critical decline, accelerated by the assimilationist policies enforced by the nationalist elites in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Nakhichevan during the Soviet era, that has no natural borders with Azerbaijan, was attached to Azerbaijan and emptied of its Armenian population. Garabagh similarly, despite its Armenian majority was also annexed to Azerbaijan and suffered a steady decline of its Armenian population. In Armenian populated Azerbaijani regions – Baku in the main – linguistic, educational and cultural restrictions lead to enforced assimilation. Similar processes were at work in Georgian controlled territories where Armenians constituted overwhelming majorities. In Tbilisi, once a thriving centre of Armenian culture and commerce, only its ghost survives. In the post-Soviet age Armenians have been finally cleared from their homes in Azerbaijan whilst their cultural legacy has been barbarously reduced to rubble. In Georgia too Armenians are being pushed out of remaining Armenian strongholds. The Soviet era increase of the Armenian population has offered no compensation. It has indeed underlined the unsustainability of the territory as an economically viable state. Since the end of the Soviet era, without central Soviet support and as a result of the ruthless plunder of national wealth by the new elite, the Armenian state has been incapable of sustaining its 3 million Soviet era population. The Armenian Republic, the last redoubt for an Armenian community in Asia Minor is collapsing asunder in the throes of a catastrophic demographic blood-letting that continues day in day out with queues thronging foreign ambassadorial buildings. A greedy and voracious Armenian elite of looters and criminals does nothing to reverse the process. As Armenia is emptied, its increasingly thinly populated lands are eyed both by Azeri and Georgian elites, also voracious and vicious but in addition well financed and well- armed to boot. Can there be any respite or recovery? As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Genocide let us be under no illusion that Genocide recognition even by the most powerful states on the globe will alter these trends. Radical action is necessary, action for which we have the intellectual and cultural resources. But have we the political will? 31 May 2013

Sitting beneath the Armenian flag at the London Paralympics On Thursday 6 September with our two children we went off to London's main Olympic Stadium to watch an evening of athletics. It turned out to be what the press rightly described as 'Thrilling Thursday', at least for the Brits who won a few gold. My boys with their roots in England were delighted. Sat among 80,000 spectators they cheered for Britain until hoarse. But British victories were not the sole source of delight. Almost incredibly, amazingly, an hour after we had sat down Raffi shouted in great exitement pointing out that we were sitting directly beneath the flag of the Republic of Armenia, directly but high, high above. Though no Armenians were competing that night it gave us all a tremendous thrill, a sense of satisfaction and contentment. Why? For the simple reason that for my generation at least, and evidently to some extent with the younger, it was a moment of unuusal acknowledgement of our Armenian being, something ignored in everyday life. We can go through a day, a week, a month and a year with no recognition of our being Armenian. It is as if that aspect of our being is invisible, unimportant, insignificant. It is as if only half our face is visible to everyone else. Then among 80,0000 you suddenly see yourself represented by a flag, fluttering not just in your own imagination or your own home, but here among 80,000 people of all nationalities, and flutering moreover alongside the flags of all other nations, small or large. Clearly a powerful symbol. It should be salvaged from those who today are besmirching it. Eddie

Dear SAS, Forgive the delay in responding...Alas my Armenian orthography is very very weak. I haven't had a chance to study it at all. I re-learnt Armenian alone in a corner of London with no other Armenians! I agree transliteration and orthography are very important but at least even when wrong in the case of famous people, we do know who we are talking about and we can communicate something of what they have contributed to Armenian and international culture and civilisation. Best regards Eddie

Thoughts for debate on the way to the 100th anniversary of the Genocide… Thought No.1 Stop licking the corpse of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres The 1920 post-World War One Treaty of Sevres between the defeated Ottoman Empire and the triumphant Allies must forever cease to be a reference point, an instrument of policy, negotiation or a platform of appeal in the Armenian people’s 21st century efforts to construct secure and viable nationhood. Armenian-related clauses of this Treaty that shaped a substantial Armenian state over large portion of historical Armenia are, pathetically because of their stamp of Great Power approval, ceaselessly cited by Armenian commentators as a critical and irrefutable recognition of the Armenian people’s legitimate right to national self-determination on historic homelands to which the survivors of the Genocide now have no right to return. So the Treaty has become part of the package of Armenian presentations against the Turkish state that run together with the demand of Genocide recognition. Armenians however must abandon to the historians a Treaty that even at its birth stank of the cynical imperialist gamble that it was – a scheme to carve up Asia Minor and the Middle East, not for Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks or even Turks, but for European imperial powers alone. The whole of Asia Minor and the Middle East, until then Ottoman colonies, was now to be divided into British, French and Italian spheres of influence with Greeks and Armenians acting as proxy within borders that, assigned to them, would be helpless protectorates. The Allies however were neither able nor prepared to impose the Treaty, unwilling or unable to deploy the necessary militarily force required. They would rely instead on regional proxies and allies who only had a chance of triumph in the event of an utterly incapacitated, broken Turkish/Ottoman ruling class and an utterly passive Turkish nationalist ruling class that had been spawned within the Ottoman state. Greek and Armenian armed forces would be used to measure the strength of a virtually defunct Ottoman Empire, shrunk essentially to its Asia Minor and Middle East colonies. If they managed to overwhelm the disorganised forces of the once mighty and savage Empire, Britain, France and Italy would be free, at no cost to them, to impose its new colonial order designed in the Treaty of Sevres with their allies employed as instrument of regional control. The Treaty of Sevres was a gamble, a gamble that failed, rapidly undone by Kemal Ataturk’s virulent Turkish imperialist-chauvinist national movement. Inheriting the legacy of the Ottoman militarism and sustained by a substantial Turkish social base Kemal Ataturk rapidly all opponents and moved to quickly establish Turkish hegemony over all of Asia Minor, including historic Armenia and Kurdistan. As Kemal’s mastery of the area became incontestable, Europe and the USA abandoned erstwhile Armenian and Greek allies and began parleying with Ataturk. Within three years the Treaty of Sevres was dead, unceremoniously cast onto the scrap heap of international law by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that recognised Turkish colonial rule over Asia Minor – including over the larger segment of historically colonised Armenia and Kurdistan. The European gamble at Sevres was particularly cynical where Armenia and Armenians were concerned. The Armenian people had no prospect of driving Ataturk’s forces from their western historic homelands. The Genocide had destroyed the demographic foundation for their national development in western Armenia. The surviving Armenian elites, in the Caucuses, Istanbul and beyond had in addition proved utterly indifferent or unable to take up the challenge of reaffirming Armenian national rights in their historic homelands. Between 1917 and 1920, Armenian forces had already been pushed back and out of western Armenia well before Ataturk’s own aggressive assaults. Even in the event of any early military success, a ramshackle Armenian state assembled in territory substantially denuded of Armenians would sooner or later fall before Kurdish and Turkish forces intervening to ostensibly support compatriots who would constitute a majority in a so-called Armenian state. Despite all this Armenian political elites have never been reconciled to the demise of the Imperialist Gamble of Sevres and as in the Armenian legend they endlessly lick its rotting corpse hoping to bring it back to life, tiresomely demanding that its Armenian clauses, deemed one of the finest manifestations of international justice for Armenians, be if not enforced in whole, then, at least tabled as a framework for forcing Turkey into ceding land to Armenia or cited as evidence of the historical justice of Armenian claims. But the Treaty is dead, a mere historical document testifying to European colonial appetites stirred by visions of a helpless Ottoman collapse. Efforts to resurrect the lost Gamble serve as dead weight keeping us bent in beggary. Kneeling before Europe and America hoping that today they will enforce what they failed to when truly Global Masters of the World, is worse than pathetic political delusion. The Armenian appeal to Sevres that often runs along with the campaign for imperialist genocide recognition is just another weeping wound of what has now become a near terminal Armenian disease - dependence upon foreign powers for the future of their nation and state, the same dependence that in the past has produced nothing but tragedy and disaster. It is time to stop licking. Eddie Arnavoudian 15 September 2012

Here some notes on a little article I am writing on Rouben Vorperian: travels without joy (Library of Armenian Classics, 1981, pp31-120) On the Armenian literary landscape Rouben Vorperian (1870-1931) appears as an entirely marginal figure. While contemporaries like Varoujean, Yessayan, Siamanto, Sevak and others were as if always at the centre of debate on art, literature and national emancipation, Vorperian leaves the impression of residing quietly on the edge, unnoticed, shy and remote not just metaphorically but literally, living most of his life as he did in Djibouti and then Paris where he died. Today he rests among the company of the forgotten. We have, in the poet’s words: ‘Placed upon him the stone of oblivion And left silence as guard to his tomb’ This is both mistake and loss. It was not for flattery that the poet received laurels from novelist Zabel Yessayan, singular critic Minas Teoleolian and others. Though Rouben Vorperian earned his living as a business man his first unchallenged passion was art and poetry. He did not aspire to be ‘an expert with statues’ or a ‘painter deserving of worship’, neither to be ‘an actor who overwhelms his audience’. ‘I was born a poet and let me remain so.’ Through determined dedication serviced by the that spark of creativity that is the gift of every human being Vorperian’s work contains flares, never mind that they do not reach as far or high as others. In cumulative flow Vorperian’s poetry sounds a rending cry of wounded wanderers, uprooted from their homeland and unable to cast happy anchor elsewhere. He generates no bracing, insurrectionary passions or sensibilities. Often he is tiresome, even pedestrian. But at its moments, even if these are not prolific, his poetry has a tragic cast that shapes the anguished bitterness of enforced migration and that of its Armenian manifestation particularly. It is bares the soul of exiles worldwide, of uprooted, lonely wanderers, brows etched with yearning for homeland living the estrangement, pessimism and hopelessness that is companion of social and national dislocation. Vorperian works his themes with thought provoking effect, suggesting a among other things a deeper appreciation of the essence of exile felt by men and women torn from closely knit rural communities where the collective more decidedly than today defined individual sensibility. Though not the best some poems compounding longing for homeland with the stunning of Genocide that blocked all hope of return are felt grasps of the solacing role of Soviet Armenia for a stunned Armenian intelligentsia. I. The joyless wanderer Rouben Vorperian is most striking when articulating the unending endurance that is enforced migration from homeland, when expressing the painful weariness of exile that failing to sink new roots is marked in addition by personal misfortune. For him it generated a melancholic, tired longing for his hearth and home as an elixir. ‘Oh for anyone to understand the sorrows of my soul Who could feel it scorched by longing For our homeland Oh I smolder on and fall towards the damp soil.’ (p92) But expressed in this grimness there is also a profound human truth. ‘My Village Road’ and ‘My Little Cottage’ are fine metaphorical renditions of the opposition between life in a rural homeland that was a social and collective unity and the rootless, isolated alienation of the life in exile. Alas that the former is memory, while the latter is a suffering present. Longer autobiographical verse draws the world map travelled by the poet who when still fuelled by youthful spirits reached to see the most distant wonders. None however filled the gap left by village home. Though Vorperian does not tell us why, his poetry yet affirms his life marked by pervasive personal unhappiness. It has become ‘but a door before the abyss, a door before the dark road’ where smiles are ‘but froth concealing pain.’ It was then almost inevitable that his remembrance would search out the paths that led to his childhood village and to his humble cottage. Thus ‘My Village Path, a poem that Zabel Yessayan valued for its perfection of form that is also a bitter confession of the sum of emptiness that the poet’s exile life has amounted to. Life’s boat left not a mark behind it Forgetfulness took all from me Old dreams vanish like clouds Memories vanish like a song Repeated in conclusion, this opening and a middle verse that establishes present time and space, gives the poem substances of defining oppositions. As he ambles along a stone-hewed road to an east African seaside a thousand miles from his childhood home, the ageing poet recoils against his present is devoid of his native village’s ‘youthful innocence’. Though somewhat bland and sentimental within the whole poem the term speaks clearly of disappointments, treacheries, lies, deceptions and corruptions that the poet has encountered in foreign lands despite their more ‘civilised’ ways. Descriptions of the path to the village recreate more than the just the beautiful rural landscape of his youth that is the site of ‘My Little Cottage’. Small and insignificant as it is, it is not just: A few pillars and black walls Bent but holding each other up Like the aged of ancient days The cottage is a fact of stability, of a rooted existence, of the warmth, comfort and security of home and hearth, suggesting the solidarities of collective, loving social relations of family – that in his time would be extended family. To all who occupy it, it is as a fortress and abode against misfortune and calamity. Meagre, ramshackle, almost dilapidated as it is, this cottage is yet the birthplace of youth’s dreams, the source of that flow of happiness and ease of life growing amid the love of parents and family - all now absent. This remembrance is a counterpoint to a present impaired by disappointment and concluded by regret. Memory underlines misery in the present. Nothing has replaced the lights of human solidarity, for family love that was relished in that smallest and most humble of rural village cottages in the homeland. Now even this cottage has gone and as: Fortune turned both you and me to dust. The yearning for homeland that is communicated in the sum of Vorperian poetry has of course been a pervasive feature of the Armenian national experience and of its national consciousness forming as a result also a broad beam in Armenian literature. Vorperian’s poetry inspires thought that goes some way to explain why its intensity. In traditional rural life, an individual’s sense of being was bound by existential cords to his/her collective, community relations. In contrast to the isolated individualism that today has reached its extremity in modern city life, for the rural man and woman, boy and girl, the collective and community define individual being with greater force. To be broken, rent asunder from this community was akin to personal fragmentation, to the loss of self. Yearning and longing return is at the same time yearning for recovery of the self, of the individual and not just yearning for an idyllic past. Alas for Vorperian who was also a patriotic poet animated by ambitions of national emancipation, any prospect of individual return and recovery was dealt an additional, almost fatal blow by the 1915 Genocide. The Genocide compounded individual, personal dislocation and alienation with a collective and national dimension. It had uprooted a whole people and blocked all possibility of its return. So now however: Grim days follow upon each other Like you they have no end Dawn always distant is blocked Like the fate of a hunted bird With his life on the wane, ‘with body immobile’, perhaps bedridden and feeling ‘no hope emerging from the chaos of the dark clouds’ the poet spends his time ‘living in the bosom of the past.’ In his editor’s introduction to a 1981 edition of Vorperian’s poetry, Vasken Gabrielian is tritely dismissive of his poems of longing, judging them to be, at least in part, a failure of vision, ‘a retreat to tradition’ and ‘inability to see the way out of capitalism’s alienated human relations (p6). Memory of the past, of one’s youth, can of course take on diverse functions, including as metaphors for social vision, conservative or progressive. In Hovanness Hovannissian they for example construct a utopia of social emancipation. But in Vorperian’s memory acts as neither serving rather to underline an enduring deep, distraught personal unhappiness and the alienation of his rootless, lonely existence in exile. Vorperian’s yearning for the home of his youth is a yearning for social and collective solidarity not for rural conservatism. That it did not act as a social or political vision is testified to in Vorperian’s poetic solidarity with Soviet Armenia, a fact indeed noted and applauded by Gabrielian himself! One could add also that the recollection of youth in old age is perhaps an existential inevitability pitting healthy, energetic and carefree existence in youth against the fact of later decay and decline. II. A Phoenix arises Experience buckled and bent the very core of Rouben Vorperian’s being. When young he experienced the 19th as full of promise, ‘with fires of science’ spreading ‘happiness across the earth.’ Science had ‘opened up the deep of the abysses’ in whose ‘stormy oceans of doubt’ God, a permanent Armenian ‘boyhood companion’, receded into the distance to be replaced faith in the idea of human progress. But as 19th century society became 20th, the glossy: ‘Make-up fell away from its cheeks To reveal instead of sweet smiles A hyena gaze and wolves’ claws Beneath its shiny gloves The savagery and barbarism of Genocide and World War One shattered confidence in independent human potential and left the poet bereft, utterly desolate, yearning not just for a return to homeland but for a return also of faith. Oh I am alone and endlessly pleading Return, God, as to my boyhood days Whether Divine inspiration did revisit Vorperian I am not sure. But a significant, deeply felt poem ‘Apples from the Motherland’, evidently not written for the occasion expresses the solace that Soviet Armenia, with the flourish of cultural and social life there, offered the tired exile in his frail closing years. Never mind that Soviet Armenia was a mere stump of the historical homeland, that it did not incorporate his own beloved family village and cottage. Still a gift of apples from Soviet Armenia Brought to the poet’s throbbing heart An infinite unending dawn sun They have after all been ‘touched by a breeze incensed with Etchmiadzin’s and Sevan’s aroma’. The tree from which they have been picked have ‘resonated to the song of the river Arax while ‘its roots have been fertilised by the sweat of the Armenian peasant.’ The excitement and the emotion is tremendous. On the wing of memory the poet still wanders through the towns and villages of his western Armenian homeland, through Kharpert, Malatya, Mush and Arapgir. But they are now beyond reach. In eastern, Soviet Armenia however things are different. Sevan and Etchmiadzin may not be in western Armenia but they are essential, component parts of the historic space that defined the Armenian nation in its history and moreover are component parts of an Armenian state and republic. Ambitions for nation building In the western Armenian homelands may have been shattered by the Genocide. But in its stead Soviet Armenia, Phoenix-like, as a nation saving lighthouse and port of call. Never mind part of the USSR, it provided the foundation for the flourish of culture and literature, language and music, architecture, history and art to produce a common consciousness and sense of national identity. Such were the historical-cultural co-ordinates that constituted a substance of nationality for the intelligentsia more immediately significant to them than the material and social emancipation of the mass of the peasants, the common people, who lived in the Armenian homelands and constituted the foundation of the nation. Even as they were obviously moved by the plight of the masses their object was the ideal of the nation as constructed by language, literature and culture. And here, despite the uprooting, dispossession and mass slaughter that had just been visited on the Armenian people, Soviet Armenia appeared still as powerful testimony, as incontrovertible evidence of a surviving nation. For all the tangled complications and albeit but a tiny enclave, Soviet Armenia proclaimed the fact of nationhood with such magnetism that, through the energetic efforts among others of men such as communist historian and political activist Ashot Hovannissyan, an entire battalion of Armenian intellectuals of all political persuasions were persuaded to return and participate in nation-construction. More than a fact of flourishing of nationhood, Soviet Armenia had also offered a safe territorial refuge to many western Armenian survivors of the Genocide. It also represented for them and for Armenians generally a possible bridge of hope, a stepping stone to recovery and even possibly a recovery of and return to lands lost in the wake of the Genocide. . . . . . Through Vorperian’s work one finds other poems and scores of scattered couplets that stand alone as strikes to inspiration. The almost impeccable ‘Wedding Ring’ for example is a harsh and telling reminder of the contradictory nature of marriage, particularly in a conservative Christian society, with all its potential for violence and oppression concealed by the ring, but also its sanction of free reign to love and lust in the marriage bed. ‘The Watch’ is another fine piece, a gentle contemplation of the passing of time and of ageing with intimations of mortality touched well in an image of the old poet looking unperturbed at his old broken watch as he ‘smiles before infinity’. As if in an epitaph Rouben Vorperian wrote that even as ‘time withers both rose and memory’, if his ‘songs were to speed from one heart to another’ he would rest easy never mind ‘beneath a forgotten tomb’. His songs would be immortality enough. There may not be many such ones. But there are some and it is good see Lola Koundakjian’s ‘Armenian Poetry Project (http://armenian-poetry.blogspot.co.uk) hosting Rouben Vorperian. Eddie Arnavoudian 18 June 2012

Hello Arpa, I did read but delinquently failed to respond to your point about the use of 'parasites' for Tsetser as the translation for the title of the Broshian novel. Please accept my apologies! You wrote asking: 'Is what you interpret as “Parasite”մակաբոՅծ/epiphyte refer to Proshian's novel Tsets/ՑԵՑ, the wool-cloth eating larva of the Moth?' I take you point but I felt happier with the generic 'parasite' that so readily communicates the connotation of social abuse and exploitation that defines the protagonist of Broshian's novel. I dare say that one with a more creative command of English could offer a more appropriate and equally telling rendering.

After another extended absence here a little note on Vrtanness Papazian...Ah what we lose as a result of ignorance of or because of willfully ignoring our own history and culture... Vrtanness Papazian (1866-1920) is another significant short story writer whose reputation has been cut short by reckless critics. A fine narrator, at once humorous and cutting, he has an artist’s feel for 19th century Armenian rural life whose class divisions, class exploitation and national oppression he describes in grippingly dramatic development. Grasping human relations in natural and authentic flow Papazian adequately compensates for sometimes flat and inauthentic characterization that can turn protagonists into incomprehensible strangers. The imperial Ottomans state, its courts, tax collectors and the string of sub-collectors with rights acquired to a portion of the peasants’ product appear in all their brutality, some plundering hand in hand with Armenian usurers. ‘The Armenian usurer indeed was more terrifying than any Kurdish bandit. Armed with debtor’s notes more deadly than Kurdish swords they seize and plunder and then laugh at the beggars they leave behind. Their brazenness reaches disgusting heights when in lieu of interest they demand beautiful women or village brides for a few days.’ A visible thread in many a story is contempt for the Church and its priests preaching passivity in the face of family homes burnt out, men murdered, women raped and children abducted. ‘Fair Judgment’, with its depictions of gruesome, ghastly dirt, with the mud, the grime, the urine and excrement, the dankness and the darkness of Ottoman jail cells, with descriptions of worn threadbare courthouse curtains behind which preside ‘yawning judges ready to fall asleep’, features as metaphor for the nightmare that passed for Ottoman justice. Here Papazian reminds one of Aranstar but with a difference. Arantsar also sketches the corruption of the Ottoman judicial apparatus. He does so convincingly, but through the prism of Armenian experience alone. Papazian gives these same truths enhanced authority focusing them through wider lens’ that take in besides Christians also Muslims, besides Armenians also Albanians, Arabs, Jews, Kurds and Greeks all also trapped in the fatal claws of Ottoman ‘justice’. ‘Monastic Yergo, with passages that remind one of Hrant’s ‘Letters on the Lives of Emigrants’, offers a telling analysis of the processes that drove tens of thousands of Armenians from their homelands in Van, Mush, Erzerum and elsewhere. Flooding into Istanbul’s ghettos they nourished hopes that money earned would repay voracious usurers threatening their families’ back home. Hopes alas are dashed with pittance earnings driving impoverished emigrants to despair and drink while their families at home suffer abuse and expropriation at the hands of usurers enjoying the solidarity of Ottoman ‘law’. Papazian’s worth is evident even in flawed stores. ‘Santo – from the Lives of Armenian Gypsies’, is a gripping tale and an invaluable record of a forgotten phenomenon of Armenian society, of those ‘tens of thousands’ of Armenian gypsies who traveled ‘through every (Armenian) village and every town selling goods prepared during the winter’ and who like gypsies the world over were labeled ‘shameless thieves difficult to do business with’ (p563). Set during the 1895-96 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire when Armenian gypsy communities where also drawn into the nightmare of genocidal repression we meet the fiery Margo, whose traveling caravan is confronted by Turkish officials and she raped. Seething, she is humiliated further by a husband who having failed to defend her then turns traitor. In the figure of Margo who eventually avenges herself and her community, ‘Santo’ highlights the independence, the force and decisiveness of women and their central and sometimes dominant role in family and community life and in relations with outsiders. It was women ‘who organized meetings’ and ‘forced men to attend and to think’ about how to respond to critical situations. ‘It would be mainly women who did the trading…as well as the fortune telling and the begging, shocking one with their brazenness but also causing wonder at their moral rectitude, at the ease with which they dispersed and got rid of those who dared approach them with ill intent. (p556) Moments of scratching prose are easily exonerated in what remains both a dramatic human tale of a woman who passes into legend for her struggle against marauding Ottoman officials and soldiers. The story is also a veritable sociological mine on the life of Armenian gypsies, their internal democratic life, their role in wider Armenian community, how they earned their living, their marriage rituals and much else. In one of his apparently more generous moods, retreating from his normally caustic dismissal of Armenian prose writers, Oshagan in the same breath speaks of Vrtanness Papazian and of Maupassan, the unquestionably superb exponent of the short story. Whatever the value or validity of such comparisons, being offered by the wantonly ultra-critical Oshagan, they speak to the quality of Papazian as writer and artist. 31 May 31, 2012

Apologies but I put this in the wrong place when first trying to post it. And here after another long silence another draft item on Berj Broshian that I shall soon submit to Groong. In its own ramshackle but nevertheless impressive fashion, Berj Broshian’s ‘Parasites’ is a remarkably modern study of the relationship between money and social power in 19th century rural Armenia, manifest concretely as an account of the tyranny of early Armenian financiers and bankers, then known by their proper names of usurers and parasites. With his web extending far and wide Palasan, the novel’s protagonist and ‘chief of all parasites’, amasses huge fortunes. He boasts arrogantly that ‘there is not a village’ across the region ‘that is not indebted to me’ adding that ‘even the banks are in my debt!’ As for those in his thrall, ‘the lot of them are my serfs’ he proclaims (p69). Shadowing our own times, Broshian shows us society in which those producing nothing accumulate enormous wealth and with it power, all obtained from the sweat, suffering and toil of others. He tells of society in which ‘the pocket that sounded the loudest jingle… wielded the bludgeon’ (p18). An ominous figure, Palasan is an early sketch, a first draft of our own parasites and usurers euphemistically labelled bankers or financiers. That he exists today is testified to by the unseen but hated figure assassinated at the opening of Narine Groyan’s novel ‘Dog Star’, awarded the 2011 Armenian Orange Book Prize. ‘Parasites’, it is well to acknowledge at the outset, is shockingly unstable. It lacks any overriding plot, axis or coherent narrative that would give unity and collective punch to what are lively but relatively independent chapters. Though they are all placed upon a common social terrain and share the same protagonists, much of the relationship between them is a function not of the flow or inner development of plot or character but of a string of unexplained, forced turns that verging on the absurd stretch credulity and so make unusual demands on patience and imagination. Let no one claim however that these troubles drain the volume’s artistic or intellectual substance. They do not. I. Broshian’s story is set in a typical rural Armenian village of ‘O’ with nothing about it romantic or idyllic, a fact captured in a telling description of class structure on one ‘cold and misty evening’ when both the ‘rich and the poor have already taken refuge in their homes’: ‘The poor have long ago gathered their half-naked children beneath some ragged and worn cloths, whilst the man and woman of the house, lying to the left and the right of their innocent young, warm them with their own body heat and breath until sleep takes over. The rich on the other hand having dined upon what god has given them, gathered around their warm fire to rest in their thick and soft bedding (p158).’ Broshian does not however open his novel with issues of class, social justice or with any sketch of the vermin that will feed off the village. We are presented rather with inviting pictures of the community and its members that shall be afflicted, among them two young lovers, Sampson and Sona, the charismatic local mayor Ardem and the well to do, jocular farmer Melik Patal. Constructing his lovingly detailed context Broshian writes with wit, humour and a perception of social and psychological truths. Male conceit across the ages is caught splendidly. Despite ruling the social and the domestic roost, Ardem and Melik Patal moan of men’s lives allegedly bent to wives’ wishes and judgements and complain that men, ‘but simpleminded brothers of god’, are in actual fact ‘cleaning cloths in women’s hands (p32)’. More powerful still are passages that tell of Sampson and Sona’s love that they must keep concealed because in village society love is not to exist independent of marriage and marriage itself is to be arranged by parents with priorities other than their children’s desires or wishes. The young’s wishes are on occasion taken into account, but more often other, economic and social, calculations prevail. Sampson and Sona do not yet know if they are among the exceptions, and so we see them suffer those universal insecurities, fears and anxieties of love that in their particular circumstances must steal its way through the restrictive entanglements of rural economic calculation, village mores, religious prejudice and tradition. Particularly moving is the depiction of the guilt felt by Sona as she defies village moral imperatives (p46-47) so deeply imbedded in her own consciousness that for shame she dreads even the idea of telling her own mother of her love. However in Sona’s and Sampson’s case it is not backward tradition or custom but Palasan that represents the most dangerous threat to their love and to village life too. II. Palasan, a brutish, thuggish, manipulative and violent man exercises power with an executioner’s finality. He is truly a Darwinian jungle beast, the personification of financial capital’s utter disregard for other human lives. ‘As if the crows will wear black if ten nobodies are annihilated’ he retorts when challenged about his savage indifference to the plight of his victims. ‘If he falls into your hand, if he is weaker than you then smite him, trash him but make sure of your profit.’ This is his philosophy of life and business. Morality and Christian notions of ‘sin and punishment’ are dismissed as ‘priests’ grandchildren’ that the clergy employ ‘to net their fish and so obtain their dinner (p74)’. Palasan is not attired in the latest Gucci fashions, nor does he drive a 4x4 BMW. But even dressed in rough 19th century costume and riding horse and cart, he is immediately recognisable. Like our own bankers he has gathered into his ambit all who have influence and authority, the village clergy, members of the judiciary, local and even the regional government officials, all of whom do his bidding. With no fear of retribution he ignores custom, mores and traditions, dispensing titles, fixing elections and bribing judges and priests to accumulate yet more and to conceal misdeeds from scrutiny. The corrupt local priest Der Soukias expresses the scale and extent of money’s almost omnipotent force. ‘Let me try, in a friendly way, to make you understand this. A single worthless command from Palasan Agha is worth all of those from the whole village put together. Were he to demand that I swap my Christian robes for Muslim ones I would do so and will without protest pray in the name of Allah.’ (p109) Through the novel we see Palasan doggedly at work subverting due but of course limited democratic process as he plots to replace Ardem the mayor with his own man. Ardem is not suitable to moneyed power for he rejects the view that public officials should be ‘machines without will, moving only at the command of the influential.’(p128) Simultaneously Palasan with Kntouni, a fraudster and forger recently arrived from Van, connives to rewrite debtor’s notes in his possession and so squeeze his victims further. To reward his chief lieutenant Khuto’s loyalty, he conspires in addition to frame Sampson for murder and so leave Khuto’s son Garabed free to marry Sona. Thereafter he engineers an arson attack on Sampson’s family barn. To ensure adequate time for the plot to mature, he instructs the local priest to deny Sona and Samposon the necessary Church sanction for their engagement. Broshian completes Palasan’s portrait by etching into it a feature common to all Armenian moneyed elites. A native of the village O, after an interlude abroad, Palasan returns home and stands in opposition to his community. Now he is riddled with shame for being Armenian, everything about which he feels to be ugly or uncivilised. Equating sophistication with anything foreign, he monkeys Russian ways and adopts Russian variants of his own Armenian name so as to better mark himself off from the rough and ignorant natives. (We should note of course that whilst the elites adopted Russian ways to distance themselves from their peasant compatriots, the habit was also common among many of the well to do who deemed the affectation of things Russian as signs of culture and progress. The genial Ardem was one among these!) III. The almost serf-like conditions to which the village community is reduced as a result of Palasan’s grip over local government, judiciary and Church finds expression in an interesting, though not always entirely convincing literary device. In answer to questions from Smbat, a young investigative journalist just arrived in the village, it is none other than Palasan himself posturing as an ardent defender of the people, who holds forth in support of the ‘lower classes of our community’. The people he announces: ‘…are ceaselessly oppressed, exploited, squeezed by the usurers’ claws, insecure in their jobs, consumed by external and internal parasites, plundered and buried in ignorance. Your eyes bleed on beholding this…You must agree with me and with the local mayor that it is urgent that we consistently lash out against these national parasites, these ambitious opportunists and irresponsible officials, theses bloodsucking usurers and traitors who for personal gain strangle every positive striving among the people (130-131) As he speaks Palasan indirectly but accurately sketches the ideological standpoint of the national movement of the day that saw the key to reform and social progress in education. Broshian holds back no punches as he shows priests and lawyers to be of the same criminal brotherhood as Palasan. Der Soukias is tarred with the same brush as one Migidan Sako, the most notorious of Broshian’s usurers and protagonist in his most famous novel ‘The problem of Bread’. Clearly already Migidan Sako social twin, near the end of the novel Der Soukias turns out to be his biological one too! Broshian in addition captures well popular contempt for the legal profession in the service of power, a universal contempt we are reminded of repeatedly in world literature. ‘Curse your cheating grandfather’ exclaims Melik Patal. ‘You’ll relieve even a dead donkey of its horse shoes’. Blocking lawyers and priests together he concludes: ‘You…are all, of the same ilk. You first take from the living and then take from the dead.’ (p151) Palasan does not exploit and abuse without challenge and discovers a formidable opponent in Sissak who returning home carries with him a bag full of ideological prescriptions for social and national ills. In accord with the outlook of the times Sissak dedicates himself to the business of education and enlightenment believing this to be the best antidote to Palasan and his gang. Palasan however has dealt with such troublesome types before, silencing one through bribery and by encouraging and financing addiction to drugs – nicotine in this instance! In Sissak’s case however Palasan fails. Sissak is too stubborn and dedicated and slowly wins adherents among some of the community’s notables. (p99) ‘Parasites’ alas ends disappointingly with most of its last fifty pages, in a novel of only 200, burdened with sentimental allocations of happy endings for the virtuous and just rewards for the evil. Yet even here, as an apt reminder of the novel’s modern resonance, we come across a striking metaphor for the corruption of politics and democracy by financial power. Recalling better days better when members of the Church acted as genuine representatives of the community, an elderly priests remarks that ‘today politeness and hospitality’ have been swept aside by a flood of individualism and private greed: ‘It is painful to admit, but I know that today people become representative delegates to open wider not their doors but their wallets. They treat the Church as a source of income to fill their pockets. They (modern representatives) reserve the coldest treatment not just for their workers or for priests from beyond the parish but for the poor and needy too….To top it all in order to cover up their plunder they are wise enough to add a few decorations and silverware (to the Church), to do a few repairs and refurbishments that will then enable them to continue thieving.’ (p185) Replace the words ‘Church’ and ‘representative delegates’ with ‘Parliament’ and ‘MPs’, ‘Congress’ and ‘representative’, or with the proper name of any contemporary ‘democratic’ state institutions and we would have an honest depiction of 21st century ‘democratic politics’. IV. To properly appreciate ‘Parasites’ and all of Broshian’s novels, it repays pondering the weight and impact of its irregular structure and plot noted here by two examples alone. Kntouni’s unexpected appearance, though not warranted by the plot is not entirely incredible. Fraudsters from western Armenia regularly preyed upon villages in the relatively more prosperous east and so his presence serves to enhance the image of the times. But one cannot but be taken aback by the sudden announcement of his unexplained meteoric rise. Just a few pages from his first entrance we are five years on and told, with no account, that Kntouni now heads his own usurer’s enterprise. That his advance was made upon Palasan’s own home territory seems to cause no complications. Further, despite his now independent means Kntouni continues to behave as little more than a forging scribe for Palasan. This is not at all credible. Neither is the fact that at the end of these same five silent years in rural Armenia of all places, Sona and Sampson, now without the bloom of early youth are still to be married! Why? We are not given the slightest hint! Nevertheless, for all these and many other drawbacks, ‘Parasites’ remains eminently readable. The reason is best explained by Shirvanzade in a rigorous review of the novel when it was first published. For all his sharp criticism Shirvanzade underlines Broshian’s talent for creating authentic characters. `Broshian differs from our other writers in that he knows well that which he writes about. He grasps the common people's lives authentically. He grasps its language, traditions, sayings and turns of phrase better than any of our other authors... The characters that he depicts, whatever the flaws, are living people. They are not the author's artificially produced whimsical constructs.' The nail has truly been hit on the head. Deficiencies of plot and logical structure do limit the growth and refinement of characters, of their emotion, psychology, sensibility and so their depth and completeness. They also deny any fluent grasp of the novel as an effective totality. But even amidst the rubble of the plot Palasan survives as a genuine figure striding behemoth style through village life, bullying and buying allies and accomplices. He is convincingly human in his manipulative essence turning taps of brutishness and charm on and off as calculation and interest see fit. Indeed the entire gang of menacing rascals grouped around him, Kntouni, Khuto, their son and nephew Vassak and Garabed, the priest Der-Soukias, the lawyer and the provincial governor are all real presences united as a power unto themselves against whom the community has little avenue of appeal. Sona, Sona’s mother, Sampson and his father, Ardem and Melik Patal are all also authentic men and women with whose condition, hopes and disappointments we can identify. Broshian’s passion for salvaging the culture and folklore of his characters in addition, serve to enhance their concrete and universal humanity. These characters, even if oft out of focus, tell shocking truths of exploitation, corruption and violence born of the operations of banking and finance capital. In their very personalities they expose the structure of injustice and inhumanity that in rural Armenia sheltered behind traditions, mores, values, prejudices, customs and superstitions deemed to be Divine canon and therefore immutable. It is perhaps this ability of Broshian to so effectively bare social truths that are hidden behind public moral billboards that explains why he was so highly regarded by men such as Nalpantian and Issahakyan, Toumanian and Shirvanzade among others. Today, we too can engage with the lives of Broshian’s characters and as we read we too can happily embark upon a creative process, that by laying aside or imaginatively correcting and editing the rather too clumsy plot acquire at its end an appreciation of the novel as a compelling imaginative totality reflecting tellingly upon our own times. Eddie

And here after another long silence another draft item on Berj Broshian that I shall soon submit to Groong. In its own ramshackle but nevertheless impressive fashion, Berj Broshian’s ‘Parasites’ is a remarkably modern study of the relationship between money and social power in 19th century rural Armenia, manifest concretely as an account of the tyranny of early Armenian financiers and bankers, then known by their proper names of usurers and parasites. With his web extending far and wide Palasan, the novel’s protagonist and ‘chief of all parasites’, amasses huge fortunes. He boasts arrogantly that ‘there is not a village’ across the region ‘that is not indebted to me’ adding that ‘even the banks are in my debt!’ As for those in his thrall, ‘the lot of them are my serfs’ he proclaims (p69). Shadowing our own times, Broshian shows us society in which those producing nothing accumulate enormous wealth and with it power, all obtained from the sweat, suffering and toil of others. He tells of society in which ‘the pocket that sounded the loudest jingle… wielded the bludgeon’ (p18). An ominous figure, Palasan is an early sketch, a first draft of our own parasites and usurers euphemistically labelled bankers or financiers. That he exists today is testified to by the unseen but hated figure assassinated at the opening of Narine Groyan’s novel ‘Dog Star’, awarded the 2011 Armenian Orange Book Prize. ‘Parasites’, it is well to acknowledge at the outset, is shockingly unstable. It lacks any overriding plot, axis or coherent narrative that would give unity and collective punch to what are lively but relatively independent chapters. Though they are all placed upon a common social terrain and share the same protagonists, much of the relationship between them is a function not of the flow or inner development of plot or character but of a string of unexplained, forced turns that verging on the absurd stretch credulity and so make unusual demands on patience and imagination. Let no one claim however that these troubles drain the volume’s artistic or intellectual substance. They do not. I. Broshian’s story is set in a typical rural Armenian village of ‘O’ with nothing about it romantic or idyllic, a fact captured in a telling description of class structure on one ‘cold and misty evening’ when both the ‘rich and the poor have already taken refuge in their homes’: ‘The poor have long ago gathered their half-naked children beneath some ragged and worn cloths, whilst the man and woman of the house, lying to the left and the right of their innocent young, warm them with their own body heat and breath until sleep takes over. The rich on the other hand having dined upon what god has given them, gathered around their warm fire to rest in their thick and soft bedding (p158).’ Broshian does not however open his novel with issues of class, social justice or with any sketch of the vermin that will feed off the village. We are presented rather with inviting pictures of the community and its members that shall be afflicted, among them two young lovers, Sampson and Sona, the charismatic local mayor Ardem and the well to do, jocular farmer Melik Patal. Constructing his lovingly detailed context Broshian writes with wit, humour and a perception of social and psychological truths. Male conceit across the ages is caught splendidly. Despite ruling the social and the domestic roost, Ardem and Melik Patal moan of men’s lives allegedly bent to wives’ wishes and judgements and complain that men, ‘but simpleminded brothers of god’, are in actual fact ‘cleaning cloths in women’s hands (p32)’. More powerful still are passages that tell of Sampson and Sona’s love that they must keep concealed because in village society love is not to exist independent of marriage and marriage itself is to be arranged by parents with priorities other than their children’s desires or wishes. The young’s wishes are on occasion taken into account, but more often other, economic and social, calculations prevail. Sampson and Sona do not yet know if they are among the exceptions, and so we see them suffer those universal insecurities, fears and anxieties of love that in their particular circumstances must steal its way through the restrictive entanglements of rural economic calculation, village mores, religious prejudice and tradition. Particularly moving is the depiction of the guilt felt by Sona as she defies village moral imperatives (p46-47) so deeply imbedded in her own consciousness that for shame she dreads even the idea of telling her own mother of her love. However in Sona’s and Sampson’s case it is not backward tradition or custom but Palasan that represents the most dangerous threat to their love and to village life too. II. Palasan, a brutish, thuggish, manipulative and violent man exercises power with an executioner’s finality. He is truly a Darwinian jungle beast, the personification of financial capital’s utter disregard for other human lives. ‘As if the crows will wear black if ten nobodies are annihilated’ he retorts when challenged about his savage indifference to the plight of his victims. ‘If he falls into your hand, if he is weaker than you then smite him, trash him but make sure of your profit.’ This is his philosophy of life and business. Morality and Christian notions of ‘sin and punishment’ are dismissed as ‘priests’ grandchildren’ that the clergy employ ‘to net their fish and so obtain their dinner (p74)’. Palasan is not attired in the latest Gucci fashions, nor does he drive a 4x4 BMW. But even dressed in rough 19th century costume and riding horse and cart, he is immediately recognisable. Like our own bankers he has gathered into his ambit all who have influence and authority, the village clergy, members of the judiciary, local and even the regional government officials, all of whom do his bidding. With no fear of retribution he ignores custom, mores and traditions, dispensing titles, fixing elections and bribing judges and priests to accumulate yet more and to conceal misdeeds from scrutiny. The corrupt local priest Der Soukias expresses the scale and extent of money’s almost omnipotent force. ‘Let me try, in a friendly way, to make you understand this. A single worthless command from Palasan Agha is worth all of those from the whole village put together. Were he to demand that I swap my Christian robes for Muslim ones I would do so and will without protest pray in the name of Allah.’ (p109) Through the novel we see Palasan doggedly at work subverting due but of course limited democratic process as he plots to replace Ardem the mayor with his own man. Ardem is not suitable to moneyed power for he rejects the view that public officials should be ‘machines without will, moving only at the command of the influential.’(p128) Simultaneously Palasan with Kntouni, a fraudster and forger recently arrived from Van, connives to rewrite debtor’s notes in his possession and so squeeze his victims further. To reward his chief lieutenant Khuto’s loyalty, he conspires in addition to frame Sampson for murder and so leave Khuto’s son Garabed free to marry Sona. Thereafter he engineers an arson attack on Sampson’s family barn. To ensure adequate time for the plot to mature, he instructs the local priest to deny Sona and Samposon the necessary Church sanction for their engagement. Broshian completes Palasan’s portrait by etching into it a feature common to all Armenian moneyed elites. A native of the village O, after an interlude abroad, Palasan returns home and stands in opposition to his community. Now he is riddled with shame for being Armenian, everything about which he feels to be ugly or uncivilised. Equating sophistication with anything foreign, he monkeys Russian ways and adopts Russian variants of his own Armenian name so as to better mark himself off from the rough and ignorant natives. (We should note of course that whilst the elites adopted Russian ways to distance themselves from their peasant compatriots, the habit was also common among many of the well to do who deemed the affectation of things Russian as signs of culture and progress. The genial Ardem was one among these!) III. The almost serf-like conditions to which the village community is reduced as a result of Palasan’s grip over local government, judiciary and Church finds expression in an interesting, though not always entirely convincing literary device. In answer to questions from Smbat, a young investigative journalist just arrived in the village, it is none other than Palasan himself posturing as an ardent defender of the people, who holds forth in support of the ‘lower classes of our community’. The people he announces: ‘…are ceaselessly oppressed, exploited, squeezed by the usurers’ claws, insecure in their jobs, consumed by external and internal parasites, plundered and buried in ignorance. Your eyes bleed on beholding this…You must agree with me and with the local mayor that it is urgent that we consistently lash out against these national parasites, these ambitious opportunists and irresponsible officials, theses bloodsucking usurers and traitors who for personal gain strangle every positive striving among the people (130-131) As he speaks Palasan indirectly but accurately sketches the ideological standpoint of the national movement of the day that saw the key to reform and social progress in education. Broshian holds back no punches as he shows priests and lawyers to be of the same criminal brotherhood as Palasan. Der Soukias is tarred with the same brush as one Migidan Sako, the most notorious of Broshian’s usurers and protagonist in his most famous novel ‘The problem of Bread’. Clearly already Migidan Sako social twin, near the end of the novel Der Soukias turns out to be his biological one too! Broshian in addition captures well popular contempt for the legal profession in the service of power, a universal contempt we are reminded of repeatedly in world literature. ‘Curse your cheating grandfather’ exclaims Melik Patal. ‘You’ll relieve even a dead donkey of its horse shoes’. Blocking lawyers and priests together he concludes: ‘You…are all, of the same ilk. You first take from the living and then take from the dead.’ (p151) Palasan does not exploit and abuse without challenge and discovers a formidable opponent in Sissak who returning home carries with him a bag full of ideological prescriptions for social and national ills. In accord with the outlook of the times Sissak dedicates himself to the business of education and enlightenment believing this to be the best antidote to Palasan and his gang. Palasan however has dealt with such troublesome types before, silencing one through bribery and by encouraging and financing addiction to drugs – nicotine in this instance! In Sissak’s case however Palasan fails. Sissak is too stubborn and dedicated and slowly wins adherents among some of the community’s notables. (p99) ‘Parasites’ alas ends disappointingly with most of its last fifty pages, in a novel of only 200, burdened with sentimental allocations of happy endings for the virtuous and just rewards for the evil. Yet even here, as an apt reminder of the novel’s modern resonance, we come across a striking metaphor for the corruption of politics and democracy by financial power. Recalling better days better when members of the Church acted as genuine representatives of the community, an elderly priests remarks that ‘today politeness and hospitality’ have been swept aside by a flood of individualism and private greed: ‘It is painful to admit, but I know that today people become representative delegates to open wider not their doors but their wallets. They treat the Church as a source of income to fill their pockets. They (modern representatives) reserve the coldest treatment not just for their workers or for priests from beyond the parish but for the poor and needy too….To top it all in order to cover up their plunder they are wise enough to add a few decorations and silverware (to the Church), to do a few repairs and refurbishments that will then enable them to continue thieving.’ (p185) Replace the words ‘Church’ and ‘representative delegates’ with ‘Parliament’ and ‘MPs’, ‘Congress’ and ‘representative’, or with the proper name of any contemporary ‘democratic’ state institutions and we would have an honest depiction of 21st century ‘democratic politics’. IV. To properly appreciate ‘Parasites’ and all of Broshian’s novels, it repays pondering the weight and impact of its irregular structure and plot noted here by two examples alone. Kntouni’s unexpected appearance, though not warranted by the plot is not entirely incredible. Fraudsters from western Armenia regularly preyed upon villages in the relatively more prosperous east and so his presence serves to enhance the image of the times. But one cannot but be taken aback by the sudden announcement of his unexplained meteoric rise. Just a few pages from his first entrance we are five years on and told, with no account, that Kntouni now heads his own usurer’s enterprise. That his advance was made upon Palasan’s own home territory seems to cause no complications. Further, despite his now independent means Kntouni continues to behave as little more than a forging scribe for Palasan. This is not at all credible. Neither is the fact that at the end of these same five silent years in rural Armenia of all places, Sona and Sampson, now without the bloom of early youth are still to be married! Why? We are not given the slightest hint! Nevertheless, for all these and many other drawbacks, ‘Parasites’ remains eminently readable. The reason is best explained by Shirvanzade in a rigorous review of the novel when it was first published. For all his sharp criticism Shirvanzade underlines Broshian’s talent for creating authentic characters. `Broshian differs from our other writers in that he knows well that which he writes about. He grasps the common people's lives authentically. He grasps its language, traditions, sayings and turns of phrase better than any of our other authors... The characters that he depicts, whatever the flaws, are living people. They are not the author's artificially produced whimsical constructs.' The nail has truly been hit on the head. Deficiencies of plot and logical structure do limit the growth and refinement of characters, of their emotion, psychology, sensibility and so their depth and completeness. They also deny any fluent grasp of the novel as an effective totality. But even amidst the rubble of the plot Palasan survives as a genuine figure striding behemoth style through village life, bullying and buying allies and accomplices. He is convincingly human in his manipulative essence turning taps of brutishness and charm on and off as calculation and interest see fit. Indeed the entire gang of menacing rascals grouped around him, Kntouni, Khuto, their son and nephew Vassak and Garabed, the priest Der-Soukias, the lawyer and the provincial governor are all real presences united as a power unto themselves against whom the community has little avenue of appeal. Sona, Sona’s mother, Sampson and his father, Ardem and Melik Patal are all also authentic men and women with whose condition, hopes and disappointments we can identify. Broshian’s passion for salvaging the culture and folklore of his characters in addition, serve to enhance their concrete and universal humanity. These characters, even if oft out of focus, tell shocking truths of exploitation, corruption and violence born of the operations of banking and finance capital. In their very personalities they expose the structure of injustice and inhumanity that in rural Armenia sheltered behind traditions, mores, values, prejudices, customs and superstitions deemed to be Divine canon and therefore immutable. It is perhaps this ability of Broshian to so effectively bare social truths that are hidden behind public moral billboards that explains why he was so highly regarded by men such as Nalpantian and Issahakyan, Toumanian and Shirvanzade among others. Today, we too can engage with the lives of Broshian’s characters and as we read we too can happily embark upon a creative process, that by laying aside or imaginatively correcting and editing the rather too clumsy plot acquire at its end an appreciation of the novel as a compelling imaginative totality reflecting tellingly upon our own times. Eddie

The following quote is from Jacqueline Rose, a British intellectual and author of the 2005 'The Question of Zion'. She was not writing about Armenians but what she says fits a large swathe of modern Armenian 'intellectuals' and 'patriots' like a bespoke suit. "Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished." For Armenians this cuts to the bone indeed. One consequence of 'victimhood as indentity' is the breeding of a disgusting dependency on the more powerful, a reliance on others, a complete abdicatiton of any sense of dignity, of any self sustaining will. It leads to a pleading and begging of others for a solution to your problems. The definition of Armenian identity as Genocide victims casts Armenians in that horribly helpless bleating posture with hands outstretched to imperialist passers begging for compensation. This is causing havoc for Armenians. Critically it acts as a cover for the elites currently plundering and destroying Armenia. Preoccupied with the politics of Genocide Recognition and the calls for compensation that flow from this, all expected to be kindly donated to Armenians, the bandits riding their 4X4 chariots roughshod over the lives and the future of the Armenian common people get away with murder, the murder of a nation included. Eddie

After another long silence.... I have recently returned from Armenia and can only echo the criticism made, on another page of Hyefourm, of the Church hierarchy that is letting the marvels of Armenian civilisation go to rack and ruin. I shall return to this when I write up my notes. The significant point is that once again in Armenian life corrupt Church elites unite with equally corrupt secular elites to plunder the people and their cultural legacy. But for the moment, to the subject... Among the large quantity of books I got hold of was a marvellous volume by... Nvart Toumanian, daughter of poet Hovanness Toumanian, wrote ‘Memories and Conversations’ with her father (336pp, 2009, Yerevan) inspired in part by her reading of Ekerman’s famous ‘Conversations with Goethe’. The result is a beautiful book that communicates something of the grandeur and magnanimity of the ‘Poet of all Armenians’. Toumanian earned this special knighthood and deserved it. Like no other public figure in modern Armenian history his life was a hub around which at critical times revolved an entire community and countless men and women of all classes and ages. Written as a diary enriched with subsequent recollection we have a masterpiece of its genre, an encyclopaedia of the poet’s world view, his philosophy of life and art, a true book of wisdom and an irreplaceable primary source. On colourful display are Toumanian’s exceptional charisma and magnetism, his generosity and altruism, his social solidarity and national dedication, his aesthetic sensibility and his tremendous capacity for hospitality, always ready to lay on a feast for countless and interminable guests and visitors. Of exemplary value for our own day Hovanness Toumanian’s life was and remains an unanswerable retort the decadent intellectual who lacks any sense of collective solidarity and social commitment and for whom private gain is foremost. Through his daughter’s memoirs we encounter the genuine democratic artist-intellectual, the poet who is at the same time a tireless national and social activist, the writer who is always among the people partaking of their woes and their joys, the intellectual who unconditionally sacrifices private ambition to the common good. Beyond its strictly biographical and intellectual record Nvart Toumanian’s ‘Memories and Conversations’ with its rich grasp of life can be read as drama of human struggle and creativity, as a drama of frustrated ambitions and truncated potential, of unrealised dreams, but also of hope and of human love and generosity. At points it imposes itself as a moving tragedy of the spirit harassed by dark clouds, of the grieving father, of inconsolable regret at the wastage of creative human potential, of the painful withering candle of life and the loneliness of an end sapped by a cancer that killed the poet when but 54. For the moment regards to all

I have just read two fine volumes by John Kirakossian entitled 'Bourgeois Democracy and Armenia' the first covering the decade begining 1870, the second 1880. Here a first impression. The British Murder of the Armenian Nation Often it is German Imperialism that is charged with complicity and even critical responsibility for the Ottoman-Turkish Genocide of Armenian people. The German state, its political and military officials certainly played their role, especially during World War One. However as John Kirakossian, a fine, fine historian shows in his two volume study of Bourgeois Diplomacy and Armenia’, the real culprit was British Imperialism. Britain is primarily responsible for the murder of the Armenian nation, for the slaughter, the Genocide and the destruction of the Armenian people living in their western homelands occupied by the imperial Ottoman-Turkish state. Kirakossian’s volume’s are rich in many ways, but this the most visible central pillar reinforced beyond any toppling. In the wake of 18th and 19th century global industrialisation, the Ottoman Empire failed to keep pace with European imperial states. Lacking elites capable of taking the lead in reforming a decaying, corrupted and violent state the Empire began to fall foul of the voracious appetites of European imperialism that prepared to plunder and seize whatever they could. Within the Ottoman Empire, failure of reform gave rise to competing nationalisms, among them Greek, Balkan, Armenian and other movements. But besides these nationalisms of oppressed peoples there also rose a virulent, savage Turkish nationalism, bent on two things: protecting the Ottoman Empire both from European plundering and the destroying, by any means it had available all internal resistance from nations it had for centuries oppressed and plundered. The Armenian case was here unique. Unlike Greek and other Balkan nations Armenian national development took a somewhat extraordinary path that denied it independent economic foundations within Armenia upon which to found a nation state could arise and in the same measure prevented the evolution of a domestic, native elite with the economic means and the political confidence to lead the struggles of an overwhelmingly backward peasantry, to challenge Ottoman power and negotiate with Europe from a position of strength. Based in the Diaspora, in Istanbul and Izmir Armenian elites lacked a popular, native base that would give them independent political muscle. In the same measure the people in the homeland, the peasantry and artisans lacked the economic and political muscle that would drive their struggles for emancipation. The emerging Armenian nation as a result lacked the where-with-all to withstand the assaults of Turkish nationalism. It also lacked the means to negotiate independently with Europe that was steadily encroaching upon the dying Ottoman Empire. The Armenian people thus, in comparison to the Greeks, Bulgarians and other Balkan nations were utterly powerless. Without the necessary social, economic and political pillars they inevitably gravitated to a policy of reliance on imperialist powers for the resolution of their national oppression. This could not be otherwise. Yet the Armenians and their plight counted for nothing, all of these powers – British, French and Russian. When it suited them they all, without hesitation or humanity, abandoned Armenians to the Turkish murder machine. For Armenians, a temporary reprieve, a breathing space opened up with the possible expansion of the Tsarist imperial state into Armenia, with the prospect of the annexation of portions of western Armenia by the Russian state. The history of eastern Armenia so annexed had generated a modicum of security and along with it the possibility of economic development that could contribute significantly to nation formation. Though under no illusions about the Tsarist State, annexation by Russia would have at least halted Turkish nationalism’s murderous assault The Russian state never was a friend of the Armenian people. Yet in the face of relentless and growing barbarism of Turkish nationalism occupation by Russia would provide Armenians with a critical breathing space. British imperialism denied the Armenian people this breathing space. As Kirakossian, shows British imperialism stopped at nothing, not lying, not hypocrisy, not deceit nor the threat of war to prevent Tsarist expansion into western Armenia. It devoted all its economic and military, all its political and diplomatic advantage to protecting the territorial integrity of an Ottoman Empire that was a prison for oppressed nations. So it preserved not just the Ottoman Empire but gave Turkish nationalism the means to wage its war against the Armenian people with impunity. British imperialism understood well the consequences of its policy of at all costs blocking any Russian advance into western Armenia. It knew full well of the massacres, the slaughter, the violence, the forced religious conversion, the prohibitions on the Armenian language. It knew of the very core and essence of Ottoman state policy to annihilate the Armenians in their western homelands. But for British imperialism this was all positive! The British state regarded Armenians as enemies, as hostile agents of the Russian state. An independent Armenia was perceived as an anti-British ally of Russia’s. The Armenian elite in Istanbul, Izmir and Cilicia was glanced at suspiciously as vehicles for a competing French Empire. A Turkish annihilation of the Armenians would be a boon for the British. So during the period after the 1877/8 Russo-Turkish war, during the negotiations preceding the San Stefano Treaty and the Berlin conference Britain did everything to force Russian forces out of western Armenia and so cut off the supply of oxygen to the Armenian nation. So they gave Turkish nationalism the succour and support to set about the eradication of the Armenian people with no fear of any challenge. Britain would be there to protect the territorial integrity of an Empire it had its eyes on. Armenians may of course, and should, criticise their elites for their abject genuflection before imperialist power, for their stupid faith in imperialist policy, for their reliance on others to solve the Armenian national question. Such a criticism is urgent for Armenian policy today. Yet this willingness of the Armenian elites to become slaves of foreign imperial powers does not absolve European imperialism of responsibility, and particularly British imperialism, for it was their policy that enslaved them. Within the emerging Armenian nation very significant efforts were made to set pillar and foundation for Armenian nation development, economic, political and cultural within the Armenian homelands itself. But at every step these measure fell foul, of an aggressive and repressive Ottoman Turkish state. But what allowed this state to be, to act, to destroy the emergence of a stable and secure Armenian nation was British imperialism. It protected the Red Sultan, preserved the Ottoman state and so enabled the state to uproot a people from their ancient homelands. Perfidious Albion, untrustworthy yesterday, today the same! From such power I want no recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It would if it ever happens be only an anti-Armenian diplomatic ploy. Keep out! Let Armenians and Turks resolve their problems amongst themselves. Eddie Arnavoudian 23 January 2011

Here a draft note on a booklet I have just read. Please forgive the spelling of the regio. I shall correct it when I write this up for Groong. The future of Armenians in Georgia Download and read ‘Issues Confronting Armenians in Tchavakhk’ by Arisdages Simavoryan and Vahram Hovyan (96pp, 2009, Yerevan). Published by the Noravank Foundation, an think-tank devoted to issues of Armenian national development and national security, it is, with focus on Armenian Roman Catholics, an examination of the condition of Armenian communities in Tchavakhk that lies today within Georgian jurisdiction. The Foundation, incidentally takes its name from an eminent medieval educational institution, whose surviving grounds offer a stunning architectural experience enhanced by its setting amid wildly beautiful mountain heights. From the outset one appreciates a healthy affirmation that religious affiliation does not determine nationality, even among Armenians where their Apostolic Church has occupied a central position in historical and national life. The whole study is informed by recognition that to be Armenian does not require affiliation to the Apostolic Church. Armenian Catholics in Tchavakhk and elsewhere in Georgia confront the very same issues that trouble all their compatriots irrespective of faith or politics. Living cheek by jowl with their non-Catholic compatriots when unable to finance, build or maintain their own churches, community centres, clubs and schools all readily share resources across denominational borders. Armenian Catholics write the authors ‘are wholly drawn into the realities of Armenian life and are active participants in pan-Armenian initiatives.’ Like other Armenians within Georgian jurisdiction they also suffer chauvinist oppression and the denial of national democratic rights. They too are victims of attempts to curtail the use of Armenian, to terminate their allegiance to the Armenian Apostolic or Catholic Church and to undermine their communities through economic, social and political discrimination. Armenian Catholics feel the same pressure to Georgianise their Armenian names and resent the Georgian state’s refusal to recognise Armenian Churches, Catholic or Apostolic, as independent institutions. They too are victims of the state’s cynical redrawing of provincial boundaries so as to transform Armenian majorities into minorities. In their resistance Armenian Catholics are an indivisible component of the Armenian community as a whole, similarly and fraudulently charged by the Georgian media with being separatists, extremist nationalists or agents of foreign states. However despite resistance, economic hardship and systematic discrimination has prompted mass emigration threatening the future of Armenian communities in the region. Data on Armenian Catholic villages suggests the pan-Armenian picture. In 1991 the village of Turtzough had an Armenian Catholic population of 2550. Ten years later the figure had fallen to 230. In the same period Varevan lost half its population dropping from 820 to 320. Khoulkoumou had 305 Armenian Catholic families in 1987. Today there are less than 150. If the trend continues Georgian chauvinism will have succeed in ethnically cleansing the region of all Armenians. Offering some historical context Georgian chauvinist attacks are traced back to the emergence of modern Georgian nationalism in the mid-19th. Then and since, with the WWI era, the Soviet and now post Soviet age it has with the Georgian Church as an Georgian Church as active partner, it has mounted repeated, often violent, campaigns of assimilation, religious conversion and ethnic cleansing in particular targeting Catholic Armenians, claiming them as Georgians assimilated into Armenian communities. These and counter claims would be funny were they not so widespread and redolent of dangerous sectarianism. Turks also claim Armenian Catholics as ethnic Turks and even some Armenians reject them as part Turkish or Kurdish. In the informative opening chapter the authors also sketch the tortuous journey of Tchavakhk’s Armenian Catholic ancestors from occupied western Armenia, all seeking to escape Ottoman rule. The memory of these historic origins is retained among communities as well as in local traditions and customs. Why Armenians in the deep of their historic homeland converted to Catholicism is not considered in detail, but it is suggested that this may have been the result of a belief that belonging to a European Church could offer them greater protection from Ottoman barbarism. As conclusion it is worth reiterating and underlining in bold the positive pan-Armenian approach that threads through booklet. Beyond religion and denomination it suggests a prospect of national unity around everyday social, economic and cultural issues. It is an approach that can and should be extended to the often vitriolic and intolerant discussion about the national identity of Armenians forced converts to Islam. Evidently ‘Armenian Muslims’ need not be a contradiction in terms. The essence of Armenian nationality is not and should never be equated solely with allegiance to the Armenian Apostolic Church. In this connection the authors make an observation that prompts further thought. Noting the speed with which Armenian converts to other Christian denominations were assimilated they add that among Armenians forced to convert to Islam the memory of their Armenian origins may endure longer for having been forced upon them with such brutality. It will endure further for the memory and remembrance of family, relatives, friends and local villagers slaughtered, kidnapped, abused or violated during the period of the Genocide. Thanks to the Noravank Foundation for encouraging thought to follow such a path. It inspires one to turn also to their other publications all of which are available on line with its books in easily downloadable PDF format. Eddie Arnavoudian 11 December 2010

I have just finished reading Manantian's fine book on 'Tigran II and Rome'. Here a few notes with a plea of forgiveness for length. The subject is interesting. Eddie I. Hagop Manantian’s 1940 ‘Tigran II and Rome’ (Collected Works, Volume 1, pp407-602, 1977) still stands supreme among the more serious studies of the first and only Armenian imperial monarch. Reigning from 95 to 55BC, Tigran II having seized the crown of ‘King of Kings’ from an enfeebled Persian throne, waged a 25 year military campaign to build a dominion stretching from northern Armenia to the shores of the Mediterranean. As master of central and eastern Asia Minor and a good portion of the Middle East Tigran could not avoid combat with Rome also eager for mastery of the region. ‘Tigran II and Rome’ is Manantian’s account of Rome’s ruthless offensive against the Armenian empire, the last barrier to its supremacy in Asia Minor. It is at the same time a sobering evaluation of Tigran’s national and historical significance. As a central preoccupation Manantian successfully takes up the cudgels against classical Roman and modern European imperialist historians who deploying fabrication and falsification dismiss Tigran II as a backward, uncivilised figure of a dismal and dark East against whom Rome’s invasion of Asia Minor is presented with the imprint of civilisation. Manantian’s particular target is Plutarch whose invented history of the Armenian-Roman wars is cited by 19th century European historians eager to reinforce their own ‘notable hostility’ towards ‘the East and the people of the East’. Manantian demolishes fabrication is demolished with skilful rigour. In their opposion to Rome, Tigran II and Mithradates King of Pontus appear credibly as defenders the legacy of Hellenism’s that with its global productive and trading infrastructure underpinned significant cultural development and still survived in Asia Minor. Here at least, the Roman Empire was, Manantian suggests, of the same parasitic order as the Ottoman relentlessly draining conquered nations whilst contributing virtually naught to economic or cultural development. Remarking on Rome’s eventual triumph Manantian concludes that ‘responsibility for the subsequent backwardness in Asia Minor’ must ‘fall squarely upon Roman shoulders.’ The argument however goes dangerously overboard when presented as defenders of Hellenistic progress against a plundering Rome, Tigran and Mithradates, King of Pontus are transformed into national liberators, the latter almost a class warrior ‘defending and protecting the exploited’, inspiring them to ‘social and class war’ against ‘brutal Roman rule.’ When Mithradates eventually falls to the Roman sword, it is only as a result of the treachery of the Pontus ruling classes. It is one thing to challenge Roman fabrication, quite another however to paint Rome’s opponents as some sort of modern revolutionary democrats, overlooking their tyrannical slaveholding character and their merciless oppression of their own common people. Nevertheless the volume’s core remains firm, to the point and relevant, an addition to a necessary polemical arsenal against imperialist falsification. For Armenians such polemics stretch back 3000 years. Fifth century historian Movses Khorenatzi had noted great powers’ attempts to assimilate smaller nations and write them out of history. To exact revenge against Haig, the founder of the Armenian nation, Assyrian King Ninos planned to ‘annihilate his every last offspring’ and ‘ordered the destruction of vast numbers of volumes that told of achievements of other nations.’ Thereafter Armenians have had to contend with 19th and 20th century imperialist and Turkish falsification as well as that of contemporary European and US historians, exposed by Armen Aivazyan. II. Effectively dismissing Plutarch as he does Manantian’s nevertheless reconstructs Tigran II without his ‘Great’ pedestal. Removing the lies and distortions Rome wrapped around one of its most formidable opponents Manantian retains his objective critical spirit. So he does not refer to ‘Tigran the Great’, the title of H K Armen’s volume also published in 1940. Emperor Tigran is simply Tigran II with no make up from our ample stocks of excess nationalist enthusiasm. With persuasive argument Manantian shows that Tigran’s defence of Hellenistic civilisation in Asia Minor was a failure and his contribution to the consolidation of the Armenian state insignificant. Contrary to hired Roman pens Tigran was no mediocrity, no disloyal and incompetent eastern barbarian who merely tagged along with the more forceful but equally barbarian Mithradates. A remarkable man of immense vigour, stubborn will and military and political skill he demonstrated a remarkable capacity for recovery from crippling and almost fatal defeat at Roman hands as well as from challenges of internal enemies. Yet still Tigran’s Empire was dismantled by the Romans and he himself humbled. In his first engagement at the Battle of Tigranakert in DATE, the Armenian ‘King of Kings’ proved no match for Roman arms. Exaggerated as are distorted accounts of categorical and easy Roman victory, the Armenian defeat was devastating and humiliating, all the more so for being a result not so much of Roman military prowess but of Tigran’s disastrous miscalculation. He had refused to join Mithradates during the earlier Roman offensive against Pontus and compounded this error with a disastrous complacency about Roman appetites for Armenia. So he offered an emboldened Luculllus his opportunity to mount his surprise attack on the centre of Tigran’s Empire. H B Hakobyan’s in his erudite ‘Great Tigran’ (244pp, Yerevan, 2005) indirectly challenges Manantian’s and others’ assessments of Armenian-Roman battles. It remains the case nevertheless that the Roman capture and sacking Tigran’s newly built capital housing his family and the vast quantities of treasure Tigran had plundered from his imperial domains, terminated, in abrupt and categorical fashion both his imperial ambitions and his ‘progressive plan the aim of which was to develop Hellenistic urban cultural and civilisation in backward Armenia.’(p526) With the end of the Armenian age of empire Rome freely rampaged and trampled what remained of Hellenism’s legacy in Asia Minor. As for Armenia, Rome’s triumph drained the land of wealth and resources. To the heavy reparations imposed by Lucullus, yet more were added by the more voracious Pompei, that grubby ‘agent of Roman finance and usury’, that ‘most notorious of usurers’ who obtained by diplomatic means what Lucullus failed to do by force of arms. He ‘subjugated and plundered Armenia without bloodshed or sacrifice’ (p583) transforming Armenia into ‘a friend and ally’ of Rome, effectively a vassal state, ‘a Roman military outpost.’ (p598). Having thus vanquished and humbled the one time ‘King of Kings’, Armenia ‘ceased to be a great power and lost its former independence.’ Effectively reduced to ‘a buffer state’ it thereafter lacked the ability ‘to take its fortunes into its own hands’. Henceforth its future was to be ‘determined largely by (neighbouring) and interested great powers’ (p602), by Persian, Roman and subsequently Arabic, Ottoman, Russian empires fighting for supremacy in the region. III. Manantian is altogether too eager to pain Tigran in reforming and progressive colours. He notes but without critical comment that Tigran, like other imperial powers of his time, resorted to the mass deportations of subjugated peoples. In Tigran’s case he ruthlessly uprooted from their homelands up to 300,000 men and women forcibly relocating them in Armenia there to serve his programme of Armenia’s Hellenisation. Despite the Armenian experience of national oppression Manantian recounts this not just without adverse comment but with a suggestion that Tigran’s deportations were marks of progress being in aid of developing towns and crafts (p458) that proved, at least for Armenians, of immense benefit! Tigran was in addition no friend to his own people to whose harsh life as slaves and servants, soldiers and labours he was, like all imperial monarchs utterly indifferent. As an individual Tigran was indeed a heroic tragic figure who from heights of imperial glory reached with such audacity and determination lived his last years as a minor adjunct of the foe who felled him. It is surprising that there is so little creative literature about the man. However as a national historic figure Tigran is certainly no role model for the Armenian people today despite his idolisation by certain trends of Armenian historiography. If ever intending to celebrate Tigran II era, Armenians should recall their protests when Shah Abbas and the Persian Renaissance was commemorated. Tigran after all did the same as Shah Abbas, deported whole, in his case Armenian communities, to Iran to serve his programme of Iranian economic development. Eddie Arnavoudian 8 November 2010

Hello everybody, I do not know whether the issue of electronic readers and Armenian e-books has been discussed previously on this list. If it has, forgive me if I bore by repetition. If not list members may wish to know that e-readers, (certainly the Kindle from Amazon) that have PDF support can be used to read Armenian material in this format. Kindle has in addition some support for Armenian script books. So for example I have Toumanian's 'David of Sassoon' in both Armenian and T Samuelian's English rendition. Incidentally T Samuelian's translation of Narek is also available (alas without its parallel Armenian) on Amazon's Kindle Books shop. I also collect the Armenian language weekly Grakan Tert on my Kindle e-reader as well as other books such as Hratchig Simonian's fine and substantial hisory of the 1909 Adana Massacres. Perhaps some enterprising Armenian lover of language and literature will rise to the challenge and prepare the classics of Armenian history and literature for e-readers, and this at an economical price that is within reach of the Armenian people back home reduced to poverty by our contemporary elites. Perhaps the same group of persons can also produce an e-reader that is within the reach of the people of Armenia. Eddie

Here a note on a very interesting subject that I will fill out for Groong. Eddie Financing the Armenian Revolution Though its title suggests a comprehensive treatment, Hovik Grigorian’s nevertheless fine booklet ‘The Problems of Arming and Financing the Armenian Liberation Struggle’ (pp113, 2004, Yerevan) deals primarily with the Armenian National Liberation Movement’s (ANLM) resort to the forcible taxation of the Armenian merchant and trading class comfortably settled in the Diaspora, in Constantinople and Smyrna, in Tbilisi and Baku, in Moscow and Petersburg and beyond in Paris, London and even New York elite so that it could finance its political and its military work in defence of the fiercely exploited and impoverished peasant and artisan masses in historic Armenia. Grigorian handles the issue with confidence and intelligence and so prompts further thought on the peculiarities of modern Armenian national development and particularly of class relations within this process. He does not ignore the threats, terror and executions that were involved. He does not glorify nor does he vilify. Neither does he brush under the carpet the murkier criminal dimension with its register of bandits, thieves and adventurers who joined the bandwagon to line their own pockets. But as he sets a foundation for his examination Grigorian convinces us in the face of increasingly aggressive and destructive Ottoman assault on the Armenian population of historic Armenia the ANLM as a matter of national life and death was compelled to consider speedy and effective ways to obtain the large sums necessary support popular resistance against well financed marauding and murderous Ottoman state forces. Routine fundraising of which Hovik Grigorian gives interesting examples, among them the sale photos of famous guerrillas could not bring in sums adequate to the task. From where to then obtain the means was the question? Here Grigorian touches on what is perhaps an important intellectual weakness of the ANLM. Believing that it represented the whole nation irrespective of class it turned to those who evidently had ample resources, the Armenian elite. ‘In the early stages’ writes Grigorian ‘the Armenian movement’ had ‘great expectations from the Armenian wealthy’, expectations raised further by noting that the liberation movement in the Balkans that they closely followed was indeed supported by ‘dedicated and patriotic representatives’ of ‘a wealthy stratum of society’. In formulating its expectations the Armenian movement however did not account for the peculiarity of the Armenian elite that though hugely wealthy was as hugely unwilling Armenian to do anything for the masses in Armenia. The revolutionary leadership was to discover this truth rapidly. Leading figures in both the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Social Democrat Hnchak Party (SDHP) speak with contempt for the Armenian elite’s stubborn refusals. ARF founder member and theoretician Kristapor Mikaelyan is particularly scathing: ‘Why get enraged only at Europe’s indifference. Throughout the year what did the Armenian do….who heard the cries of the starving, the wailing of the orphans, who heard his brothers’ pleas for guns and bread. What did the Armenian bourgeois do, the Armenian youth, the intelligentsia, the well-to-do and thinking segment of the Armenian people?’ (p41) Mikaelyan goes on to note that despite ‘the empty Turkish state treasury’ the Ottoman state managed to supply ‘funds with which to…station its forces’ in the very centres of Armenian resisance, Van, Zeitun and Sassoon. In contrast the Armenian wealthy does not lend a hand to its people not ‘because it cannot’ but but because ‘it does not want to and does not even think of supplying money to obtain guns for fighters.’ (p42) As Grigorian’s account shows the Armenian elite was so hostile that it organised ‘co-ordinated resistance’ and in addition readily resorted to betraying revolutionaries to the Ottoman and Tsarist states. Grigorian at one point bemoans but does not seek to explain why unlike the Greek and Bulgarian national movement, the Armenian never enjoyed consistent and substantial backing from any significant section of its own national elite. Any elucidation of reason must note most centrally in contrast to the Balkan national bourgeoisie the Armenian elite had no substantial segment rooted in its homeland. It was a Diaspora elite not a national one. Its home, its sources of wealth, its needs and its interests were tied into and fashioned by their location in distant foreign imperial cities. They had therefore no objective reason and felt no need or desire to open their money bags to help the peasant and artisan in Armenia for whom they generally reserved only contemptuous disdain. With the absence of any direct structural relationship to its historic homeland and to the mass of the Armenian peasants and artisans, the Armenian merchant and trading class was a national class only in a very narrow, restricted and deformed sense. This Mikael Nalpantian had already recognised back in the 1850s writing that the: ‘Armenian merchants and their trade do not represent anything national and have absolutely no relation to Armenia's national interest...Armenian merchants are essentially servants of European powers...and let me be frank, people called merchants are in reality only intermediaries servicing others rather their own people.’ This Diaspora elite happily and sometimes even enthusiastically financed education and enlightenment in Diaspora Armenian communities where it needed the services of educated Armenian men and women. But the needs of the homeland poor concerned it hardly ever, and when it did it was only as a pool to suck cheap labour into Baku, Tbilisi or Constantinople or when revolutionary upheavals among peasants and artisans in the homeland disturbed its peaceful accumulation in the imperial capitals. Grigorian indirectly supports such an explanation when he deals with the response of the Armenian elite in Tbilisi and Baku during the 1905 Armenian-Azeri clashes. There he shows it to have been willing and generous to the ANLM. The reason is self evident. The ‘eastern Armenian rich proved relatively generous in its contribution to the defence of Armenians in the Caucuses’ and ‘this was quite natural’ as the Armenian elite ‘grasped by that such means it was also defending its own life and wealth’. This reality, the author notes applied particularly to the elite in Baku the centre of Armenian-Azeri clashes. Where its direct interests were concerned the Armenian elite, like bourgeois classes anywhere, demonstrated its readiness to seek cover behind the nation’s fighters and where necessary even finance them. In the Caucasus the Armenian elite had direct and immediate interests to defend. But in the core of historic Armenia there were none that were significant. So in relation to historic Armenia and its native people this elite was stubborn in its refusal to offer financial assistance to the ANLM. But as the condition of the Armenian population became increasingly desperate the revolutionary movement decided, reluctantly in the case of the ARF, to embark on a programme of forced taxation backed up with terror and execution when necessary. To some extent the campaign produced effective results securing substantial funds with which the movement was able to direct to areas of greatest need such as Sassun, Van and elsewhere. Through its campaign of forced taxation the ANLM represented in a certain sense a mediated link or relation between the Armenian trading and merchant class in the Diaspora and the peasant and artisan masses at home. In this instance representing the mass of the population the revolutionary movement’s demand for money can be seen not just as a distorted expression of nation formation but one can say even a mediated and indirect form of class conflict. For by means of force, in this instance threat, terror and violence, the ANLM was bending the Armenian bourgeoisie in the Diaspora to demands that served not the Armenian bourgeois class but the artisan and peasant class. It served the national interest, but in this instance the nation had no significant native Armenian elite. It was, perhaps unusually, a people’s nation! As he set a context for his account Grigorian outlines some of unprecedented his essay is also a polemic against an important axis of the Turkish falsification of the history of the ANLM. Contrary to falsifiers who represent the ANLM as instruments financed by foreign powers, the Armenian movement received no state aid or financial support from any of the imperial powers seeking inroads into the Ottoman Empire, neither from France, Britain, Germany or Russia. Indeed Grigorian notes, whilst liberation movements in the Balkans received material and financial aid from Tsarist Russian in particular, the Armenian received nothing and was in addition systematically undermined, shunned, abused and betrayed by all imperialist powers. In a significant aside with lessons for our own day Grigorian notes that the ANLM required significant funding not just for its political and military organisation in the homeland but for propaganda work to counter the Ottoman state’s lucratively funded and systematic global anti-Armenian propaganda campaign. Abdul Hamid in particular spent millions on mendacious vilification of the Armenian liberation movement. The tradition of Turkish state sponsored falsification is old and continues to this day. To its shame and disgrace neither the Armenian state nor the elite does anything to react. Eddie Arnavoudian 2 July 2010

The Nation, the Book and Foreign Language Schools in Armenia I. The historical development of the modern Armenian nation is marked by significant peculiarities the most prominent of which is the extra-territorial grounding for many of the defining components that constitute a nation. In the Armenian case the economic wealth that forms a nation’s solid base accumulated not in Armenia but in the Diaspora – in Tbilisi, in Baku, in Istanbul and beyond. The cultural and literary renaissance that accompanies nation formation also emerged abroad with outstanding centres of culture and education appearing in Venice, Vienna, Istanbul and Tbilisi that together contributed decisively to the shaping of a common modern language that is distinctive of nationality. This historically unique process of nation formation was shaped by centuries of Armenian statelessness, mass migration and the formation of substantial Diaspora communities, combined with an extraordinary level of exploitation and oppression by Ottoman, Persian and Tsarist imperial power that devastated the Armenian social organism in the homeland. Whatever the precise nature of the causes, the effect of extra-territorial development was critical. Armenian national consciousness and ideology that was to guide political action developed disproportionately outside Armenia, on the basis of Armenian social and economic relations within and dependent on foreign political states with little reference to realities in the homeland. A deracinated patriotism was one significant and debilitating result. Without being rooted in defined territorial borders the Armenian notion of nation and patriotism suffered an overemphasis of the idea against the act. Patriotism could be and often was little more than declamatory pride in ancient history and culture and was reduced to a sensibility independent of any direct practical service to the people in the homeland who constituted the nation. The contemporary Armenian state’s enabling of foreign language schools is one contemporary expression of this same distorted nation-formation. Is it not indeed a manifestation of an extraordinary deformation when a state’s leadership will use its power to create conditions for the education of its elite in a foreign language whilst at the very same refusing to adequately sustain education, culture and publishing in the language spoken by the mass of the people in the land? II. A perusal of Rafael Ishkhanian’s ‘The Armenian Book’ (154pp, 1981, Yerevan) shows how the history of printing and publishing, so closely associated with the development of a national language that is central to any process of nation-formation mirrors Armenian particularity. Armenians are proud that their first printed book appeared in 1512 ahead of the in Russian in 1517, Estonian 1535 in and Georgian 1629 in. But the printed Armenian book was born in Venice, took its first steps in Europe and returned to Venice with brilliant flourish long before it reached Armenia proper. Even as publishing moved nearer home it was to Armenian populated communities in Istanbul, Tbilisi, Baku and Smyrna where achievements were phenomenal. Through the 18th century for example Armenian presses in Constantinople published ancient authors such as Pavsdos Puzant, Yeghishe, Khorenatzi, Barbetzi, and others, many for the first time. The next century saw more than 350 periodicals published in the city with another 50 in Smyrna. The first Armenian bookshops also opened in Constantinople. However during four centuries of printing the Armenian homeland, west and east, remained more than an extremely poor cousin. As Rafael Ishkhanian notes even: ‘During the first half of the 19th century the centres of the Armenian book remained outside Armenia. Even during the second part of the century no town in Armenia could compare with Venice, Vienna, Tbilisi or Constantinople. (p109) The first press in Armenia proper appeared in Etchmiadzin in 1771 but ravaged by Persian occupation it did not flourish. Some 50 years later a second was established in Shushi in 1820 and it took a further 56 years for another to open in Yerevan and Cyumri (Leninakan). In Ottoman occupied western Armenia things were even worse. Efforts to develop a printing and book industry in Van by Khrimyan Hayrig in 1863 and elsewhere all fell foul of an Ottoman state increasingly dominated by Turkish chauvinist nationalism that understood well the danger Armenian publishing posed to its savage imperial domination. Ironically, despite the extreme savagery of the Ottoman occupation of western Armenia, western Armenian as a modern literary language paced ahead of eastern Armenian. Of the 1720 Armenian titles published from 1800-1850, 1400 were in classical Armenian whilst of the 320 modern Armenian volumes 280 were in western with but 40 in eastern. By the second half of the century modern Armenian of course registered total triumph but the 1915 Genocide fatally wounded western Armenian. Here another peculiarity of Armenian national development: the emergence of two remarkably sophisticated and versatile variants of the same language that in normal course of things should have merged into a single national tongue. Ishkhanian’s account ends in 1920. But it does set the historical context for beginning an evaluation of the printing and publishing record during the Soviet Armenia era. It was only during the Armenian Soviet era that Armenia for the very first became a dominant centre for printing and publishing and that on a vast and unprecedented scale. Whatever the overall judgement of the Second Soviet Armenian Republic, and even when accounting for the catastrophes of the Stalinist purges and the damage done to linguistic development, Soviet Armenian printing left a remarkable legacy. With print runs in the thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands almost the entire body of ancient and medieval Armenian literature was made available to the common man and woman and that in modern Armenian translation. The classics of 18th, 19th and 20th century literature – eastern and western – and a huge body of translations also rolled off Yerevan’s presses. Despite censorship, the Soviet Armenian era witnessed a vast output of scientific, literary, historic and other journals that contained besides the mounds of rubble gems of the highest order. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the post-Soviet Armenian elites to offer it adequate state support the Armenian publishing industry and the Armenian language has been dreadfully undermined. Current government legislation to legalise foreign schools in represents an additional threat. In an age where communication is supposed to be everything the Armenian state is weakening the most vital, the most essential and indispensable element of effective communication – the language that is spoken by the people and that defines a people. Eddie Arnavoudian 19 June 2010

This of course is absolutely correct. It does not do to underestimate Toumanian as an artist who was simultaneously a profound thinker and critic in ALL his work. A fantastic commentary 'Daredevils of Sasun' Poetics of an Epic by Azat Yeghiazaryan deals with the manifold significance of this epic. Here my own little note that will be part of my commentary on Toumanian's epic poetry of national and social liberation. ----------------------- Toumanian’s stature as a narrative poet who was also a social and political thinker of substance is cemented in his ever-popular retelling of the Armenian national epic ‘David of Sassoon’. A gripping drama that pits superhuman David representing the Armenian people against the imperial Arab invader Toumanian’s retelling synthesises those democratic and moral principles that shape the best progressive trends within all popular national liberation movements. Describing David’s preparation for battle against imperial invaders coming to seize ‘forty caravans filled with Armenian gold and forty caravans filled with beautiful Armenian women’ Toumanian also defines the main characteristics of the two dominant trends within national liberation movements across the globe. A unique individual gifted with superhuman strength David of Sassoon is however devoid of selfish egoism that would pit him against community and collective. A ‘crazy brave born to the Armenian nation’, he is fearless, recognising ‘neither lord nor master’. Though a king he lives like and within the common people. His every action, his every emotion and feeling, his very being expresses his dedication to the community and the people. David does not of course represent a particular or typical individual. An epic figure with mythical dimensions that are developed with brilliant wit and drama he is the artistic representation of the collective, of the community and nation, its interests, its ambitions and moral vision. As such David has no time for debate or negotiation about the right of nations to self-determination. He cannot understand why others worry when he prepares to take on the Arab invaders. ‘What will the king of Syria do me anyway What am I asking from the king Let the king remain in Syria What business does he have in my father’s mountains National independence is an inalienable right and anyone seeking to subvert it must be resisted with uncompromising determination and all the force necessary. David’s uncle, Dzenov Ohan is an absolute opposite. Albeit Armenian, he represents only the narrow, selfish elite that so often dominates national liberation movements. He refuses to resist or to fight. He hides away the famous family sword and locks away the epically powerful stallion inherited from his forefathers. In Dzenov Ohan’s explanation of his compromising ways we hear the refrain of all opportunist politicians. Pretending to care for the people he happily considers surrendering caravans of Armenian gold and Armenian women claiming that this will ‘ensure’ that imperial power ‘looks upon us with gentle eye’. No doubt if Dzenov Ohan were to have had his way, he and his family may have been safe. But the common people whose mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are surrendered along with their national wealth, it is they who would pay the price of Dzenov Ohan’s security. This David will not tolerate. ‘I shall not hand over he said, my father’s gold I shall not hand over the women of my people. In the land of Sassoon there is no place for you.’ The personification of ruthless and uncompromising resistance David is however also a democrat and humanist. He has no contempt or animosity for other peoples and other nations. His enemy is not the common Arab man and woman, not even the rank and file Arab solider who has invaded Armenia under the command of the Arab emperor. Your order common people, shepherds he said Penniless, in darkness, hungry and pained A thousand fires and woes A thousand worries you have What have you lifted arrow and bow And come to foreign fields. Do we not also have home and hearth We too have children and our old. The end of David’s address to the defeated Arab soldiers whom he has spared speaks of a patriotism that is at once a profound humanism and internationalism, a patriotism the revival of which is so urgently necessary today: ‘Return along the road you came To your homeland of Msra But if once again you come upon us with sword and soldier You’ll find before you like today David of Sasson and Tour-Gayzag. Hovanness Toumanian’s poetry of national and social engagement, like his poetry of love and life is driven exclusively by a preoccupation with and concern for the actual character and quality of the everyday life of ordinary men and women. His nationalists, patriots and social rebels do not go about with boastful swagger or superior airs mouthing bombastic phrases and slogans that all too frequently muddy the fields of Armenian literature. They are all cut from the same human cloth as those from his poetry of love and life. They oppose oppression and exploitation because these are negations of life, because these obstruct and destroy the flowering of love and solidarity. It is in this that Toumanian’s poetry stands as a welcome and edifying corrective to the intolerant, anti-democratic nationalism s of today that with chauvinist, exclusivist and irrational assertions of national superiority would have appalled David of Sassoon.

Having previewed the post I feel I must ask for forgiveness where the length is concerned! Here initial notes for an introduction to Toumanian's poetry that I am preparing. All comments of all sorts will be much appreciated before I complete a draft for eventual submission to Groong. Hovannes Toumanian - poet of the people with a dream of freedom No other writer is as quintessentially Armenian as is Hovannes Toumanian. His work, in Souren Aghababian’s apt description is an ‘encyclopaedia’ of 19th century rural Armenia that, being then homeland to the vast majority of the Armenian people, defined an authentic national reality. To appreciate something of the essence of Armenia, to feel something of its defining features, its history and society, something of the inner lives of 19th century Armenian man and woman one must read, enjoy and study Hovannes Toumanian. Seeking to repeating for Toumanian what Engels had said of Balzac’s focus of French society Barouyr Sevak argued that: ‘Taken together the whole and very substantial body of scientific literature on the history of the Armenian people cannot give even the vaguest idea of that which is offered so vividly in Toumanian’s work.’ But Toumanian’s Armenian encyclopaedia is also an international one illuminating as it does some of the most diverse dramas of humankind that unfolded in the Armenian highlands. Protest against the suffocation of the human spirit, the cry of devastated love, the rage against national and social oppression and injustice and the confrontation with the existential awe of life’s finite reality fires almost every one of Toumanian’s poems. This it does with a force that focuses sharply the trouble and strife of our 21st century, in Armenia and beyond. Significantly for the Armenian people, in epics such as ‘To the Land’, ‘The Old Fight’ and ‘Mehri’ Toumanian’s authentic representation of aspects of Armenian national oppression can be read as ripostes against the Turkish falsification of the history of the history of the Armenian liberation movement claiming it had no grounds in the social condition of the people and possessed no indigenous roots. ‘Maro’, ‘Anush’, ‘The Old Fight’, ‘Towards the Infinite’, ‘Akhtamar’, ‘Mehri’, ‘The Rejected Law’, ‘Sako from Lori’ and other epics, ballads and poems are all inspired by or rooted in the concrete everyday experience of the Armenian village particularly from the author’s native province of Lori in the north Armenian highlands. They draw deeply too from the common people’s collective memory that in tales and legends, songs and poetry embodied and reflected the custom, the tradition and mores of bygone ages and so preserve something of the true history of the mass of Armenian men and women that had been disdainfully omitted from the pages of Armenian chronologies written by ascetic men of the Church. All of Toumanian’s protagonists are common folk presented with lucid simplicity but never in a manner that reduce their human complexity to one-sided plainness. Often in a single line or two, Toumanian captures and richly so, an essential aspect of the inner world of his characters or of the complex relations of the world that they inhabit. No passion or emotion, no ambition or desire, no tragedy or comedy that together socially or individually shape a human life is absent from Toumanian’s work. All flourish within brilliantly concrete reconstructions of Armenian rural life that feature almost every aspect of popular existence. It is all there – labour and love, sport, dance and song, marriage, death, blood feuds, honour killings, revenge and treachery, dreams of immortality and infinity, peasant superstition and mob drunkenness, Church backwardness, religious asceticism, banditry, madness, the plight of emigration, greedy grasping priest and landlord, rural banditry, foreign oppressor, ideals of emancipation, armed national resistance and more. As with all great writers Toumanian’s writing pays specific attention to the condition of women. The Armenian woman, as was the case with women from neighbouring Turkish, Kurdish or Georgian villages, was required to be a passive and obedient servant to the will of her husband, her father and her brother. She was not entirely denied initiative and independence but these had to be pressed into patterns of her servitude normalised by a web of customs, traditions, moral strictures and rules that were in turn defended by the strictest of punishments meted out against the inevitable refraction or rebellion, rebellion that Toumanian so brilliantly reveals as an essential quality of the human spirit. Hovanness Toumanian could not avoid engagement with the Armenian national and social question. After all his beloved creations - Anoush, Maro, Saro, Mossi and the scores more - did not live lives bound only by the relations and traditions of local family and community. They carried, in addition, ugly scars and daily-inflicted wounds of Ottoman conquest, Tsarist oppression as well the blight of Armenian feudal and Church exploitation. No statement about 19th century Armenian life could approach truth without consideration of these issues and to them Toumanian turns in ‘David of Sassoon’ and in some undeservedly neglected epics such as ‘The Old Fight’, ‘Mehri’, ‘The Sigh’ and other poems such as ‘The Song of the Plough’. Though often flawed and incomplete these epics retain both artistic and historical value each being marked by Toumanian’s exceptional ability to touch on fundamental human and social truths through dynamic narrative and dramatic plot that is always ceaseless movement and action. Whatever faults distort character or plot, these epics reproduce, and with striking coherence, some of the most significant social and political contours of Armenian life during the second half of the 19th century. Particularly fluent is Toumanian’s articulation of the successive stages of the people’s 19th century passage from resignation to resistance, first as individual and local defiance and then as organised action Toumanian’s body of work offers us an artistic totality that is at once ruthless social and moral criticism executed with clarity and straightforwardness that leaves no room for misunderstanding. Vibrant and dynamic in the depiction of the flow human passions that course through the Armenian highland his poetry also has a cutting objectivity that dissects social and individual ills, individual pride and mob prejudice as well as delusion and superstition and much else. The moral judgement of social relations that emerge at the core of this work is never however dry and dull philosophical or sociological assertion. All becomes apparent and explicit through the actions of full-blooded protagonists who, never mechanistic functions of the social relations, develop in plots remarkable for their pace and dramatic tension. In the Armenian literary constellation Toumanian occupies a central position. He raised to the level of art the lives, the cultural traditions, the history and the hopes of the Armenian peasant that for the previous millennia had been excluded from official literature controlled by the Church and its intelligentsia. Emerging within a popular democratic artistic tradition established and developed among others by Khatchaour Abovian, Berj Broshian and Ghazaros Aghayan, Toumanian himself also turned literature in the direction of the common people, recreating their lives in a language that was comprehensible to them and with their own concerns and hopes at its core. His work became the finest collective mirror indicating that which needed to be discarded and that which should be preserved in the process of modern Armenian democratic nation formation. Here Toumanian’s 19th century legacy recalls the endeavour of 20th century African nation formation reflected in the work of Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo or that of Nigerian Chinua Achebe. Outstanding in his art Toumanian was also extraordinary as a public figure, imbued with an unwavering democratic, national and internationalist vision. The qualities of honour, loyalty, friendship, valour, gallantry, individual and collective solidarity and social and national freedom that define his art is manifest in his own public life. In the often fraught and troubled inter-national conflicts in the Caucuses Toumanian was in Yeghishe Charent’s view ‘a tower’ facilitating ‘interethnic unity’. His life and work epitomized an Armenian cultural and political tradition that was defined by a sturdy patriotism, an uncompromising opposition to national and social oppression but also by a deep consciousness of the common, shared, spheres of life that united Armenians with the common folk of their neighbouring Turkish, Georgian, Kurdish and Azeri villages. Considering Toumanian’s poetry in English presents more than the normal difficulties of quote and extract that are inevitably altered by translation. Even in their original quotes and extracts never substitute satisfactorily for an appreciation of the whole. This is particularly so for Toumanian’s epics the truth of which emerges always in the telling of the entire story. Yet even though translated and isolated quotation may miss the deeper human truth available they do enable us to touch on those essentials in Toumanian’s work that speak with force to 21st century lives. Eddie Arnavoudian

Bury the ‘Law on Language’ – deeper than the deepest Khor Virab On 20 April 2010 the Armenian Government laid before Parliament legislation to alter the existing national ‘Language Law’. Its draft proposals will allow the formation of foreign schools in Armenia, schools in which the language of tuition will be foreign. In these schools Armenian will inevitably be relegated to the level of just another subject. Even as we await further details – who will run these schools, how will they be financed, who will be allowed to attend them, where will their staff be recruited, what school fees will cost, will they be subsidised by the state - a few general points are not amiss. There is something bizarre here - the Armenian state enabling non-Armenian schools in Armenia, not for temporary foreign residents but for Armenian citizens! Why? In London there is a Russian school but exclusively for children of the Russian diplomatic services staff whose children will return to their homeland and need to be educated primarily as Russian citizens. But Russian or American schools in Armenia for Armenian citizens? Any member of the Armenian Parliament who supports this piece of legislation is casting a vote of no confidence in the future of the Armenian people and Armenian nation. By definition foreign schools in Armenia can only serve a tiny minority not the people. For them to serve the majority would require the abolishing of all Armenian schools! To train and educate an Armenian citizen primarily and dominantly in another language cannot serve the purpose of helping the people and nation whose primary and dominant language is Armenian. Today foreign schools in Armenia, as they were in the past, will represent Armenian subordination to foreign commercial and political forces and will act as mechanisms for the reproduction and reinforcement of this subordination. They will prepare children of the elite for lives of privilege overseas or relatively privileged lives at home but in the service of foreign corporations or foreign governments. With a foreign education the Armenian citizen will comprehend so much better the instructions of their masters. Today foreign schools are being reintroduced in Armenia by the elite that has no interest whatsoever in the progress of the Armenian people or in the long term development and future of the Armenian nation, state and economy. With this proposed legislation it is unashamedly preparing to groom it offspring either emigration to foreign lands or for domestic service to foreign commercial and political forces for as long as Armenia exists. It has no faith for the future of its children in Armenia and it does not care for the future of the mass of the Armenian people. So, as they pursue their selfish ambitions, Armenian schools go to rack and ruin, along with the entire infrastructure and fabric of Armenian economic, social and cultural life. The interests of the people and nation are sacrificed to a greedy, selfish minority. The Armenian elite’s indifference to the Armenian people and the Armenian language is not surprising. The elites do not derive legitimacy from the people that it has robbed of its wealth and resources. Its economic and social fortunes are born of its corrupt relations and connections with foreign commercial and political powers and with Diaspora institutions. Its vision of culture and civilisation is in the aping of the west. It therefore inevitably has no care for the people, its culture or its language. This shameless announcement of the Armenian elite’s readiness to subordinate itself to foreign commercial and political interests just for days before the 95th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide signals a further critical weakening of the existing Armenian state. Alas it also expresses this corrupt elite’s political confidence as it nakedly pursues its ambition with little fear of mass opposition. It is a historical fact that while every epoch of Armenian national consolidation has been accompanied by the rise and consolidation of the Armenian language – the 5th century Gold Age, the 9th century Bagratouni Kingdom, the 18th and 19th century National Revival, every epoch of decline has been accompanied by the Armenian elite’s indifference and even hostility to the language of its population. Today our contemporary elites follow in the footsteps of their degenerate predecessors whose disdain for the Armenian language was also a manifestation of isolation from and contempt for the Armenian masses. Let us as we oppose this piece of legislation follow the example those like Abeghian, Ajarian, Varoujean, Derian, Shirvanzade, Toumanian and countless others who dedicated their lives to the consolidation of our language because it was through that language that one could serve people and nation. Eddie Arnavoudian 18 May 2010

Arandzar - another forgotten value Here a little reworked item that I am reworking again for Groong I would wager that hardly anyone has heard the name of short story writer Arandzar. He real name was Missak Kouyoumjian. He was born in 1877 in western Armenia and died in Adana in 1913. I am even more strongly convinced that the percentage of those who have read his enjoyable short stories is even smaller than those who may have seen or heard his name. This is a very great pity indeed for it is a fact that a good writer need not be honored with labels such as 'genius', 'talented', 'brilliant', and so on and so forth to be readable beyond their day. Such is the case with Arandzar whose famous short story 'The Laughter of Misery' that depicted an episode of mass human suffering during the bloody devastation of Armenia by Leng Timour was featured in many a literary anthology. Arandzar however perhaps deserves greater remembrance and not just in Armenian but in international literature for his story 'From the Gallows to the Wedding' that contains one of the earliest references in international fiction to the manner in which technological advance would be put to the use of mass, scientifically organized slaughter: 'Our modern civilization’ he writes ‘along with lots of other things has also made the business of massacre that much easier. From within his four walls, the electric cable, like death's unseen hand, within a split second will communicate orders from the chief executioner. And almost immediately, at a moment of least expectation his victims are bloodied and laid low. Villages and towns that were standing at dawn do not witness dusk. Thanks to knowledge, new discoveries will in the future even further perfect this system. But let me not stray to far....' Arandzar wrote little. But some of what he wrote offer excellent insight into Armenian life in Istanbul and Ottoman occupied western Armenia prior to the genocide, covering in fact the period up to about 1907-1908. With endearing wit and charm he creates warm and living characters for whom we cannot fail to have sympathy. They are ordinary mortals like you and me attempting to live their lives as best they can. Yet at each step their life becomes a misery or a nightmare, a terror or a death, for they live as an oppressed group within the Ottoman Empire. They exist as second class citizens, discriminated, regarded as inferior and treated unequally, with contempt and humiliated as a matter of course. Arandzar really brings to light how men and women must have felt at being so treated. Though heavy with the burden of oppression Arandzar’s stories gain by the absence of any sentimental nationalism or declamatory patriotism. So he enables us to feel the plight of an oppressed person that much more acutely. We hear not the ringing slogan but the cry of pain. ‘My Cotton Trade’ further enhances his reputation. Besides its vivid detailing of the corruption of the Ottoman state apparatus from the top to the remotest provinces it registers episodes of the 1895-96 massacres showing in particular the manner in which the Armenian trading and merchant class was targeted. Here a vital record of the overarching Ottoman strategy to blight Armenian economic development in historic Armenia. Giving Arandzar’s writing the quality of art is his humour, his capacity for telling a story, his clarity of language and most of all the vitality of his characters, underlined by focus on a critical particular or by a phrase that is expressive of the type of character represented. With a single sentence he summarizes the camel like patience of the Armenian shopkeeper noting in 'The Beard Brush' that 'every patience has its limit, they say, even that of a shop keeper, and that of an Armenian shopkeeper as well.' Deploying his sharp wit Arandzar also takes steady, humorous and accurate swipes at the mediocre Armenian intelligentsia and artist in Istanbul. His ‘Short Story of Short Stories’ is literary criticism in the form of fiction disposing of that segment of Armenian literature that artificially aped and copied French samplings and produced tripe that was then duplicated and triplicate. He also targeted the press of the time that encouraged and gave a platform such mediocrity. His barbs hit too at the pretentious, self-flattering but socially useless young intelligentsia that whilst in Europe postured as students but lived lives of egotistical hedonism swindling charities for the expense. He ridicules their pretentious pompous language adorned by countless borrowings from the French designed to cover vacuity with phraseology that is incomprehensible. How very reminiscent of our modern intelligentsia! If you have the opportunity, read this fellow. Pity that he wrote so little and gave up the art well before his early death at 36. Eddie Arnavoudian 13 May 2010