Armenian dreams bud from young trees

[Azat]

By Frank Brown

Religion News Service

 

YEREVAN, Armenia — Although this is a country consumed with the telling and retelling of its great and tragic 2,600-year history, there is a short period in the early 1990s that people just don't want to talk about.

It was a time, if it is mentioned at all, during the war with neighboring Azerbaijan known as the "cold" or the "hungry" years, when houses went unheated, bread was baked with a mixture of sawdust and flour and hundreds of thousands of trees were cut down for firewood.

 

"I was here in 1993, during that terrible winter, and I saw how many trees were cut down," says Archbishop Datev Sarkissian, at the time head of the Armenian Apostolic Church's Western Diocese of America based in Los Angeles. "It was very painful to see whole forests cut down."

 

Already this year, when Armenia is celebrating 1,700 years of Christianity and is hosting hordes of foreign visitors, there are few signs of the "cold years." The country is stable and the first signs of economic growth are visible. But, the trees are still gone, giving a lunar look to much of this mountainous, rocky country slightly smaller than Maryland.

 

The United States-based Armenia Tree Project aims to change that by reforesting not just those areas denuded in the 1990s but also monastic lands that once boasted rich orchards and farmlands before Communist authorities took control after the 1917 revolution.

 

Today, project workers are finishing the plantings in a yearlong program connected to the Armenian Apostolic Church's 1,700th anniversary that placed 17,000 saplings at 45 churches and monasteries across the country, said Laura Gononian, the Yerevan-based director of programs.

 

By the end of this year, the Cambridge, Mass.-based group will have planted about 300,000 trees across Armenia in a program modeled closely on the Jewish National Fund's tree-planting program in Israel.

 

Before the group will begin planting trees and shrubs on the often barren grounds of churches, priests are required to submit "dendrological plans." Special care is taken with high-profile sites like the church in the village of Oshagan that contains the remains of Mesrob Mashtots, the Armenian saint who invented the national alphabet in 405 A.D.

 

"We have to be very sensitive to the fact that the church itself is a historical monument." Gononian said.

 

Church leaders hope eventually to make the historical monasteries into places for tourists to rest and relax, much the way Orthodox Christian churches in Greece often feature cafes and bathrooms.

 

In Oshagan, a dirt-poor village of 7,500 people, church rector Archimandrite Vazgen Mirzakhanyan says between 10 and 15 busloads of tourists visit every day.

 

"It means a lot for the people," he says, referring to local women who sell trinkets and jars of honey at the church gates and have benefited from a 30 percent increase in tourists during the 1,700-year celebrations. "Maybe life will get a little better. People will spend some money and that will help."

 

Economic development is one of the most valuable aspects of the Armenia Tree Project's work, according to Sarkissian, one of its biggest boosters.

 

Sarkissian speaks with sadness of the economic plight of Armenia, a country of 3.3 million residents, up to half of whom are estimated to be working abroad.

 

"Most of our people have now become farmers in spite of themselves. Doctors are farmers. Teachers are farmers," he says.

 

Sarkissian's dream is to use fertile monastic lands to build a growing fruit-export business that would eventually revitalize the areas around monasteries and draw the population back to Armenia.

 

Using an Armenian Apostolic Church network that spans the globe, Sarkissian says he has already had some success marketing fruit in the United Arab Emirates.

 

"We started with Dubai. The Arabs were interested and, boom, we got in," he says.

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