On the Fable of Avarair

[MJ]

There was cult of traditional Armenian History in my family when I was growing up. I started to feel that Armenian History, as presented in the traditional framework, makes no sense once I was over my teenage years. The reason is that I found it to be too illogical and stupid so that to convey a coherent and convincing story. In the list of all the falsehoods there is one fable which stands tall as the utmost nonsense of Armenian history and the most egregious lie. I couldn't digest it since my early childhood - it is the story of the Avarair Battle – not the fact of the battle itself but its interpretation, or better to say, its misrepresentation and misinterpretation with all the fatal consequences for the future of Armenia throughout 1500 years, along with the invention of false heroes such as Vardan Mamikonian, who should have been considered, in my view, as one of the most miserable individuals in Armenian history.

 

Anyway, I have been reading Vrej Nersissian’s “Treasures from the Ark” over the weekend and came across some narration which supports all my doubts, I think.

 

[i used to think that V. N. works for the British Museum and I contacted them asking for his contact info. Turns out I was wrong. Does anyone know how to contact him?]

 

Anyway, here is an interesting material, as I perceive it. Though the quality of the scanning requires some editing, I am too lazy to do it.

 

The Spread of Christianity in Armenia

 

F. Dvornik in a series of studies has proved that' one of the leading features of primitive Christianity was precisely that it laid everywhere the first foundations of the universal edifice of the Church on a national plan'.[4] To reach the roots of the growth of western Christendom, special emphasis must be placed on the Christian east, since it is the Eastern Churches that have best preserved some features of early Christianity .[5] For this perspective Church historians must abandon the picture of the history of the Christian Church as presented by the father of ecclesiastical history, Eusebius, who gives a 'very poor coverage' of the Church before the conversion of Constantine.[6] When Christianity began to spread from Palestine in the first century AD, two world empires, the Christian empire of East Rome (later Byzantine) and the Zoroastrian, Sasanian empire of Persia, had a determining influence on the Christian populations that lived in the shadow of 'the two shoulders of the world' . Their frontiers cut across a largely undivided culture, with the result that Christians who lived in Roman and Sasanian Syria and Mesopotamia remained in close contact with each other, and yet were part of empires that spread the cultural achievements of their peculiarly vibrant region far to the west and to the east. Christianity spread into Persia via Edessa, which in the first century was still the capital of an autonomous state under Roman supremacy, though it was to be incorporated into the empire two centuries later. As the same language Syriac - was spoken on both sides of the Romano-Persian frontier, Christianity spread from Edessa first along the Tigris and the Euphrates deep inside the realm of the Persian empire. The Parthian kings did not hinder the diffusion of Christianity and after 226 their Sasanian successors spontaneously offered asylum to Christians seeking refuge in Persia from persecution in the Roman empire. Not until war broke out between the Romans and the Persians in 340 did the Christians come under public suspicion, as was only to be expected, and a bloody persecution was let loose under Shapur II. In the realm of the Romans as well as of the Persians, Christianity had to exist as a religious minority amidst a non-Christian population, subjected to non-Christian rulers. Church history is full of accounts of martyrs in both empires.[7] But Christianity under Persian rule differed from that under the Roman empire in many ways. Christians in the Persian empire were not subject to persecutions officially ordered by the King of Kings. The persecutions in the Persian empire were rather of a local nature. The ruler of the state was not behind the martyrdom of individual Christians. Even when persecution was at its worst, Christian worship was freely carried on in some provinces. In Persia persecutions never assumed the character of a general imperial policy as in the Roman empire. It was the powerful Persian Zoroastrian religion that after the third century flourished and deprived Christianity of its chance to convert the ruler and the state.[8] The fact that the Persian kings were not Christians, and the Churches in Persia never enjoyed the position and the privileges of a state religion, in no way prejudiced the development of Persian Christianity and its spread to the east. The Church in Persia did not need privileges to fulfill its mission; it had all the characteristics of a national Church without the dangerous entanglements which a state Church could scarcely avoid.[9] In the Roman empire the situation was quite different. Since the time of Emperor Decius in the fifties of the third century the ruler himself had tried to wipe out the Christians from allover his empire through cruel persecutions. In its opposition to Christianity, however, the pagan Roman authority could not rely on any particular religion being strong enough to check Christianity in the long run. The Christians in the realm of the Romans existed in a religious environment, which, despite all syncretic approaches, was generally multiform and in the end powerless to prevent the Christian victory that came with the conversion of Constantine the Great. The hostility which for centuries divided the two empires made it absolutely necessary for the Christians of the Persian empire to build up their own independent ecclesiastical organization and to foster as little contact as possible with the Christian Churches of the Roman empire. This made the Persian Church a national Church over which the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon wielded unlimited authority .[10] It adopted the church organization as it had grown up in Roman Christianity, complete with patriarchs, metropolitans and bishops, ruling from definite sees over carefully delimited dioceses as the necessary framework to carryon its mission to the east. And yet the sense of being part of the Universal Church was very much alive and received adequate expression. It always valued its relations with Edessa and Antioch. In AD 410, the Persian Church accepted the canons of the Council of Nicaea and some other western synods. In AD 424, the Persian Church took an important step when a new Persian synod decreed that thereafter there would be no appeal from the judgement of the Catholicos to the Western Fathers, the metropolitan of Edessa and the patriarch of Antioch: 'Easterners shall not complain of their own Patriarch to the Western Patriarchs; any case that cannot be settled by him shall await the tribunal of Christ.' [iI] The above decision has often been construed as an expression of the Persian Church's schism in disguise, but the verdict is rash; we should rather read the decision as the manifestation of the natural desire of every national Church to be independent of other Churches, which in its eyes are also national. There was a general tendency allover the east for every Church to be

autocephalous: the Armenian Church was another case in point.

 

References

 

4. Dvornik, F., 'The study of church history and Christian reunion', The Eastern Church's Quarterly VI, 1 (1945), 4.

5. Dvornik, F., National Churches and the Church Universal. Westminster, 1944, p. 5.

6. Brock, S.P., 'Christians in the Sasanian Empire: a case of divided loyalties' , Studies in Church History 18 (1982), 2.

7. Rage, Wolfgang, Syriac Christianity in the East (Moran Etho 1 ). Kottayam, 1988, pp. 3-9.

8. Christensen, A., L 'Iran so us les Sassanides. Copenhagen, 1936. pp. 136-73.

9. Dvornik, 'Study of church history', 13.

10. Macomber, William, F., The Authority of the Catholicos Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (offprint), pp. 179-200; Young, W.G., Patriarch, Shah and Caliph. Rawalpindi, 1974.

11. Chabot, Jean Baptiste, Synodicon Orientale, Notices et Extraits des Mss de la Bibl. Nationale et autres Bibliotheques. Paris, 1902, vol. 37, pp. 51, 296.

[MJ]

Turns out he works for the Britsih Library not the Museum.

[Azat]

Dear MJ, Maybe you want to visit the British Museum to see all those great sculptures from the Parthenon or that great Egyptian collection or even the Rosetta Stone? I know I want too.

 

Here is the info I found on Dr. Vrej Nersessian.

 

Dr Nersessian is Curator of Christian Orient collections in the British Library.

---------

For further information please contact:

The British Library

96 Euston Road

London

NW1 2DB

United Kingdom

 

Tel: + 44 (0)20 7412 7873

Email: vrej.nersessian@bl.uk

 

[ January 20, 2003, 11:00 PM: Message edited by: Azat ]

[MJ]

Thanks, Azat. I already got response from him. Turns out he is facing serious health problems. Yet, he has published another book called "The Bible in the Armenian Tradition."

 

I would ask the spiritually advanced ( ) members of our forum to pray for the success of his upcoming surgery.

[Stormig]

Why?

[MJ]

In few words, he was a flip-flap artist with no understanding of where he stood and why. He could be on either side - depending on who demands it.

 

Well, while he could do with his miserable life whatever he would decide, he also took with him thousands and thousands of others (based on the sources) and got them slaughtered for no apparent good or meaningful reason. In the result, it took about 500 years for Armenians to be able to bring together another army and to stand for its independence.

 

Then, his image and what he did was taken out of the context, misrepresented, and here you have a false hero. While others, who were perhaps patriotic noblemen, where portrayed as traitors.

 

It takes a whole life of studies to be able to make sense out of the Armenian history.

[Stormig]

Hmmmmmmmm, I see where you are coming from.

Another example of such misrepresentation should be Sheikh Shamil, who led thousands upon thousands to their deaths in the hands of Russians and Cossacks, only to finally give up to save his own hide and live in palaces guarded by Russians and things like that. Now HE is miserable, but he is greatly venerated among Caucasian peoples today. Must be the altitude.

[sen_Vahan]

If I understand MJ's point right then I would add that it is rediculous to be involved in the war which you will lose for sure knowing it in advance. if the army is not ready yet for the attack or defend then keep growing untill it is otherwise you are going to lose peoples' lives with absolutely no result.

But I might get the point wrong,

Vahan

[MJ]

Yes, you do get the wrong point. Why?

[sen_Vahan]

Stormy,

 

I don't get why you posted it as an answer to my last post? All I mean is that a wise commander/army general/ should never start a war knowing in advance he will lose. It is just "don't begin a war if you want to win but know you will lose", the wars need to be won. That's it.

Avarayri chakatamart' was lost and there was no doubt it would be.

A vivid example is Chechnya - no way to win it for chechens (or whoever fights there) and they just rape own people, it is not heroism.

[Stormig]

That is because I assumed you might've re-read MJ's post to notice this:

 

... to continue on to my own elaborations.

MJ's words from the Ethnic-Armenian Turkish diaspora?, although both very simple, are so telling, I am astonished I wasn't able to think them myself.

 

They suit this thread, too.

[Stormig]

Actually, MJ, I'm wondering - given that popular story-telling and history on the part of the common folk are not too keen on diplomacy and whatever political mechanisms, could it be that the precise details of the "why" of these battles and wars have been flung into obscurity to be overshadowed by the filling-in of imagination?

Somehow I don't think thousands upon thousands could have done a kamikaze for a "miserable" figure. I don't mean this for Avarayr in particular, though. Am I to assume through your characterization of Mamigonian as flip-flap that you imply upon his conversion and re-conversion and how it would seem almost naive to take this at face-value?

[Twilight Bark]

What you should be wondering right now, Stormy, is why you have not yet asked MJ to present convincing evidence in support of his thesis. In the absence of such inquiry, you would be guilty of being an accomplice in manufacturing an "imaginary perception", regardless of whether the particular perception in this case is close to reality or not.

I, for one, am interested in knowing more about the subject.

[Stormig]

The "issue" with Vartan Mamigonian is too specific, so I didn't lock in on it until later.

[Stormig]

I attribute this mass mis-representation to lack of hope and such. Just like people try to look for answers in religion, people, rather than looking to the future or even at the present, desperately try to define themselves by the past, sometimes smearing their guffaws all over their faces. Just what past they might opt to choose is beyond me.

On a side-note, you see this type of misrepresentation everywhere. One example: you have Columbus Day in the U.S., whereas Columbus, although perhaps not the perpetrator of a genocide himself, opened the way to Spanish barbarism as represented by Cortez and Pizarro who smited whole civilizations, yet today these people aren't known as butchers whereas Hitler and Stalin are and Pavelic is being "rediscovered" as the original "butcher of the Balkans" (not Milosevic as some think), being mentioned in history books as mere commanders whose victims somehow in a matter of decades ceased being what they were and got completely assimilated (if that can be a right word!) through some reptilian process into Spanish-speaking goody-goody Catholics, just like official Turkish apologetics claims that Armenians in Anatolia disappeared into thin air - and all this not even in the hands of popular myth and story-telling. That falls short of actually showing respect for these genocidal maniacs. How this relates to self-misrepresentation is that today the still-overwhelmingly indigenous Americans erroneously call themselves Latinos, Hispanics, etc., and don't know their history beyond the discovery of the New World by Columbus (also originally not the "discoverer of the Americas," as some think - remember the Vikings) - whether what existed to tell of history was destroyed by the Spaniards or they didn't have viable records, or what is known isn't much heeded to. Ironically, another misrepresentation has been coming out of this - Mexica Movement-ists, Mexica purists taking their pre-Columbian heritage to the other extreme of the spectrum, not being able to come to terms with things like human sacrifice which are abhorred today, trying to downplay European accounts of such practices - and so it goes. What happens is that the cultural treasures that were buried aren't even quite resurrected.

The adverse effects of these can vary, so I will not go into those.

Although knowing and learning history is important, people have yet to realize that it, in part or in whole, isn't a defining agent worth manipulating to become "worthy" in your eyes and getting obsessed over, especially not if you're thinking of your own good and if you are thinking of promoting independence/independent-thinking to give spear-heading dynamism a chance to emerge. As long as this keeps up, people will be smearing their guffaws all over their faces, in the end not accomplishing much of anything relevant. And, yes, cultural handicaps WILL affect prosperity and such. In the age of machines, I wouldn't even want to think of Arab countries if they by religious decree happened to reject technology as "inventions of the infidels," waiting and waiting, in vain, for their past glory they masturbate over to re-emerge. They can wait all they want.

 

[ January 21, 2003, 12:22 PM: Message edited by: Stormy ]

[Stormig]

Come to think of it, the Taliban were such an example of rejecting technology (except for cellular phones and the internet when blowing up places).

[Boghos]

I think it is beyond discussion that most national epics if not all are more a result of a need to establish rallying flags than the representation of reality.

 

That doesn´t mean that they should be regarded as "lies", "deceits" and the like, they essentially fulfill a human need to believe in collective strength, uniqueness, pride, and other similar manifestations that vary according to the moment.

 

Most similar "legends" focus on a given character, the "hero" and of course they also have a "villain" that maybe a people, a religion, a person and so on. Manicheism. But understanding what is at the root of these legends doesn´t mean negating them and much less turning them upside down.

 

TB´s call for rigour is merited, lest we run the risk of creating myths about myhths.

 

[ January 22, 2003, 04:15 AM: Message edited by: Boghos ]

[MJ]

Which thesis?

[Arpa]

I know, I know.

Writing in all upper case in cyberspace is tantamount to shouting. So be it! I am shouting!

WILL SOMEBODY TELL ME WHY WE OBSERVE VARDANANANQ IN FEBRUARY OR MARCH, I.E. BASED ON THE PASSOVER CALENDAR while it is a known fact that it occurred in late May or Early June?

I have asked this at many occasions and to many "knowledgeable people" (read idiots). One "idiot" who happened to be an officer of THE CHURCH gave this "garbage"; Since Vardananaq is such a "pagan" occasion, what with all that "drunken paganism", it was seen fit to move it outside the "holy season" such as "lent"(whatever the hell that is, I will write about the connection of Bargintan and Mardi Gras).

DUUUUHHHHHHH!!!

Does anybody remember "drunken paganism" during Vardananaq? I have seen many a Vardananants Ton, yet I fail to remember any drunkenness and bccahanalia. You wish!!

 

PS. Martin, welcome to the club!!! You are a man after my heart! More thoughts will follow, but in the meantime, remember that Vardan was a son in law of St.?? Sahak and that Eghisheh, the chronicler was an officer of the CHURCH. Need I say more?

I WILL!!

As this topic may shed some light on why Armenian History is a users' guide of WISHFUL THINKING, aka LIES.

It is a sad commentary when we believe the lies that WE perpetrated in the first place.

It is one thing to lie to the world, but lying to oneself???!!!

Where is Freud?

F**k him!

His ethnic kin taught us the art of lying in the first place.

[MJ]

How about the Persian elephants?

[MJ]

Stormy,

 

As in every feudal society, those “thousands and thousands of kamikaze” were the “personal property” of nakharars. Their structure has been one of personal loyalty – “the way the master says the way it goes.” At the time of Avarair, Armenians had been divided and fighting against each other – a significant part of Armenians being on the Persian side along with their nakharars.

[Arpa]

Yeah right!!

Were those Elephantus Indicus or E. Africanus?

Or were they White Elephants or Pink ones?

I have forgotten what the expression of Pink Elephant is. Are those elephants that prefer same sex partners? White Elephant, besides being a euphemism for a hoax, i.e. a heap of garbage auctioned at church affairs is defined such in the Websters'; a. A rare pale-gray variety of elephant, regarded as sacred by the Siamese or Burmese. b. something from which little profit or use is derived; especially, such a possession acquired and maintained at much expense". (see above about "White Elephant Auction").

Of course, if and when the Persians allow us to dig at the site of Avarayr(a score of miles west of Jugha, Nakhijevan) we may find tons of ivory, i.e. white (lies).

Tusk, tusk!!

[Arpa]

Is this to imply that the era of the Nakharars is a thing of the past?

You know better.

The nakharars are here, they are alive and kicking and their collusion with the hierarchy is as destructive as ever if not more. The nakharars are here even if they may go under other aliases.

To understand the phenomenon better read about the city of Arshakavan, the real story, not the Sunday School version.

Yes Vahan, Avarayri Chakatamart was a defeat, a first perhaps in many more to follow and topped off with the 1915 one. It also helped create the stupid cliche of "Baroyakan Haghtanak". With "haghtanaks" of the sort I'd rather lose the moral battle and win some real ones for a change. Our adversaries may need a few "baroyakan haghtanaks" of their own. Lucky for us that the Artsakhtsis did not know about Avarayr and they could care even less.

[MJ]

Arpa,

 

I do think that the traditional Armenian society is still reminiscent of a fuedal society. That is what my argument (at least partially) is about in another thread.

[joseph]

The Artsakhists chose to fight a battle that from any which angle you look at was a lost battle but still they chose to fight and look what happen to the azaries that out numberd and had more weapons , arent you glad that they chose to fight ,they could hide in their homs and wait to be finished , i think they were led by few Vartan Mamigonians ,not by the like of MJ and Arpa ,long years from now the Armenian people will still be looking at Vartan as a hero not at you guyes .