Abrahamian - Armenian Identity 2006

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Armenian Studies Series, No. 8
This book intends to discuss the old
and the new constituents of
Armenian identity, such as language,
religion or shared history in broader
Transcaucasian and former Soviet
Union context. It focuses on the
shaping of the paradigms of
Armenian identity and the transfor-
mation of its key symbols in the late
1980s and post-communist period.
The 16 chapters and 67 subchapters
of the book are composed to present
respectively the main and the forking paths of different ages
and of different lengths that eventually form the park/garden of
the Armenian identity.
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ARMENIAN
IDENTITY
IN A CHANGING
WORLD

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MAZDA MAZDA MAZDA MAZDA MAZDA
L e v o n A b r a h a m i a n
Cover design by Haroutiun Samuelian.
The author is the Head of the Department of Contemporary
Anthropological Studies at the Institute of Archaeology and
Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.
Of Related Interest
A AA AA Concise History of the Concise History of the Concise History of the Concise History of the Concise History of the Armenian People Armenian People Armenian People Armenian People Armenian People
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Edited by Marc Nichanian
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Armenian Identity in a Changing World
Armeni an Studi es Seri es Armeni an Studi es Seri es Armeni an Studi es Seri es Armeni an Studi es Seri es Armeni an Studi es Seri es
Number 8
Levon Abrahamian
Armenian
Identity
In A Changing
World
MAZDA P UBLI SHERS, I nc. MAZDA P UBLI SHERS, I nc. MAZDA P UBLI SHERS, I nc. MAZDA P UBLI SHERS, I nc. MAZDA P UBLI SHERS, I nc.
Costa Mesa u CA u 2006
Mazda Publishers, Inc.
Academic Publishers
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Copyright 2005 by L.H. Abrahamian
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted by any form or by any means without
written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN:1-56859-185-3
(paper: alk. paper)
Publication of this volume has been made possible by a
grant from the Fesjian Publication Fund at Columbia University
Abrahamian, Levon.
Armenian Identity in a Changing World / Levon H. Abrahamian.
p. cm.(Armenian Studies Series; No. 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. National characteristics, Armenian. 2. ArmeniansEthnic identity.
3. NationalismArmenia. I. Title. II. Series.
DS172.A37 2005
305.891992dc22
2005049640

Armenian identity in a changing world

ARMENIAN IDENTITY
IN A CHANGING WORLD

Levon Abrahamian

MAZDA PRESS

CONTENTS

Prefatory Remarks by Marc Nichanian ix
Acknowledgements xiv
A Note on Transliteration xv

Introduction
The Forking Paths of Armenian Identity 1

ONE
The Path of Ancestors
Four Types of Genealogical National Trees 7
The Path of Selection 8
The Path toward the Roots 10
The Path of Prestige 12
The Path toward Everywhere 16
The Shortened and the Lengthened Paths 22

TWO
The Path of Naming
Naming As Nation Building 27
The Path of Demiurges 27
The Path of Name Magic 31
The Forking Path of Differentiation 36

THREE
The Path of Renaming
Recall/Forget Your Name: Strategies of Renaming 45
The Path of Symbolic Return 45
The Forking Path of Name Anarchy 51
The Forking Path of Faking 53
The Circling Path of Manipulations with Time 56

FOUR
The Path of Language
Mother Tongue and the Cult of Translation 65
The Original Path of Mother Tongue 65
The Forking Path of Purism 72

Contents vi
The Forking Path of Bilingualism 77
The Forking Path of Alphabet Identity 79
The Path of Translators 84
The Forking Path in the Direction of the Path of Rebellion
and Festival 88

FIVE
The Path of Music
The Sensitive Ear of Musical Identity and the All-devouring
R'abiz 93
The Path of Unheard Music 93
The Path of Komitas 96
The Path of R'abiz 97

SIX
The Path of Faith
1700 Years of Christianity and the Pagan Armenian-
Christians 111
The Path of Pioneers 111
The Path of the Armenian-Christians 114
The Parallel Paths of Grigor the Illuminator and the Virgins
117
The Forking Paths of the Two Natures That Eventually Meet
Again 121
The Path of Rejection and Ethnic Survival 125
The Path toward the Temple 128
The Misty Path of Celebration 133

SEVEN
The Path of Tradition
Identity Forged by Everyday Life 137
Another Path of Pioneers 137
The Path of a Nation-Family 145
The Path toward Home 148
The Path of Dignity and Shame 155
The Forking Path of Greetings 161

EIGHT
The Path back to Prehistory
Archaic Society in Modern Disguise 171
The Path of Communist Initiation 171

Contents vii
The Path of the Thunderer Gods 175
The Path of Fear 179
The Forking Path toward the Feudal Future 182

NINE
The Path of Tyrants and Fools
Every Nation Deserves Its Ruler 191
The Paired Father-Son Path 191
Successive Paths of the Father and the Son 193
Back to the Paired Path? 194

TEN
The Royal Path
The Return of the King 205
The Original Path of the King-God 205
The Path of the President-Catholicos 207
The Forking Path of the Phallic King 212

ELEVEN
The Path of Rebellion and Festival
The Gharabagh Rallies in Anthropological Perspective 217
The Many Hidden Paths of the Political Festival 217
The Path of the Carnival Civil Society 224
The Two Forking Paths Running from the Square 235

TWELVE
The Path of Violence
The Gharabagh Conflict: A Fight for Symmetry and
Asymmetry 247
The Path of Structural Violence 248
The Path of Constructed Violence 250
The "Green" Path of Violence 253
The Nine Months Long Path of Asymmetry 255
The Path of Symbolic Violence 264

THIRTEEN
The Path Decorated with Statues
Fighting with Memory and Monuments 273
The Path of Pre-Monuments 273
The Path of Reinterpretation 276
The Path of Monument-Crushers 279

Contents viii
The Path of Moderate Executioners 283
The Path of Substitutes 292
The Path of the Dead 297

FOURTEEN
The Path of Memory
Museum As a Mirror and Generator of Identity 305
The Path from Temple to Museum 305
The Path of Collectors 308
The Path from Museum to Temple 310
The Path of Competition 311
The Path of Cooperation 315
The Path of the Monument-Museum 318

FIFTEEN
The Path of Dispersion
Divided Armenians 323
The Forking Paths of Homeland and Diaspora 323
Two Paths That Were Always Divided 326
The Paths of Prudence and Rebelliousness 331
The Path of Reunion 335

SIXTEEN
The Path of Mediators
Armenia and Armenians between East and West 345

Epilogue
A Garden or a Labyrinth? 353

Bibliography 357
Index 391

PREFATORY REMARKS

In 1989, immediately after a glorious year full of pathbreaking
events in the Soviet Union and in Armenia (but also immediately
after the earthquake that ravaged the north of that tiny Soviet
Republic in December 1988) a number of Armenian intellectuals
and political activists were invited to Paris by the humanitarian
group Mdecins du Monde and gave well attended talks about
the situation in their country. It was the first time that a direct
encounter was taking place on such a large scale between repre-
sentative members of the intelligentsia of Armenia and the dias-
pora at large. Up until that date, only officially accepted and la-
beled scholars or artists could make their way outside of the bor-
ders of the Soviet Union and its affiliate countries. Encounters
between the two segments of this utterly divided people, the Ar-
menians, were rare and they always were strictly controlled.
Books circulated but, without any exception, all the books pub-
lished at that time in Soviet Armenia obeyed the draconian rules
of censorship. And censorship did not allow the civil society to
express itself, to come to the fore. In the academy, no doubt,
humanities and social sciences had their place, but they were
always practiced with a national coloration. Strangely enough,
beyond the margins of official Marxism, only national and some-
times overtly nationalist expressions of intellectual life were au-
thorized. Maybe this was not the case to that extreme degree in
Moscow, but the peripheral Republics (and Armenia was the
most peripheral Republic of all) could not escape this provincial
reduplication of the written and more often unwritten laws of
Soviet power. This does not mean that all spontaneity and inde-
pendence of intellectual life were extinguished, crushed, or rep-
ressed. But spontaneity and independence could not express
themselves in the academic context, in accepted forms of public
life, in essays, newspapers, journals. They were doomed to a

Prefatory Remarks x
subterranean existence, limited to private circles, to the circui-
tous ways of oral transmission.
In 1988, the fabulous changes (of which Armenians were
both witnesses and actors during their mass meetings in the
streets of Yerevan, which gathered hundreds of thousands of
people for weeks and months) also arrived at the doors of the
diaspora. Everywhere Armenians gathered and chanted slogans
referring to the Gharabagh movement, which was perceived as a
national uprising and probably a belated restoration of national
pride (or national anger). The invisible side of this collective and
celebratory emotion was the discreet propaganda of the Gorba-
chevian emissaries in the communities that comprised the Arme-
nian diaspora. I played a minor role in one of these secondary
episodes (and I am not very proud of it), when the newly elected
president of the Union of Writers in Armenia, on a tour through
diaspora communities, incited a number of intellectuals in Paris
to join the ranks of the French annex of this same Union (which
up until then was made up of old communists or orthodox thu-
rifers of the Soviet rule) in order to introduce the spirit of glas-
nost and perestroika in Armenian life. However ridiculous this
episode appears now to my eyes, it was nevertheless the first
opportunity of (limited) exchanges between intellectuals of the
homeland and those who were born in Western countries. Of
course, the problem is that the writers who traveled to Paris in
the subsequent months in some way or another belonged to the
nomenklatura or the establishment and were not the best repre-
sentatives of the civil society that had been silenced for so many
decades. It is only in 1989, when activists of the Gharabagh
movement and other intellectuals involved in the new develop-
ment of events were invited to Paris by Mdecins du Monde, that
a real encounter could begin to take place. Levon Abrahamian
was among these intellectuals and I first met with him while
serving as a translator for a lecture that he gave on the anthropo-
logical significance of the mass rallies in Yerevan in terms of
festivals analogous to the festivals in primitive cultures.
That day, I translated faithfully Levon Abrahamians talk and
his learned answers to the audiences inquiries but, in all hon-
esty, I did not know what to think about such an interpretation of
what I considered at that time a massive upsurge of long re-
pressed but rather diffuse sentiments of national consciousness.
Later on, Abrahamian published the results of his analysis and I

Marc Nichanian xi
had a chance to get a closer look at the different features encap-
sulated in it. The reader will find here (Chapter 11, The Path of
Rebellion and Festival) the development of this idea in due
form, this time presented within a more general context, which
gives it an accrued relevance and will offer us the possibility of
an informed discussion in the future.
Levon Abrahamian received his anthropological training at
the Institute of Ethnology in Moscow and began his career with
significant studies on archaic cultures. After that first stage, his
scholarship, more and more oriented toward contemporary life
and modern societies, provided him with widespread recognition
among his peers in the former Soviet Union as well as the United
States, where he is invited regularly to participate in conferences.
The reader will find a list of his contributions in the bibliography
appended at the end of this volume. The fact is that his approach
to social phenomena through the lenses of an anthropologist is an
impressive example of creative interpretation, i.e. of reading
contemporary situations within a new framework that gives them
an unexpected meaning and allows the language of the theoreti-
cian-observer to immediately acquire an operative quality. This
book is good evidence for that exceptional predicament. Because
of the extreme diversity of Armenian identities, the enterprise
of exploring their intricacies could be considered at first glance
as doomed to failure. Thanks to his method of opening (or de-
scribing) paths within a fluctuating landscape, Abrahamian
gives his readers the opportunity of finding their way through the
roots, the trees, the statues on the road, and of distinguish-
ing between different levels in the process of identity-making.
His attention to the level of societal predicament brings to the
fore features that had never before been considered worthy of
attention in any scholarly (or for that matter, journalistic) ac-
count. I refer in particular to the extraordinary study on the
r'abiz phenomenon in Armenia, in the Path of Music, enti-
tled The Sensitive Ear of Musical Identity and the All-devouring
R'abiz (the word r'abiz designates a kind of popular music, but
also by extension a style of life and a layer in the Armenian soci-
ety, which has also been exported to the outside world because
of the large wave of emigration in the past 15 years). But I could
have referred as well to the Path of Language (Mother Tongue
and the Cult of Translation), where the author points to tiny lin-
guistic usages, which become visible only to an exercised ear

Prefatory Remarks xii
tuned to the phenomena of everyday life. To the best of my
knowledge, no study had ever been devoted to the jargon of
the Yerevantsis or the inner determinations of Western and East-
ern varieties of modern Armenian (borrowing vs. translating for-
eign words for neologisms, change vs. immobilism, diverse atti-
tudes toward bilingualism...) Abrahamian not only studies gen-
eral patterns that define a particular way of being in the world,
he also describes the inner workings of particularity, always
one layer below what the usual scientific and ideological
approaches are used to deal with: under the laws of language, the
tiny particularisms; under the political stances, the workings of
power and the archaic figures; under the official language about
memory, the popular representations and the concrete practices
(policies of naming, organizing museums, raising or crushing
monuments); under the discourse on religious revival, the his-
torical regularities; under the claims of unity, the divisions and
more than often the antagonisms. All in all, what Abrahamian
shows is that there is a dispersed, agonistic, divisive way
of being a nation and that for centuries Armenians have become
the specialists of that rarely trodden way. In a certain sense, they
have interiorized their own dispersion, their own otherness to
themselves (the diaspora is an Other for the country, and recip-
rocally; the Western variety of modern Armenian is an Other for
the Eastern variety; constant emigration is an Other for stability;
pagan trends are an Other for the established Christian religi-
osity; political conservatism well represented among Armen-
ians is an Other for rebelliousness; Dashnaks are Others for
Ramkavars; the jargon is an Other for the literary language;
and the list could be continued ad infinitum).
It is true (and the reader should be aware of this) that Abra-
hamian looks at these divisions and internal oppositions from
what I would qualify as an Eastern point of view, the point of
view of an inhabitant of Armenia who knows the diaspora very
well, of a speaker of Eastern Armenian who knows the other way
of being and speaking (and also not speaking the language,
which is nowadays more common in the diaspora). But here,
more importantly, the language of the social anthropologist aims
at a renewal of the ways we consider the characteristic and
mostly unrecorded features that comprise a nation. The result is a
sharp contribution to (and, at times, against) the modern theories
of nationalism set forth mainly by political scientists. Abraha-

Marc Nichanian xiii
mians descriptions offer a flurry of first hand information and a
strong (but somewhat inexplicit) theoretical stance, which em-
phasizes the significance of underground nervures of identity,
the importance of everyday life, and before all the necessity of
understanding national patterns historically, in the long term.
Polemical passages on this question are to be found in chapter 7,
which broaches the Path of Tradition (Identity Forged by Eve-
ryday Life), where the author advocates the existence of an Ar-
menian medieval nationalism the negation of which, he says, is
a typical product of Eurocentrism, and insists on the necessary
differentiation between European and non-European national
models. All these issues obviously deserve further discussion.
Meanwhile, Levon Abrahamians book can be read as a pow-
erful reflection of the infinite multiplicity of layers and compo-
nents that constitute what we usually call identity, and also as
an account of the rarely documented agonistic and antagonistic
ways of being a nation, which the Armenians have developed for
centuries, sometimes with comfort and often with pain.

Marc NICHANIAN

Acknowledgements

During the spring term of 2001, I taught a course on Armenian
identity in the 20
th
century at Columbia University. Marc
Nichanian, the head of the Center for Armenian Studies at the
Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures,
who invited me to teach this course, suggested I organize the
lectures in book form. As I worked on the text, it developed into
the Armenian Identity in a Changing World, which I illustrated
with a collection of my cartoons. Without Marc Nichanians
initiative, encouragement and patience this book would never
have come together.
I am grateful to Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, who was my
first American editor; some of my articles published by her in
Soviet Anthropology & Archeology and later in Anthropology &
Archeology of Eurasia, found their continuation and revision in
this book.
I would like to thank all my colleagues, friends and
informants, both in Armenia and in the United States, who
helped me in my work. I am grateful to Sylvia Dakessian for
editing this book; without her help it would never have appeared
in the present shape. My special thanks to my sister, Greta
Abrahamian, who was my indispensable assistant and critic.
I am grateful to the Slavic Research Center of the Hokkaido
University for creating excellent conditions during my
scholarship stay in Sapporo from December 2001 to April 2002,
which resulted in several Paths and the final shaping of this
book.
And, of course, I am grateful to my students at Columbia
University, whose encouraging interest inspired me in this
attempt to outline the Armenian identity in a changing world.

Note on Transliteration

For convenience, the Armenian words have been transliterated as
follows:

a
b
g
d
e
z

t'
zh
i
l
kh
ts

k
h
dz
gh
ch
m
y
n
sh
o, vo (in the
beginning of a
word)
ch'
p

j
r'
s
v
t
r
ts'
w
u
p'
k'
ew

f

To avoid confusion, the names of the Armenian authors are
given in forms already used in literature and catalogues, names
of modern authors are given in the form used in Armenian
passports. Russian words and names are given in the Library of
Congress transliteration except in some cases requiring
linguistic transliteration.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

THE FORKING PATHS
OF ARMENIAN IDENTITY

The aim of this book is to try to outline characteristics of the
Armenian identity. Of course this will not be a full and final set
of characteristics, neither will we find answers to all the
problems related to this crucial question of Armenianness. This
book is rather an attempt to approximate these problems and to
try and see them in a broader context and in comparison with
other, neighboring and more distant cultures as well. We will not
try to rigidly define what the Armenian identity is, but rather will
outline the frames within which it becomes visible.
Our approach can be illustrated by the following three
methods of laying out a public park, which are known from peri-
scholarly folklore.
1
The first method is characterized as
dogmatic. This is a volitional way of laying out a park. A
chosen territory is enclosed within a fence, a number of trees are
cut (if there are any) another number are planted to create paths
and lanes; signs and posters are placed to denote where people
should not walk or lie, statues may later decorate the paths, etc.
This construction is declared to be the park.
The second method, in contrast, does not admit to any voli-
tional decision. It is characterized as the German approach to
parkology and presents in fact an idealized scientific method.
It supposes that before laying out concrete types of parks, one
has to make a thorough preliminary research to best learn what is

1
Here I am using Yu. Gastevs free and conventional comparisons,
which served him as working models for an analysis of the gnosio-
logical aspects of modeling (Gastev 1967: 213-214).
ARMENIAN IDENTITY IN A CHANGING WORLD
2
hidden under the somewhat vague concept of park. This
method, naturally, should take into account multiform factors,
such as geographic, social-political, anthropological, economic,
agronomic, aesthetic, psychological, pedagogic, ideological and
many others. In short, only after learning what the term park
means would this method dare to lay it out.
The third method is known as the English method, since it
is believed that parks in England are being laid out by just this
method. Its main principle is based on a simple observation that
people somehow manage to not trample down all the grass in
forests and on lawns, even if we are dealing with a large number
of human beings (of course, provided they dont transform into a
furious mob), and leave a number of passageways and paths.
More than that, these paths, as a rule, are being beaten in the
most rational way, so that the park designers and staff are said
only to look after the places where the grass is not trampled
down to sow and mow grass, trim the trees, etc. and here is
the park, which is being organized as if by itself, without peo-
ples knowledge or will.
However, in reality all three methods are being used when
laying out a park, although the proportion of the methods applied
may vary considerably from case to case. In this book, we will
mostly follow the English method when trying to reveal the
beaten tracks and secret paths in the park of Armenian identity.
And as the park paths may cross, fork and join, so our identity
paths will cross and interlace at times. Generally speaking, vege-
tation metaphors and allegories are among the most popular ones
around the world let us recall the Garden-Paradise as an exam-
ple; they are close to the Armenian mentality as well.
2
We will
meet different types of trees in our park/garden of identity. Many
old trees havent survived in this park; however, we will encoun-
ter some very ancient ones, as well as a number of strange and
exotic trees.
The park metaphor seems natural, since a tree model is tradi-
tionally used in different branches (note another example of the
tree language) of science for describing various kinds of
evolving systems. The history of languages and peoples particu-
larly enjoys this floristic approach. We see how a sprout gives

2
See, for example, H. Petrosyan 2001b: 25-32 for an analysis of the
garden (vineyard) archetype in Armenian culture.

Introduction 3
branches, rises into a powerful tree to be uprooted sometimes as
a result of oblivion and genocides. The park metaphor also
works well because it embodies the opposition of nature and cul-
ture, the wild and the cultivated, and, hopefully, the ethnic and
the national as well. Parks and gardens are very vulnerable to
time: changes in the world are often well seen in the fate of
parks. A park needs constant care and can easily turn into a wild
forest or a treeless desert. But it can also turn into a flourishing
garden full of fruit or a botanic garden with strange flora.
Let us follow the ancient and newly trodden paths of this
park/garden of identity in the hope that it will reveal its secrets to
us its visitors, explorers and creators.

The Path of Ancestors

ONE

THE PATH OF ANCESTORS
Four Types of Genealogical National Trees

In the park of identity one, naturally, would expect to see trees.
In this first path we will deal with genealogical trees, which are
being constructed by any human group, from clan and tribe to
nation, to locate itself in time and space. We will discuss four
types of such trees or rather models, which could be called, re-
spectively, selective (1), root-oriented (2), prestigious (3),
and omnivorous (4). Each nation uses various combinations of
these four approaches when constructing its identity, and one
hardly would find a nation that follows only one of these models.
However, some nations may choose one or another of the four
schemes as the basic axis for their national speculations, so that
the chosen model acquires a national hue.

1 2-3 4

8
The Path of Selection
For example, the selective model seems to correspond to the
Russian way of identity consolidation. It tends to cut away the
alien branches in the upper part of the national genealogical tree
(modern times), while leaving the alien branches in the lower
part (earlier times) untouched. For example, the great Russian
poet Pushkin with his African background is considered to repre-
sent the highest standard of Russian language and Russianness in
general, while it is preferred that modern Pushkinists, specialists
in Pushkins language and poetry, be ethnically Russian.
1
This
model can be found in many aspects of Russian culture. Thus,
modern Russian nationalists, in the person of some extremist
neo-paganist branches of the Pamiat' (Memory) Society,
lower the demarcation line between Russians and non-Russians
below (before) 988 AD, the year of Russias conversion to
Christianity, in order to cut Christianity, an alien, Jewish branch
from the trunk of Russianness in these older times, as they do
with Jewish branches in modern times. The working mechanism
of this model with a constantly shifting demarcation line be-
tween our people and aliens can be seen in the current un-
constitutional law introduced by Moscow mayor Luzhkov: eve-
ryone, especially people of Caucasian nationality
2
who have
Moscow propiska (permanent residence), are considered legiti-
mate (ours), while those without propiska are considered ille-
gitimate (alien) and are subject to fines and deportation. This
last example presents the momentary transformation of aliens
into us (our people) in the crown of the genealogical tree,
the process of cutting out the alien branches being moved to
the level of fresh shoots. As for the old branches, Russians
seem not to notice the blackness of Pushkin, while Ethiopian
tribes are said to compete for the honor of giving Russia the an-

1
This last idea was present in the open letter of the Russian writer Vik-
tor Astaf'ev to a Russian Pushkinist of Jewish origin Natan Eidelman.
2
This term, literally persons of Caucasian nationality, does not corre-
spond to the American meaning of Caucasian as of European race,
but, on the contrary, reflects the modern Russian racist attitude toward
the peoples originating from the Caucasus and Transcaucasus including
Armenians they are also called chernye (blacks), evidently for their
black hair, and even chernozhopye (black-bums).

The Path of Ancestors 9
cestor of the great poet.
3

The three other models, the root-oriented, the prestigious
and the omnivorous, are well expressed in the Transcaucasus
or, to use our floral language, seem to be endemic. With the
same exaggeration as in the case of the Russian model, they
can be called respectively Armenian, Georgian, and Azer-
baijani models. This conventional national attribution of the
models correlates with popular jokes of the Soviet period de-
scribing how once upon a time an Armenian, a Russian, a Geor-
gian, and an Azerbaijani or a smaller group of these four in dif-
ferent combinations face one or another critical situation result-
ing in the survival of the single sharp-witted member of the
group, whose nationality depended, naturally, on the nationality
of the joke-teller.
4

It should be said that the models (trees) discussed here are not
purely academic constructions, although academics play a con-
siderable role in constructing and shaping them. Each tree is a
result of collective speculations both scientific and quasi- and
pseudo-scientific. Sometimes, an unscientific construction can be
even more helpful for us, since it may reflect an ethnogenetic
trend much more clearly and openly than its implicit scientific
version. These models gain their shape in the same way, as the
paths in our park are trod by many feet. This can be seen in the
second, root-oriented model, which could also be called the

3
Pushkins African roots are traditionally traced back to Ethiopia. Re-
cently new African claimants have entered into this competition a
prince from Cameroon sent a little soil from the poets ancestral land
and a native African shield to the House of Pushkin in Moscow in the
late 1990s.
4
Such jokes are very informative for revealing the auto- and the exo-
stereotypes of a nation. Russians usually prefer to deal with Americans,
Englishmen and the French people in such jokes. Armenians (like the
Jews who are also often involved in such competing groups) present
themselves as trickster-like heroes who manage to survive their stupid
companions. Or, on the contrary, their negative characteristics are ridi-
culed in self-criticism in contrast to the characteristics ascribed to their
neighbor-companions. In Soviet times, this genre also produced an in-
teresting anti-totalitarian (anti-Russian) version: all three companions,
an Armenian, an Azerbaijani and a Georgian, couldnt cope with their
respective difficult tasks and were finally devoured by the dev (demon)
representing, evidently, the Russian.

10
historical or rather pseudo-historical model, as well as in the
other ones.

The Path toward the Roots
The root-oriented, or the Armenian, model is characteristic for
its fight against aliens in the lowest parts of the national genea-
logical tree, being in this aspect the opposite of the selective
model. The Armenian model is thus the opposite of the Rus-
sian one. The only undesired aliens in this Armenian model
are the Urartians, a Hurrian speaking people who formed the
state of Urartu on the historical and present-day territory of Ar-
menia in the 9
th
-6
th
centuries BC. That is why the Armenian
model fights for the Armenian identity of the Urartians (cf. Shni-
relman 2001: 61-78). Although there are many Armenian-
Urartian cultural proximities as well as distinct divergences, we
are not going to discuss the pros and cons of this hypothesis
here, except to show how this discussion is linked to building
and consolidating the national identity.
While the hypothesis of the Near Eastern homeland of the
Indo-Europeans
5
confirms the ancient roots of the Armenians
in their territory, the Hurrian speaking Urartians with their high
culture present a gap in the continuity of the Armenian culture.
By identifying Urartu with Armenia, the Armenians can proceed
without any hindrance along their genealogical tree back to the
most ancient times. In a conference held in 1985 in Yerevan, a
patriotic Armenian historian even expressed a hope that some
specific palaeo-anthropoid remains would be found in Armenia
some time in the future, as the palaeo-anthropoid ape Udabno-
pithek was found in Georgia.
6
Obviously, the idea was that the

5
This hypothesis of T.Gamkrelidze and V.Ivanov (1984), which places
the homeland of the Indo-Europeans on the Armenian Highland, within
the territory of historical Armenia, continues to be the most popular
theory in contemporary Armenia and is widely used both in scholarly
and populist patriotic rhetoric concerning the autochthonous character
of the Armenian people.
6
It is characteristic that Azykhanthrop, a Neanderthal man from the
cave Azokh in Mountainous Gharabagh, was thought to be an Azer-
baijani ancestor by its Azerbaijani explorer (see Areshian and Abra-
hamian 1988), while an ancient skull discovered in Georgia in 2000,
was declared to be the ancestor of the Europeans by the organizers of
the impressive exhibit-presentation of the find and by Georgian jour-

Armenians were autochthonous of the territory from where not
only the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans but also the Homo
sapiens hopefully have originated. That is, the Armenian genea-
logical tree is thought to be located at the center of the world
with its roots ideally going back to the beginning of times.
Urartu was Armenianized using scientific, quasi-scientific
and non-scientific methods. The first two are used by Raphael
Ishkhanian, the most ardent supporter of this point of view (see,
e.g., Ishkhanian 1989); Suren Aivazian, an outstanding Arme-
nian representative of fantastic historiography, uses the last two
methods. The latter even reads Urartian cuneiforms in Arme-
nian (S. Aivazian 1986: 30-31). An interesting point in this dis-
pute is the renaming of Urartu into the Araratian kingdom,
which is intended to give a biblical and an Armenian touch to
this ancient state, since Mount Ararat is one of the modern staple
symbols of Armenia (let us note, for instance, its presence on the
coat of arms of the three Armenian republics
7
). In the late 1980s,
the name Urartu became a kind of taboo in the popular press and
on Armenian TV and radio programs; it survived only in some
academic editions (see, e.g. Arakelian et al. 1988).
8
The tradi-
tional attitude toward Urartu was treated as being anti-patriotic
and was ridiculed in satirical periodicals. However, at the same

nalists quite in accordance with the Georgian and Azerbaijani
models to be discussed in a moment.
7
The present-day Mount Ararat was identified with the biblical moun-
tain where Noahs Ark landed after the flood only in medieval times. In
early Christian times it was thought to be located in Corduena, at the
southern borders of the Armenian Highland. The present-day Mt. Ara-
rat was known as Mt. Masis for the Armenians and had its own, Cauca-
sian-related mythology described by Khorenats'i, who never mentioned
it in a biblical context. On the sacred mountain as a symbol of Arme-
nian identity (with the literature on the Ararat/Masis controversy) see
H. Petrosyan 2001b: 33-39; n.d.
8
See Astourian 1994: 43-52 for review and analysis of the two oppos-
ing positions. In the late 1990s, this hysterical witch-hunt seemed to
subside. Proof of this may be the giving of the name Urartu to a pres-
tigiously-situated store in Yerevan in the late 1990s: its owners were
by no means involved in the Urartu/Armenia discourse, however, such
a renaming would hardly take place were this discourse a hot topic of
the day. We will discuss the phenomenon of renaming further in a spe-
cial Path.

12
time, this non-scientific position may paradoxically help in
opposing the anti-Armenian reconstructions of the regions his-
tory. For example, the Azerbaijani historian Igrar Aliev used the
Urartian evidence from Mountainous Gharabagh (Nagorno-
Karabagh), namely the Urartian origin of its Armenian name
Arts'akh, to state that it had nothing to do with the Armenians
who appeared in this region, according to Azerbaijani opinion,
only in the recent past (see Aliev 1988: 15). Thus we see that the
fight for identity in the distant past, which is typical for the
root-oriented model, may result in building and consolidating
identities in the present.

The Path of Prestige
The prestigious, or Georgian, model can be defined as a way
of consolidating national identity by means of obtaining prestig-
ious forefathers. Prestigious in many cultures means unique,
sole. This feeling of national uniqueness is especially character-
istic of Georgians (hence the name Georgian of the prestig-
ious model), though, of course they are not alone in this aspect.
Armenians also suffer from this, especially in their being the first
ones in some cultural acquisition or another the aforemen-
tioned national pride of being the only ones among the Indo-
Europeans who stayed in their homeland is an example of this.
9

For the Georgians, their feeling of national uniqueness seems to
be more disinterested.
10
The formula for this feeling would be
the only ones, rather than the Armenian the first ones. Anec-
dotes and jokes describe this peculiarity of national character
very well. For example, in one joke a flying saucer lands some-
where on the globe. People gather to greet the strange guests. It
is a great surprise for them to see a very handsome pilot coming
out of the saucer. They ask him whether everyone on his native
planet is so handsome and get answers in the affirmative. Then
they ask the same question about his beautiful and well-cut suit,
stylish shoes, wonderful tie, etc., also getting affirmative an-

9
See Shnirelman 1999 for the examples of other nations looking for
prestigious ancestors.
10
However, this disinterestedness vanishes when the choice of an an-
cestor may influence national geography and history, for example, in
the case of the Georgian/Abkhazian dispute over ancient Abkhazia (see
Shnirelman 1998: 53-59; 2001: 199-350).

swers. Finally, they ask whether anybody else on his native
planet has such precious diamonds in their tiepins, and the alien
answers with a feeling of self-dignity: No, only Shaliko [a typi-
cal Georgian name] does. The prestigious model deals with
the same feeling of uniqueness in the sphere of ethnogenesis it
is looking for a unique ancestor. In the list of unique ancestors
(or at least ancient close relatives) one can find Sumerians, Urar-
tians and even Basques. The Basquean hypothesis is one of the
most popular in Georgia, especially in non-academic circles.
11
It
illustrates very well the point of uniqueness of the prestigious
model. This does not mean, of course, that this hypothesis is
groundless and expresses only the trend to uniqueness, but that
whatever linguistic arguments and accordance lie in its base, the
touch of uniqueness is quite evident here. This hypothesis is ac-
tually the modern version of an ancient one, which tries to ex-
plain the strange coincidence of the two toponyms, Iberia (Ive-
ria), the ancient name of Eastern Georgia, and Iberia, the ancient
name of Spain. Both countries were named after the ancient
tribes that inhabited the land in question. In one case those were
the Ibers, one of the main ancestors of the Georgians, and in the
other case the Ibers, the ancient tribes of Spain, which were
conquered by the Romans in the 3
rd
-2
nd
centuries BC and later
romanized. Appian, the Roman historian of the 2
nd
century AD,
suggests three possibilities of such a coincidence: either the an-
cient inhabitants of Spain were the forefathers of the Georgians,
or on the contrary, the Georgians were the progenitors of the
Spanish tribes, or the two names have coincided just by chance
(see Melikset-Bekov 1911). There is also a fourth possibility not
considered by Appian, that the Georgians and Basques could
have had a common ancestor. This latter hypothesis lies at the
base of modern academic Georgian-Basquean discourse, al-

11
There also exists a Basquean hypothesis in Armenia, which asserts
the ancient relations between the Basque language and proto-Armenian.
However, this hypothesis is not popular in Armenia. As a matter of
fact, it seems to be presented only by its author, Vahan Sarkisian (see,
e.g., the periodical Araxes. Revista International Armeno-Vasca ed-
ited by him in 1990s or his book discussing Urartian-Armenian-Basque
linguistic unity Sargsyan 1998). In any case, it does not reflect a pres-
tigious model in Armenia but rather is a version of the root tracing
typical for the Armenian model.

14
though it is not a commonly shared view in Georgian academic
circles (see Melikishvili and Lordkipanidze 1989: 181). However
it may be, one can see that the Georgian ethnogenetic model has
the same touch of uniqueness since ancient times, which makes
it truly prestigious. Today the Spanish roots of the Georgian
identity may manifest themselves in a Georgian screen version
of Don Quixote shot in Spain or in a not realized project pro-
posed to UNESCO for the celebration of the 500
th
anniversary of
Americas discovery: Georgian participants were supposed to go
to Spain and move further to the American continent after a big
fiesta in Madrid.
Interestingly, the ethnogenisis jealousy of the Armenians
responded to this Georgian uniqueness with a fantastic version
by the aforementioned Suren Aivazian (in one of his numerous
leaflets), which turns the prestigious uniqueness of the Georgi-
ans forefathers into an unprestigious one. According to this ver-
sion, the Georgians do originate from the Basques, but these first
Iberians are thought to be brought to the Transcaucasus as slaves
by Armenian troops in ancient times, after some successful mili-
tary expedition to the Iberian Peninsula.
The Georgian model also has an interesting selective pecu-
liarity, which correlates with the selective Russian model.
But while the Russian model tends to cut the alien branches in
the crown of their national tree, the Georgian model recognizes
as alien, unprestigious (which is the more important characteris-
tic here) only the Armenian branches and especially the Arme-
nian roots in their genealogical tree. For example, Georgians
deny that Mesrop Mashtots', an Armenian, introduced the first
version of the Georgian alphabet.
12
In accordance with the black

12
The information about Mashtots' also inventing alphabets for the two
neighboring peoples goes back to his hagiography written by his disci-
ple Koryun, although Georgians consider this information to be a later
addition of the copyists. For the Georgian version of the origin of
Georgian script see Gamkrelidze 1989: 258-306 (see p. 303 for argu-
ments against Mashtots' authorship). Cf. S. Muravievs attempt to
prove Mashtots' authorship by revealing a common constructing prin-
ciple in the three Trancaucasian alphabets (see, e.g. Muraviev 1985 and
Gamkrelidze 1989: 293 for criticism of this approach). Azerbaijani
scholars in their turn dont want Mashtots' to be the inventor of the Al-
banian script (see Mamedova 1986: 6-7, 40).

but our Pushkin who must be studied by Russian Pushkinists,
the Georgian model has its specific national alien Saint
Shushanik, the Armenian martyr of the 5
th
century tortured to
death by her anti-Christian Georgian husband to be revenged by
a Georgian Christian king (see The Passion of Saint Shushanik
1999). The Saint Shushanik tale is recognized as the first monu-
ment of Georgian creative literature with a consequence that
only Georgians are thought today to have the true right to treat
it as a piece of art in Georgia. Such an attitude at least became
obvious when Sergei Parajanov, the famous Tbilisi born film
director of Armenian descent, was refused permission to shoot a
film on St. Shushanik based on his original script.
13

As we have already mentioned, in the prestigious model
national discourse tends to assume as merely factual the
uniqueness and distinction of the accomplishments of great
ancestors. In this perspective, the Georgian model correlates with
the peculiarities of the Georgian social structure with its highly
visible network of nobility, a survival and successor of the feudal
system. Other models discussed here, naturally, would not ne-
glect the prestigious aspect of their ancestors, if they happened
or are ascribed to be of noble descent. However, they seem to
be more democratic in their search for ancestors, if this search
pursues one or another (usually political) aim. For example, the
Russian archaeologist V. I. Ravdonikas didnt hesitate to cut the
highly developed branches of the German-speaking Goths re-
lated to southern Russia on the Russian national tree (Shnirelman
1993: 57-58), and the academician B. Rybakov, when searching
for the origins of the name Rus' (and the future Russia and Rus-
sians), cut without any sentiments for nobility its widely ac-
cepted Scandinavian Viking roots (Fasmer 1971: 522-523), giv-
ing preference to a native root Ros (see, e.g., Rybakov 1953), the
name of a somewhat savage and dubious tribe that lived in the
South Russian steppes in the 6
th
century AD.
14
While the de-

13
Personal communication.
14
Here I am not denying the southern origins of the name Rus'; on the
contrary, I am inclined to agree with O. N. Trubachev who traces Indo-
Arian roots in Ros (see Trubachev 1999: 56-58, 122-124, 166-167).
However, Trubachevs reconstruction involving other aliens (this time
southerners) in the forming of the name of the Russians is based on a
deep etymological-historical study rather than patriotic feelings.

16
mocratic manipulations of Ravdonikas with the national tree
were aimed at opposing the German irredentist trends in the
early 1930s, Rybakovs anti-aristocratic and idiosyncratic root-
cutting has to be classified as purist and nationalistic and in a
sense resembles the fight with the alien roots of the Armenian
model. In contrast, the prestigious model, generally speaking,
seems to not pursue any political aim, though the flexibility that
it gives to the ethnogenetic processes might be easily used for
such aims. This is well manifested in the fourth, the omnivo-
rous model.

The Path toward Everywhere
The main characteristic of this model is the trend to appropriate
any alien culture in any part of the genealogical tree, acquiring
simultaneously different kinds of fresh shoots, branches and
roots in contrast to the other models, which may usually only
manipulate a few roots and/or branches in the lower or some-
times upper parts of their national trees. A typical omnivorous
model is, for example, the Azerbaijani model of consolidating
national identity, which tries to fit simultaneously into the
Turkic, the Median and the Caucasian Albanian versions of the
Azerbaijani ethnogenesis and national history.
15
The omnivo-
rous model easily appropriates any foreign language and culture
in various periods of a nations history. Thus, according to Azer-
baijani ethnohistory, the Albanian-speaking proto-Azerbaijanis
who had lived on the territory of present-day Azerbaijan,
adopted a Turkic language from a small group of nomads in me-
dieval times (Guliev 1979: 64; Aliev 1988: 48),
16
while those
who had lived on the territory of present-day Mountainous
Gharabagh are thought to have adopted the Armenian language.
Azerbaijani and Armenian variations on this last theme actually
served as a linguo-cultural rationale for the bloody war in the

15
On the Albanian/Turkic/Median controversies in Azerbaijani inter-
pretations of Azerbaijani national history, see Dudwick 1990; Astou-
rian 1994: 52-67; Shnirelman 2001: 113-126.
16
Armenians, on the contrary, consider the Turkic language of the pre-
sent-day Azerbaijanis to be the legacy of the mass nomadic invasions
of the 13th-14th centuries, and Azerbaijanis to be in main the direct
descendants of these Turkic-speaking nomads (Galoyan and Khudaver-
dian 1988: 13).

region in the late 1980s and early 1990s, feeding both Azerbai-
jani nationalism and Armenian irredentism.
As we will see in the Path of Naming, this fight for national
identity may involve many complicated historical and semiotic
manipulations. Appropriations of alien branches used in the
omnivorous model have worked out specific advanced meth-
ods, which translate appropriation into the language of re-
gaining. For example, according to an opinion popular in Azer-
baijan, Armenians appropriated Caucasian Albanian history and
identity by translating Albanian texts into Old Armenian and
destroying the original manuscripts,
17
or by destroying Albanian
inscriptions on the medieval khach'k'ar (cross-stone) monuments
and thus claiming them to be Armenian (Akhundov and Akhun-
dov 1983: 13).
18
Another appropriated identity of the Azerbaijani model is
the Median one. As the Albanian identity is related to rights
upon Caucasian Albania, i.e. upon Northern Azerbaijan, the Me-
dian identity deals with Southern, or Iranian Azerbaijan.
19
The
Median theory, as one of its Turkist-oriented opponents, Sley-

17
See Buniatov 1965: 97 for such accusations and Muradian 1990: 62-
63 for Buniatovs criticism. The idea of the original Albanian language
of Kaghankatuats'is manuscript on Albanian history (to be discussed in
the Path of Naming), goes back to the works of Z. I. Yampol'sky
(1957). On the Albanization of the Armenian heritage including a dis-
course on the script see Shnirelman 2001: 154-164.
18
Interestingly, when accusing the Armenians of destroying Albanian
inscriptions and in erroneously dating one of the stelae from Jugha
from 1602, D. and V. Akhundovs, evidently, didnt notice the Arme-
nian inscription indicating the date (in Armenian letters) and the name
of the master woven into the ornaments of the monument; old photo-
graphs show that the now damaged inscription at the foot of the monu-
ment was also written in Armenian (Arakelian and Sahakian 1986: 46;
Arg. Aivazian 1984: Pl.62-63). Cf. Akopian 1987: 138-139, No. 62.
19
One of the most consistent advocates of the Iranian role in the Azer-
baijani ethnogenesis is Igrar Aliev, a well-known historian, whose atti-
tude is well reflected in the title of his 1990 article Does Science Have
Evidence in Favor of the Iranian Language of the Medes and Atropat-
enians? Can We Consider the Medes One of the Forefathers of the
Azerbaijani People? The author gives affirmative answer to these
questions. For a discussion of the Iranian version of Azerbaijani eth-
nogenesis see Astourian 1994: 54-58.

18
man liyarov, thinks, was invented to make Azerbaijanis forget
their Turkic roots and, as a result, distance themselves from Tur-
key, this aim also being Stalins political strategy. That is why
the apex of the Median interpretation of Azerbaijani historiogra-
phy falls in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of tense relations be-
tween the Soviet Union and Turkey.
20
Though liyarovs anti-
Median and pro-Turkist attitude was severely criticized from the
scientific point of view by his Medes-oriented colleagues (see
Aliev 1990, 2: 80), his political argumentation is quite correct. It
appears Stalin really did seem to plan for the consolidation of the
two Azerbaijans, the Soviet and the Iranian, for which the Me-
dian ethnogenetic theory was a good excuse, and he would have
hardly felt too enthusiastic about Turkist and even pan-Turkist
trends, which were actually opposed to the imperialistic trends of
the Soviet Union.
As we can see, different ethnogenetic versions may lead to
different political consequences, although in other circumstances
they may easily consolidate in a non-contradictory ethnoge-
netic complex. Thus in the post-Soviet period, the Turkist orien-
tation, while helping the consolidation of the two Azerbaijans,
Northern and Southern (Iranian), at the same time in some mys-
terious way seems not to hinder the two other Azerbaijani na-
tional consciousness, the Albanian and the Median ones, each
being shaped within different ethnogenetic conceptions. From a
genealogical point of view, the three contradictory versions of
Azerbaijani ethnogenesis (if they were Turks, then they were not
Medes and/or Caucasian Albanians; and if they were Albanians,
they were not Medes, and vice versa) could be peacefully dis-
tributed in the lower part of the Azerbaijani genealogical tree, if
it could be constructed following the hypotheses claiming that
both Caucasian Albanian and Median languages originate from
some unknown proto-Turkic language. According to these hy-
potheses (which were severely criticized by academician Z.
Buniatov /1987/, an advocate of the Albanian ancestry), Sumer-
ian also originated from this proto-Turkic language or is itself
just this ancestral Turkic language. As we can see, the Azerbai-
jani model also has some prestigious versions.
21

20
I refer to S. liyarov's untitled essay in the Azerbaijani language
(Azrbayjan", 1988, No. 7, p.175) cited in Astourian 1994: 54-55.
21
By the way, Sumerians are the most popular among the prestigious

Responding to its omnivorous definition, the Azerbaijani
national tree appropriates aliens anywhere on the tree. The
Medes and Caucasian Albanians are at the root level, the Turkic
branch is somewhere in the middle of the trunk, and the assimi-
lated minorities in the crown at least in its Soviet section.
22
The
Georgian national tree at times also manifests omnivorous
properties in the crown cf. the campaign for recalling the
forgotten Georgian identity by the representatives of minori-
ties in the late 1980s early 1990s.
23
Armenia, being the most
monoethnic Republic even in Soviet times (93.3 % of ethnic
Armenians according to the 1989 census, this figure clearly
would be larger as a result of the dramatic exchange of popula-
tions between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the late 1980s-early
1990s), had less of a problem in appropriating the few alien
branches in the top region of the tree, so that Armenians could
focus their attention on the dangerous aliens in the roots. The
Armenian tree could have experienced an appropriation of such
alien branches somewhere in the lower parts of the trunk cf.
the opinion of H. Acharian (1945: 362-439) that the Armenian
sub-dialects of the 5
th
century AD could reflect the Armenian of
some foreign language speaking groups incorporated into the
Armenian nation, rather than dialects in the pure sense of the
word. In any case, the Armenian tree seems to show less interest
in alien branches than the other trees discussed here. Thus, the
Udin, one of the few surviving groups of the ancient Caucasian
Albanians, since the 5
th
century AD were under the strong influ-
ence of the Armenian Church and language, which was the rea-
son why they were expelled from Azerbaijan together with the
Armenian population in late 1980s, although they were actually

ancestors. For example, they are claimed to be the ancestors of the
Bashkirs of the Volga River basin (see Egorov 1993); Hungarians also
seem to like to have them as ancestors rather than the unprestigious
Hants and Mansi of Western Siberia for this last point I am indebted
to Peter Veres. Some Armenian authors are also looking for proto-
Armenian realities in the Sumerian culture or, rather, are trying to show
the proto-Armenian origin of some Sumerian realities (see, e.g., Mov-
sisian 1992).
22
See, e.g. Dragadze 1996: 273 on the assimilatory politics toward mi-
norities in Soviet Azerbaijan.
23
For more on this see the Path of Renaming.

20
the only living proof for the Azerbaijanis of their claimed Cauca-
sian Albanian legacy. Despite this long-term influence, the Udins
managed to preserve their Udin identity and language (as a lan-
guage of inter-family communication), which is good evidence
that the Armenian national tree shows a rather low rate of graft-
ing (assimilation).
24
While many Udins who changed their lan-
guage of education to Azerbaijani in 1937, lost both their native
language and identity quite quickly, especially in the village of
Nizh.
25

The free acquiring principle of the omnivorous model pro-
vides a very flexible mechanism for cultural adaptation. Eng-
lishmen, for example, appealed to this model to understand the
complex ethnic processes, which their people underwent. All the
ethnic inputs that take place in the course of history, even the
minor and unessential ones, find their place in the resultant eth-
nic appearance of the nation. And there is nothing strange in this:
all the ethnic constituents the Celts, Saxons, and Normans
finally consolidate into a nation, which is well aware of its eth-
nogenesis. For a nation living on an i s l a n d this process of
identity building may result at worst in a somewhat self-satisfied
national identity as to a point, was the exaggerated image of
the English in the eyes of the non-English, especially in colonial
times.
This insular effect is quite different under continental con-
ditions. Any identity from the list of acquired identities requires
a newly acquired territory in this case. The most typical case of
such swelling identity is the case of identity building in re-
cently nomadic peoples; their migrational itineraries becoming
historical territories and a guide-book for their acquired
identities. Even in cases when the nomadic constituent of a na-
tion is reduced to a minimum, this swelling effect may play the
leading role in the process of identity and nation building. Evi-
dently, this is the case with the many-faceted Azerbaijani iden-
tity of whether the nomadic Turkic-speaking groups that gave

24
I borrowed this observation from Artsruni Sahakian.
25
A. Arzumanian who conducted anthropological field work among the
Udins in the 1980s in Azerbaijan, stated that in some of the former
Udin quarters of the village of Nizh only the older generation remem-
bered their Udin identity. The names of the quarters also reveal clues
regarding their recent Udin past (personal communication).

their language to Azerbaijanis were small in number (the Azer-
baijani ethnogenetic version) or formed the main massive of the
future nation (the Armenian version).
The English case is actually the same omnivorous model,
only used consciously: foreign roots and branches are not denied
and misappropriated but recognized and naturalized through this
recognition. Another case of omnivorous identity, this time of
the continental type, but unlike the Azerbaijani case, used con-
sciously, is the Russian idea of Eurasianism its tendency to
accept various Asian peoples in the lower part of the Russian
national tree,
26
whereas these Asians are traditionally viewed as
invaders from a more purist nationalist perspective. The Eurasian
idea seems to be an implicit reflection of Russias imperialist
past
27
hence its swelling identity. No wonder that at present
this idea has become popular among neo-imperialist theorists
like A. Dugin.
The omnivorous model can also be used temporarily, as a
stratagem, as it was used by the Chinese. To prevent the constant
attacks of the Sun (the Huns) from the north, the Chinese em-
peror Liu Qing arranged a wedlock with one of the Sun rulers in
198 BC, that is, invited him (and his people) into the Chinese
genealogical tree. However, this temporal branch protected
China from the nomadic invasions for only a short period of
time, until 33 BC, and the Chinese returned to their ancient
means against the nomads continuing the construction of the
Great Wall, which was already initiated in the 7
th
century BC
(Von Senger 1995: 302).

26
Ana Devic believes the phenomenon of the African-Russian Pushkin
is a reflection of similar sentiments based on the idea of successful im-
perialistic russification (she advanced this opinion at a seminar at the
Watson Institute of Brown University, where I discussed the four mod-
els in April 2001). For a critical analysis of the national program of the
Eurasianists see Shnirelman 1997.
27
This should not be understood as an absolute statement: intellectuals
representing Eurasionism were trying rather to understand the ob-
scure Russian identity, its constant uncertainty in East/West orienta-
tion. In a sense, it can be interpreted as an unconscious excuse for Rus-
sias underdevelopment as compared with Europe. Cf. Alexander
Bloks attempt to explain the revolutionary euphoria he and his artist
contemporaries experienced during the Bolshevik revolt as a reflection
of the wild and barbaric nature they inherited from the Scythians.

22
We already know several cases stating which of the aliens are
allowed and which are not allowed to be a branch (root) of a na-
tional tree. The African Pushkin, evidently, is not dangerous
for the Russian tree: presently there is no African threat for
Russia. Jews were and continue to be considered dangerous in
accordance to the traditional Russian anti-Semitic attitude. As
we mentioned earlier, the German-speaking Goths and also the
possible ancestral Finnish branches were dangerous, while
Scythians are absolutely harmless today (see Shnirelman 1993)
they cant claim any national territory from Russia. On the
Georgian tree, we have learned, Armenian branches are not
welcome, and the Armenian tree expels the Urartian roots,
unless they are naturalized (nationalized). And on the
Azerbaijani tree any alien root and branch is welcome also
after being nationalized. In the Armenian, Georgian and Rus-
sian trees alien kings are welcome. Those were the Arshakuni
dynasty of Parthian origin in Armenia and the Bagratuni dynasty
of Jewish origin both in Armenia and Georgia. In Armenia, the
famous Mamikonian aristocratic family was traditionally traced
back to a Chinese ancestor, and, although this genealogy was
thought to be a result of a phonetic confusion (Chan, the name of
the tribe neighboring the Mamikonians family province of
Tayk', mistaken for Chen Chinese see Adonts 1971: 403-404),
the alleged alien roots of this heroic family were never consid-
ered as something undesirable. And the Russian royal genealogy
is densely populated by aliens from Europe. However, this last
case of the alienness of the king relates to the otherness of the
First Man,
28
rather than to the schemes discussed here.

The Shortened and the Lengthened Paths
Finally, I will briefly outline a very telling case directly related to
our park metaphor and the discussed national genealogical trees.
This is the revolutionary rewriting of world history by A. Fo-
menko (see, e.g. Nosovskii and Fomenko 1996), which is very
popular among Russian patriots and intellectuals without a profes-
sional historical education. A. Fomenko, developing an old idea of
N. Morozov, tries to show that all the existing histories and chro-
nologies are but a fake and introduces his much shorter new

28
On the king as another see Airapetian 2001: b263. On the difference
between another and the other see b261.

chronology beginning somewhere in the 13
th
century. Before this
borderline, according to Fomenko, our information is very poor,
however, there is some scarce information about the period be-
tween the 10
th
and 13
th
centuries for example, about Jesus Christ
who died at the end of the 11
th
century but nothing is known
about the times before the 10
th
century.
29
From the many conclu-
sions of Fomenko and his collaborators one can see an obvious,
maybe unconscious, aim of the new chronology to shorten the
entire forest (park) of national trees in order to equalize it with the
Russian genealogical tree.
30
Usually the opposite operation is un-
dertaken in the Park of Identity. In order to feel comfortable in the
general row of tall trees, the tree cultivators, on the contrary,
artificially lengthen national trees to make them look taller. From
the Armenian viewpoint, the Azerbaijani national tree presents
just such a case as we have already mentioned, it is thought to
give rise after the appearance of a mass Turkic nomadic popula-
tion in the territory of the present Republic of Azerbaijan and Ira-
nian Azerbaijan in the 13
th
-14
th
centuries. In a similar way, Azer-
baijanis cut the genealogical tree of the Armenians of Mountain-
ous Gharabagh to the first half of the 19
th
century. Analogously,
Georgians cut the genealogical tree of the Abkhazians, and the
Abkhazians the Georgian tree in Abkhazia. National trees (histo-
ries) constructed by national historians are hence considered to be
artificial elongations. One can say that neighboring and competing
peoples always cut (shorten) each others national trees, but this
appears to be the first time when national jealousy results in such a
global ecological disaster.
We can conclude that although some nations, as we have
seen, fit more to one of the discussed four models, all the four
usually work together to constitute a nations identity. Russians,
as well as Armenians and Georgians, use the omnivorous Azer-

29
Although A. Fomenko is an academician in mathematics (this fact
attracts many readers), his historical and linguistic analyses are typical
pseudo-scientific speculations see a critical analysis of the new
chronology undertaken by prominent specialists in different branches
of science, which are reconsidered by Fomenko, in Istoriia i antiisto-
riia 2001.
30
Cf. analysis of Zhivov and Ivanov (2000) of the popularity of Fo-
menkos ideas in Soviet times (in opposition to the lying official doc-
trine) and post-Soviet period (theory of conspiracy against Russia).

24
baijani model; while Armenians and Azerbaijanis look for pres-
tigious forefathers like the Georgians, and Azerbaijanis and
Georgians, like Armenians, lead historical disputes with some
remote ancestor, trying to change his identity in their favor.

The Path of Naming

TWO

THE PATH OF NAMING
Naming as Nation Building

The Path of Demiurges
To remember something we give it a name. Unnamed things ac-
tually dont exist or if they exist, they have more of a chance to
pass away without leaving a trace. A name is such a trace. This
archaic semantic philosophy can be seen today in the modern
computing world, where unnamed files disappear during elec-
tronic cataclysms. And what is history if not a series of cata-
clysms. We need to know a name to learn its story, since every
name is actually a story at its beginning. For example, an Arme-
nian popular etymology of the toponym Nakhijevan tells a story
of its origin as the place where Noah stepped down from his Ark
for the first time after the flood. First time and descended are
heard in Armenian in this name. So the name confirms the
biblical story and the national legend on the beginning of the
Armenians. While the scientific etymology may tell quite an-
other story, where Noah may not be present at all. The original
form of the name is Nakhchavan, in which Nakhch'o (Nokhch'o)
is present, the name by which the Vainakh peoples of the North
Caucasus (the Chechen being one of them) call themselves (Dja-
hukian 1987: 443, 615). So instead of the story of Noah in bibli-
cal context we might have a story about the ancient inhabitants
of the place in the context of the recent hypothesis on the genetic
relations of Hurrian and Eastern Caucasian languages (Diakonoff
and Starostin 1986; 1988).
Sometimes the knowledge of a name could be enough to
pull many other stories out of it. For example, from a cunei-
form inscription left by the Urartian king Rusa on a rock near
Lake Sevan in Armenia we learn that he conquered a country

28
named Uelikuni (Uelikuhi). Nothing but the name is known of
this country. However, its stem uel- can be traced to the Indo-
European *uel-, which may indicate that the conquered people
were Indo-Europeans. This stem is related to the name Uel- (Vel-)
of an ancient Indo-European god with dragon-like characteristics
and is also reflected in other places, where ancient Indo-
Europeans lived, for example, in Vilnius in Lithuania (see Ivanov
and Toporov 1976: 125-126; Toporov 1980: 57). This name
could further tell a story about why the nearby mountains are so
rich in vishap or dragon stone monuments. And finally, it
helps us link the past and the present, since the present name of
the province Geghark'uni (Geark'uni) in the same place is a
phonetic transformation of this original Uelikuni.
1
Thus the name
gives us a key to the treasures hidden among the roots of our
national trees. At the same time, as we will soon see, it has a
great demiurgic power and can play the role of a seed which mi-
raculously gives rise to a strong and tall national tree.
This magic of the name has a huge archaic background and is
based on a universal idea of the name as the essence of the object
denominated. That is why mythological heroes and their succes-
sors in literature are often living and acting in strict correlation
with the meaning of their names. In many cultures a false name
is substituted for the real one in order to cheat the evil forces, or
these forces and even the Almighty are brought under control by
the revelation of their names. In many cosmogonies the Demi-
urge creates the world just by successive acts of naming. The
biblical Genesis also implicitly bears this archaic mode of crea-
tion: after filling the newly created world with all kinds of living
creatures, God asks Adam to name them (Gen. 2.19, 20). In other
traditions the great ancestors give names to everything they en-
counter during their initial journey of discovering the present-
day world, as the Australian Wauwalak sisters did in the begin-
ning of times (Berndt 1951: 20). The sons and grandsons of the
Armenian progenitor Hayk did the same when they settled in the
country that became the historical homeland of the Armenians.
Such acts of opening up the world can be typologically com-
pared with the act of creation (Abramian 1983: 119; cf. H. Petro-
syan 2001a: 14). Hayks offspring, like other name-giving he-

1
I use here Armen Petrosyans reconstructions see A. Petrosyan 1987.

The Path of Naming 29
roes, not only named the world of Nature but introduced another
form of Culture they built towns which they named after them-
selves (Khorenats'i 1913: I.12), so that the process of their set-
tling-naming approaches the act of creation even more.
2

Any resettlement in a sense recreates this original act of crea-
tion. Settlers also name the places where they resettle, but these
new demiurges seem to be more sentimental than their mytho-
logical prototypes, which is natural, if we take into account that
the first creators had no memory yet. Names the resettlers give to
new places often reflect nostalgia for their native land as in the
names New York or New Zealand. In this sense, Yerevan can be
compared to a puzzle consisting of units bearing the names of
the native land lost after the Genocide Nor Arabkir, Nor Sebas-
tia, Nor Kilikia (Cilicia), all with the prefix Nor (New). How-
ever, Nor now only exists on the building plan of the city,
whereas in everyday usage most of the new old names have
lost this prefix. Many citizens today are not even aware of this
name transformation and simply use Arabkir, Sebastia and
Kilikia, oriented exclusively toward the past (cf. Lur'e 1998:
347) while York or Zealand do not mean anything special for the
present-day inhabitants of New York or New Zealand.
In most cases the newly resettled lands were not virgin and
semiotically empty. Many obscure toponyms of today reflect the
ancient names of the former inhabitants. These names show that
the vanished predecessors either lived there when the newcomers
came or that the name of a place was still alive at that time. In
any case, the important role toponyms and hydronyms play in
modern linguistic reconstructions might indicate that the ancient
resettlers seemed to feel more respect toward the old names than
the modern ones do. However, renaming often reflects not an
opening up of a new land but a regaining of an old territory,
whether this regaining is historically based (a kind of recon-
quista) or not. But more often such regaining is only symbolic,

2
The Australian progenitor sisters also tried to transform the unnamed
Nature into a named Culture by cooking the named animals and
plants (in accordance with C. Levi-Strauss famous opposition of the
raw and the cooked), but they didnt succeed because of an act of sacri-
lege they had committed. As a result, the already named but not yet
culturized animals and plants ran away from the fire back to raw Na-
ture (see Abramian 1983: 89).

30
and renaming reflects regaining of a history and not of a terri-
tory,
3
as we will see in the Path of Renaming. However, regain-
ing or creating history may also lead to wars for territories that
figure into this history, since history and territory, as their more
abstract prototypes, the twin concepts of time and space, are al-
ways interlinked.
But to interlink these categories, a mediator is needed. This
mediator is the people that needs a territory to experience a his-
tory.
4
And here rises the problem of the name, since it is the
name that tells us the story and/or history of a people. What was
in the beginning? Do a people give their name to a territory
(country), as the land Hayk' (Armenia called by Armenians) was
named after Hay (endo-ethnonym of the Armenians), literally,
many Hays (Hayk' is the nom. plural of Hay), or, on the con-
trary, does a country give its name to the people, as was the case
with Americans? In either case, however, usually there is a First
Man progenitor, demiurge and/or discoverer who gives his
name to the country. In Armenian legend, the progenitor Hayk
gave his name to the land,
5
and the American continent and the

3
For an interesting case of a symbolic and factual re-discovery of a
land involving various types of renaming see in L. Kharatyan n.d.
4
Cf. definitions of the nation which almost always include characteris-
tics of shared territory and history or historic territory see, e.g.
Smith 1991: 14, 16.
5
According to Khorenats'i (1913: I.11), Hayk' Armenia was called
after Hayk. Etymologically Hayk' and Hayk both derive from Hay the
form Hayk through Hay-ik lit. little Hay (with the suffix -ik; diminu-
tive suffixes are characteristic for mythopoetic language in general, cf.
e.g., the theonym Astghik lit. Little Star (= Venus), Aphrodite, and
the name of Hayks son Aramaneak, with the related diminutive suffix
-ak). Thus, Khorenats'i proves to be correct in the etymological sense
of the word when saying that Hayk'-Armenia was called after the pro-
genitor of the Hay-Armenians. This does not mean that the form Hayk'
has derived from Hayk, as R. Thomson literally understands and rejects
Khorenats'i (see Khorenats'i 1978: 88, no. 6). For the interpretation of
the final -k of Hayk, see e.g. Alishan 1904: 127; Matikian 1920: 320;
Ananikian 1964: 65-66; for the figure of Hayk as the epicized version
of the archaic thunder god: A. Petrosyan 1997b: 22-24, 133-136, with
bibliography; for various considerations on the historical associations,
prototypes and etymology of the ethnonym Hay see Djahukian 1964:
63-67; 1987: 279-285 with references. (I am grateful to Armen Petro-
syan for shaping this footnote.)

future Americans were named after Amerigo Vespucci, who
appropriated this privilege from Christopher Columbus.
Both directions of naming, people to country and country to
people, are well-known phenomena, and in many cases the his-
tory of naming can be traced more or less accurately.
6
There are
also many cases when these two directions intertwine into an
intricate scheme. For example, the endo-ethnonym Bulgar of a
nomadic Turkic group gave name to a state on the territory to the
south of Danube River, where this group settled by the end of the
7
th
century AD. This name later passed to the Slavic population
of the state. Such manifestations of the creative power of the
name are typical especially for cases when a certain group moves
to a new territory, opening up or conquering the world.

The Path of Name Magic
However, a nation might also be created without difficult pas-
sages and conquests, merely as a result of the magic of naming.
History gives us examples of such namenation creations.
Benedict Anderson (1992: 157-158) presents one such example
concerning modern Vietnamese nationalism. On his coronation
in 1802, Gia-long wished to call his realm Nam Vit, which
meant Southern Vit and was in effect a claim to the old
realm, but the Manchu emperor, however, insisted that it be
called Vit Nam, which means, roughly to the south of Vit, a
realm conquered by the Han seventeen centuries earlier. Being
an artificial appellation emanating from Peking, this name was
not used extensively neither by the Chinese nor by the Vietnam-
ese in the nineteenth century, as it later was in the twentieth cen-
tury. Anderson concludes his analysis of this case: That todays
Vietnamese proudly defend a Vit Nam scornfully invented by a
nineteenth-century Manchu dynast reminds us of Renans dictum
that nations must have oubli bien des choses, but also, para-
doxically, of the imaginative power of nationalism (Anderson
1992: 158). However, the paradoxes of this case seem to show
only the upper part of the iceberg neglecting its hidden part the
specific role of the n a me in creating national history. In this
aspect Renans dictum does not fit too well to this case: what is
of importance for the contemporary Vietnamese, is the constitu-

6
See, for example, Nikonov 1970: 21, for an analysis of topographic
ethnonyms.

32
ent Vit and not the Vit Nam/Nam Vit controversy, which
was significant in the 19
th
century context. What is significant
for modern Vietnamese nationalists seems to be the fact that this
name oriented toward the glorious past of their country was not
in use during the nineteenth century. As a result of the described
dispute, the Chinese used an offensive name, Annam, while the
Vietnamese court used an unofficial but loyal name Dai Nam
(the Great South or Imperial South) (Anderson 1992: 157-
158). That is, what the Vietnamese, were it Gia-long in early 19
th

century or the modern nationalists, seem not to forget, is the
name Vit oriented toward the roots of their national tree. In
any case, they remember the past, which took place in the his-
tory of their ancestors. The Chinese rulers understood this, which
was the reason why they didnt want to support this memory also
by naming. Even Anderson seemed not to doubt this major trunk
of national argumentation, although he was more interested in
the intricate verdure of temporary twigs.
In a similar case of creating a national genealogical tree, that
of Azerbaijan, which fits Andersons analysis much better, the
roots are not remembered in a Vietnamese mode, they are just
invented, as we saw when discussing the Azerbaijani model in
the Path of Ancestors. For Iranian Azerbaijanis, a trend to natu-
ralize a local alien ancient root, that is, the historical Atropatena
(At/a/rpatakan), would resemble the fight for Armenian identity
of the Urartians in the Armenian model. However, such ma-
nipulations do not seem to be a crucial discourse in establishing
the national identity of the Iranian (Southern) Azerbaijanis,
7
in
contrast to the Azerbaijanis of Azerbaijan (Northern Azerbai-
janis), who dont hesitate to use the history of the South (At-
ropatena and Medea) for the needs of the North, justifying the
omnivorous name we gave to the Azerbaijani model.
Generally speaking, the Azerbaijani nation building process
widely involves the creative power of the name. The case of the

7
Many of them refer to themselves as Turks, but they do not imply in
using this term a greater Turkic identity than that of the Azerbaijanis in
the Republic of Azerbaijan, where the term is in less common use
(Shaffer 2000: 473-474, note 2). As a matter of fact, for many Azerbai-
janis in Iran the establishment of the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1991
served as a stimulant to identify with the Azerbaijani ethnic group
(Shaffer 2000: 450).

Caucasian Albania or Aghuank', which we briefly mentioned
when discussing the Azerbaijani model, is an excellent exam-
ple. This case is very instructive and consists of a combination of
name-oriented semiotical moves which are worth discussing in
more detail here. Albania was the name of a kingdom which
was located on the left side of the Kura River, as we learn from
ancient authors like Strabo. Hence Albanians are considered to
be the ancestors of the Azerbaijanis living on the territory of the
present-day Republic of Azerbaijan, which covers the territory of
this ancient kingdom. This is a usual way of constructing na-
tional history and has its specific problems and paradoxes as we
have seen in the Armenian and Russian national trees. But what
is interesting for us in this story is the magic of the name that
oversteps the ordinary discourse over a national tree root.
After the Armenian kingdom ceased to exist in 428 AD, two
Armenian provinces located on the right banks of the Kura
River, Utik' and Arts'akh (the future Mountainous Gharabagh),
formed a part of the kingdom of Albania. However, soon thereaf-
ter in 469 the Albanian kingdom also ceased to exist, and these
two provinces now became a part of a Persian administrative unit
also called Albania after its predecessor. As a result of Arabian
invasions, Persian domination loosened in the region, and a prin-
cipality was formed by the end of the sixth and at the beginning
of the seventh centuries, roughly in the place of this unit, which
continued to bear the name Albania. However, now the south-
ern, Armenian part of the former unit seemed to become the fo-
cus of the name Albania, while the northern tribes seemed to
lose their Albanian identity, which actually never seemed to be
much articulated.
8
Such name extensions and shrinking are not
something unique. They reflect the many moves in the historical
game, especially in feudal times. But in this particular case it
became the root of historiographic puzzles and eventually led to

8
As a matter of fact, the term Albanians never became an endo-
ethnonym, the name by which these tribes would call themselves. By
the 3
rd
century AD it seemed to be used in sources as a collective name
for the population of the kingdom of Albania. Neither did the northern
tribes consolidate into a single Albanian ethnos by the 5
th
century,
when the name Albania/Aghuank' was transferred to the territories on
the right banks of the Kura River as well (see Akopian 1987: 106-107,
148, 273-274).

34
the recent bloody war in the region.
In the early tenth century the Bagratide kings of Armenia
tried to re-unite the Armenian provinces into a new Great Arme-
nia. But they didnt succeed, mainly because of the principali-
ties feudal tendency toward dissipation (Akopian 1987: 269-
270), this opposition of centrifugal and centripetal trends being
an essential characteristic of Armenian identity, as we will see in
the Path of Dispersion. In the case of Albania/Aghuank', such an
opposition to unification took an interesting name-oriented form:
to prove her rights to sovereignty, Aghuank' used her specific
name.
9
This was actually an ethno-secessionist movement (Ako-
pian 1987: 269-271), although its advocates, of course, were not
thinking in these modern anthropological categories,
10
they just
wanted to be independent. No wonder that it was a h i s t o r i a n,
Movss Daskhurants'i (Kaghankatuats'i),
11
who undertook this
task.
12
Thus, already in the seventh or at least in the tenth century

9
The following analysis is based mainly on Alexan Hakobians book
on the history of Albania (Akopian 1987). See also the article by A.
Akopian (Hakobian), P. Mouradian, and K. Yuzbashian (1987) (re-
printed in Mouradian 1990: 9-52), which is a critical review of the
book by F. Mamedova (1986) interpreting Kaghankatuats'is book on
the Albanian history with a rigid and straightforward name-nation link.
10
Aleksan Hakobian used this category in a number of lectures on the
subject in 1988. However, his attitude was not encouraged by academic
circles in the context of the rallies of the time directed at the re-
unification of Mountainous Gharabagh with Armenia. By the way, Ale-
ksan Hakobian presents one of the most consistent examples of the
historian to politician transformation: being a historian specialized in
the history of Caucasian Albania he became a member of the Ghara-
bagh Committee to eventually become the governor of the K'arvachar
(the former Azerbaijani Lachin) province connecting Mountainous
Gharabagh with Armenia.
11
There are different opinions on whether these were the two names of
one Movss who lived in the 10
th
century, or there were two historians
bearing the same first name Movss and living respectively in the 7
th

and 10
th
centuries (see Akopian 1987: 166-177; Kaghankatuats'i 1983:
v-xvii; Mamedova 1977: 32-36 for discussion of yet another name-
centered problem). For convenience, we will refer to the author in
singular.
12
V. Arakelian thinks that either some feudal prince commissioned a
historian to undertake this task or it was the authors initiative. In any
case, we have either the classic politician-historian pair (as in the case

we have a case where a historian was constructing a national
history.

In other cases, in Armenia beginning with Movss
Khorenats'i, the father of Armenian history, this was not ex-
pressed so explicitly. History was either chronicled (hence the
name historiographer for these early historians) or interpreted
with an ethical or philosophical perspective.
13
While Daskhu-
rants'i/Kaghankatuats'i also pursued another principal aim to
prove that Albania/Aghuank' was a specific country different
from Armenia with a specific people differing from the Armeni-
ans.
14

In this sense the title of the work could give some clues to the
history-making logic of the author. As A. Hakobian states, fol-
lowing N. Akinean, the original name of the work was Pat-
mut'iwn Aghuanits' (Akopian 1987: 164-165), which can be in-
terpreted as History of Aghuank' (Albania) or History of the
Aghuanians (Albanians) both translations are grammatically
permissible. An eighteenth-century copyist invented a new title
Patmut'iwn Aghuanits' ashkharhi, also with two possible inter-
pretations, History of the Country of Aghuank' (Albania) and
History of the Country of the Aghuanians (Albanians), which
was used later in many publications and translations.
15
Non-
Armenian authors usually prefer to have the p e o p l e and not
the c o u n t r y in the title. But while C. Dowsett (see Dasxur-
anci 1961) evidently follows the translator tradition founded by
R. Thomson (see Khorenats'i 1978), F. Mamedova (1977) seems
to follow aims other than linguistic ones. For Mamedova, the
term Albanians unconditionally means an ethnonym, the name
of the tribes that were thought to be the direct ancestors of the

of Khorenats'i) or a nationalist intellectual anxious to have a national
history. Although V. Arakelian sees the centrifugal trends in Aghuank',
he seems not to recognize their ethno-separatist context (see Kaghan-
katuats'i 1983: xx).
13
Cf. Albert Stepanians analysis of Khorenats'is historical concep-
tion, in particular his specific attitude toward the past, present and fu-
ture (see Stepanian 1991: 134-189; Abrahamian 1991).
14
Cf. the opposite case, when neighboring but genetically not related
peoples, Armenians and Georgians, are declared relatives by blood by
constructing a legend stating that their respective progenitors were
brothers (Mroveli 1979: 21).
15
For the full list of the titles of the manuscript and published versions
of the History see Kaghankatuats'i 1983: xxxiv-xliv; Akopian 1987: 165.

36
modern Azerbaijanis. Her next step is another name-involving
operation to consider Albania a country with exclusively Alba-
nian population, a kind of a nation-state, with corresponding his-
torical, territorial and political reconsideration of Transcaucasus
(see Mamedova 1986; cf. Shnirelman 2001: 171).
16
While the
analysis of the text of the History shows that its author meant
History of Albania, since he was describing the country in
general and not its northern Lezgin-speaking tribes exclusively
(Akopian 1987: 148, 166; cf. Kaghankatuats'i 1983: xxvii). Even
if the books title will be understood as History of the Albani-
ans, the term Albanians is used here as the name of its citi-
zens, inhabitants of Albania with strict differentiation be-
tween the population of the right banks of the Kura River ( u s
implicitly Armenians) and that of the left banks ( t h e m ex-
plicitly barbarous northern tribes).

The Forking Path of Differentiation
To construct a national history, the author took as a model
Khorenats'is famous Hayots' patmut'iwn. In the same manner,
he introduced the progenitor of the Albanians. But while Khore-
nats'i did this in accordance with the well-known genealogical
tradition of interpreting a peoples history, Daskhurants'i/
Kaghankatuats'i also pursued another aim to prove that his

16
Interestingly, the same way of translating Khorenats'is Hayots' pat-
mut'iwn as History of the Armenians (and not as History of Arme-
nia) evidently serves Farida Mamedova as a basis to claim that it is
not correct to use the term history of Armenia and she proposes to
use history of the Armenian people instead, since, as she thinks, Ar-
menians were always scattered in the world and never formed a state
that one may call Armenia (in her article Ursachen und Folgen des
Karabach-Problems. Eine historische Untersuchung in Krisenherd
Kaukasus. Uwe Halbach and Andreas Kappeler (eds.). Baden-Baden:
Nomos, 1995, p. 114 cited by Stephan Astourian in his paper Some
Comments on Armenian and Azerbaijani Nationalisms presented at
the American University of Armenia on July 29, 1999). One has to
keep in mind that the Eastern Armenian academic tradition of using the
term History of the Armenian people has another aim to examine
the history of the Armenians from ethnogenesis through historical
states to modern nation (see, e.g., Aghayan et al. 1967-1984). We will
return to the double interpretation of Hayots' patmut'iwn and early
stages of the Armenian nation in the Path of Tradition.

people had a d i f f e r e n t history and hence a d i f f e r e n t
ancestor. However, the author didnt move too far away from the
Armenians traditional ancestor, T'orgom (Togarmah), who was
a grandson of Noahs son Japheth and the father of Hayk. As a
matter of fact, he couldnt go too far away the part of the world
where Armenia and Aghuank' were located, was thought to be
inhabited by the peoples originating from Japheth. But since all
the descendants of Japheth were already appropriated by one
people or another, Daskhurants'i/Kaghankatuats'i had to share an
ancestor with some other people. The author chose the Cypriots,
who were thought to originate from another grandson of Japheth,
Kittim, who was T'orgoms nephew. The author divides the
proto-Cypriots into two parts, the pagan islanders, that is, the
Cypriots, who left for the west, and those who stayed in the north
and gave birth to the Albanians (Kaghankatuats'i 1983: ch. I.2).
Khorenats'i had more freedom in fitting the national legend
about Hayk with the biblical story of flood survivors. The later
historians start to create a history, the less heroes, peoples and
cultures are available to chose national ancestors from. As a mat-
ter of fact, this is just what happened with the Azerbaijani histo-
rians who began to write their history only in Soviet times.
Thus for a seventh/tenth-century creator of a sovereign peo-
ple the most significant point was to have a h i s t o r y begin-
ning from a specific hero p r o g e n i t o r. It is interesting to fur-
ther follow the logic of this medieval demiurgic activity, since,
although it was following the traditional way of describing a
people, it also seems to correlate well with a description a mod-
ern analyst would give to an ethnie (Smith 1991: 19-28) or a
non-Western nation (Smith 1991: 11-12). After presenting in
Chapter I.2 the aforementioned genealogy of Japheth and the
origin of the Albanians (Chapter I.1 is a brief introduction pre-
senting Noahs genealogy), the author continues in Chapter I.3
with naming and counting the kings after Japheth and outlining
the borders of the world where Japheths sons spread. However,
the chapter is called On the peoples which know writing,
17

reflecting the first sentence of this chapter where peoples having
written language are listed, Armenians and Albanians among

17
C. Dowsett (Dasxuranci 1961: 3) uses nation for azg here (The
nations which are acquainted with [the art of] writing), while a more
neutral people seems to better fit the context of our analysis.

38
them. So the chapter names the second traditional characteristic
of a nation l a n g u a g e. More than that, we learn that Albani-
ans have had their specific language. This point raises many
questions. The first and the most essential is: in what language
was the original text of the History written? The most ancient
copy of the text dates from 1288-1289 and is written in Old Ar-
menian, although its orthography in general differs from the
classical one. A later copyist of 1761 complains in the colophon
of this (Kaghankatuats'i 1983: xlvi). Armenian scholars have no
doubt that both Movsses were Armenian and wrote the original
text in Armenian (see Mnatsakanian 1969 passim; Akopian
1987: 138, 226-240). More than that, they believe that Armenian
survived in Utik' and Arts'akh even after they became part of the
Albanian-Persian world in 428 (see Kaghankatuats'i 1983: xvii-
xviii) mainly because Mashtots' had established Armenian
schools in these two provinces early in the fifth century (de-
scribed in ch. I.27 and 28). Azerbaijani scholars, however, be-
lieve the original language of the History to be Albanian.
18

They believe Armenians destroyed the original text, translating it
into Armenian in advance, together with all the other Albanian
texts, especially those on the monuments of history and art, in
order to Armenianize them, as we know already from the Path of
Ancestors.
The fourth chapter introduces the first ruler of Aghuank'
named Aran. The country got its name after his nickname aghu
meaning gentle in Armenian another implicit hint in favor of
the Armenian proto-text (Mnatsakanian 1969: 128; Akopian
1987: 236-237). This means that the author used the country
people model, that is, Albanians are interpreted as a derivative
of the politonym Albania/Aghuank', and not as a tribal name
(lets recall Americans). Major Albanian tribes are named in
the same chapter, and we learn that their aristocracy was related
to the first mentioned ruler, Aran.
In the same fourth chapter the author outlines the b o u n d a -
r i e s of Aghuank' from the Araxes River to a spot where the
boundaries of Greater Armenia, Georgia and Aghuank' met
(Kaghankatvats'i 1969: 277, no.64). However, the word
boundaries figures in the next, the fifth, chapter, where the

18
See Mamedova 1977: 14, no. 1 for the literature on the question, cf.
also p. 153.

riches within Aghuank's borders are characterized. That is, we
now have a progenitor, a language, a territory, and a name story
for a people.
The next characteristic is r e l i g i o n, which is thoroughly
discussed in many chapters beginning with the sixth and seventh
chapters speaking about Eghisha, the disciple of the apostle
Thaddaeus, who founded the first church in Utik' and, in general,
Christianity in the East. Introducing this important characteristic
of a nation, the author of the History tries to accentuate that
Albanians were not subordinate to Armenians in this regard ei-
ther and were even the first to adopt Christianity: Thaddaeus was
killed by the Armenian king Sanatruk, so Eghisha avoided the
Armenians and chose Aghuank' for his preaching, although this
country also turned out to be unsafe, as he soon perished due to
unknown circumstances (Kaghankatuats'i 1983: ch. I.6). There
are also other places in the History where Aghuank' is pre-
sented as a country that adopted Christianity prior to Armenia
(chapters I.9, I.10, II.47, II.48, III.21), which reflects the fight for
supremacy between the Armenian and Albanian Churches (see
Akopian 1987: 141-142, 181-184, 207). Different manuscript
copies bear the traces of sometimes inconsistent censoring or
editing by the 18
th
-century Armenian catholicosi who, in their
turn, accused the Albanian clergy of earlier edits and insertions
in their favor (see Erevants'i 1873: 75; Akopian 1987: 152-153).
This competition in primacy reflects the needs of a separate na-
tion to have if not a separate, then at least a more ancient relig-
ion. Although the author of the History discusses the events of
the times of the Beginning, he seems to reflect a more recent
situation beginning in 552, when the Albanian Catholicosate was
established and received its ordination and canonical authority
from the Catholicos of Armenia (Ulubabian 1981: 201-204;
Tchilingirian 1997: 68). It is symptomatic that the competition
for primacy seemed to begin when the Albanian Church was
Armenianized: the establishment of the Albanian Catholicosate
was marked by the move of the head of the Albanian Church
from the left banks of the Kura (Derbend) inhabited by Albanian
tribes to the right banks (Partav) with an Armenian population.
19

19
Although the Albanian Church ruled over vast territories on the left
banks of the Kura River with the proper Albanian population, it became
ethnically more Armenian by the second part of the 6
th
century

40
Thus we have a list of the main characteristics of a nation at
least in its non-Western perception. However, one, and the most
important, characteristic is not yet in this list. This is the charac-
teristic of i d e n t i t y, which many scholars of nations and na-
tionalism consider the crucial, if not the only characteristic of a
group to become a separate ethnic unit. Regarding our case: what
did the term Albanian mean for the author of the History?
He never mentions his being Armenian. However, this could be
understood from the context of the History (cf. Akopian 1987:
7, 240-241, 266-269). Although the ethno-secessionist trend
forced its author to look for an independent genealogical line for
the Albanians, the proper Albanian tribes of the north were con-
sidered by him to be savage new-comers (Kaghankatuats'i
1983: ch. I.2; see also Akopian 1987: 239, 245, 251-252, 260-
261, 268-269, 275) a strange attitude of an Albanian national-
ist. After appropriating the northern country where these peo-
ples lived, the Armenian king Vagharshak addresses them and
asks them to do away with banditism and pay him tribute obedi-
ently. These peoples were considered so inferior that the author
doesnt even mention that the Armenian king had to conquer
them. The king appointed rulers to govern these peoples and the
principal ruler, Aran, as we know already, gave his gentle
nickname to the country. But this Aran, in contrast to the barbar-
ian newcomers, is described as a descendant of Japheth (cf. also
ch. I.15). That is, the special Albanian genealogy was created by
the author of the History for the native ruling elite of
Aghuank', which differentiated itself from the inferior newcom-
ers of the north. As A. Hakobian rightfully asserts, the Alba-
nian world-view of the author of the History was actually
only a part of his world-view, while its other part can be charac-
terized as an Armenian one. While creating the history of the
Albanians, the author was perceiving himself and his people who
lived on the right banks of the Kura River, as an ethnic part of
Armenia, thus differentiating themselves from the Albanians in
the true sense of this word, who lived on the left banks of the

(Akopian 1987: 139-140). Starting in the 15
th
century, the seat of the
Albanian Catholicos became the Gandzasar monastery in the present-
day Mountainous Gharabagh. In the 19
th
century the status of the Ca-
tholicosate was reduced, first to a metropolitan seat and then to a dio-
cese of the Armenian Church (Tchilingirian 1997: 69).

river (Akopian 1987: 251-252, 261-263, 275).
The ethno-separatist trend of Aghuank' to create a new eth-
nos, which might have had a future in the context of the tenth
century, later seemed to die down as a result of the Seljuk inva-
sions and the end of the Bagratuni kingdom (Akopian 1987:
271). Unlike the one-time ethno-secessionism which resulted
from a political secessionism, a powerful fight for political reun-
ion with Armenia took place in Arts'akh in the late 1980s based
on the idea of ethnic unity. However, Azerbaijani historians and
their assiduous students, politicians, and, as a consequence, the
common people following them, continue to abide under the
power of the magic of naming. Thus the author of the History of
Aghuank' tried to save his people from the centripetal appetites
of the Armenian medieval kings but, instead, put them into the
trap of modern Azarbaijani expansionism. Today, a Russian TV-
journalist can air an interview with a Shushi Azerbaijani inhabi-
tant (in 1988) speaking about his Albanian daughter-in-law
(meaning an Armenian of Mountainous Gharabagh), and an
American journalist can write about Albania citing an Azerbai-
jani high official (who meant Mountainous Gharabagh) (see
Kinzer 1997) without even being aware of all these name-
involved puzzle pieces.
One can say that the Armenian creator of the History of Agh-
uank', as a result of name magic, was looking across the Kura
River for Albanian realities, for example, for the Albanian script.
In the same manner and due to the same name magic, the
modern creators of the history of Azerbaijan look for Albanian
realities across the Kura River but now they do this from its
left banks. As we can see, the magic of naming does not lose its
creative power with time. More than that, it may lead to bloody
wars many centuries after the miracle of creation. Hopefully, this
is not always the case. The name Bulgaria, for example, is still in
use without any irredentist dreams of the contemporary Bulgari-
ans concerning the Volga River basin territories, from where
their name-donors originated. Perhaps this is the case only be-
cause the Volga is much too far away from the Danube.

The Path of Renaming

THREE

THE PATH OF RENAMING
Recall/Forget Your Name: Strategies
of Renaming

The Path of Symbolic Return
Since we dont live in the beginning of time and almost every-
thing is already named, we have to rename rather than name the
things we want changed or recreated. Such renaming is espe-
cially typical for countries that gain political independence with
different strategies used in the renaming process. Renaming usu-
ally aims to erase an undesirable past, to get rid of the names
inherited from the previous regime. This is the logic of renaming
cities and streets in the former Soviet republics with their pre-
Soviet names. This strategy of renaming can be described as a
leap back to the past, to the point where people would miracu-
lously like to move to have the opportunity to transform history
and proceed to the future (which actually coincides with the pre-
sent), in a better way. Sometimes as in the case of Leningrad,
people were so hateful of the Soviet past that they preferred to
skip over the citys pre-Soviet Russian name (Petrograd) in favor
of its original Germanized name Sankt-Peterburg (St. Peters-
burg) in order to avoid the Time of Troubles impregnated with
future revolutions. In a similar manner, a surgeon may cut a little
beyond the actual cancer tissue to avoid a possible remission of
the disease.
In a similar situation, the Armenians of the city of Leninakan
decided to get rid of Lenins name by leaping all the way back to
the citys early 19
th
-century name, Gyumri, rather than to Alex-
andrapol, the name which the city was given in 1837 on the oc-
casion of the birth of the Russian princess Alexandra. No wonder

46
that this latter name could not be a good historical stop, as it
would symbolize yet another foreign empire, the predecessor of
the Soviet one. But while the history of Leningrad ends with St.
Petersburg, the history of Leninakan goes back much farther, at
least to Kumairi of Urartian times. As a people with a histori-
cal model of identity, the citizens of Leninakan faced the task of
gaining back this most ancient name. This may have been un-
consciously motivated by the desire to have no less an ancient
name as Yerevan (Erevan, originating from the Urartian re-
buni) there is a traditional one-sided competition of the resi-
dents of Leninakan, a provincial city with ancient artisan tradi-
tions, with the residents of Yerevan, the capital of Armenia,
1
an
urban monster of modern times devoid of a stable urban structure
and town traditions.
2
However, Kumayri lost to Gyumri, its late
palatalized transformation, a result of a Turkic influence, at a
referendum on the citys renaming in 1991.
3
The reason was said
to be the phonetic closeness of Kumayri to an Armenian obscene
curse involving ones mother (mayr), but it also seems that the
power of traditionalism among the Leninakants'i played a very
strong role (our fathers called it Gyumri, so let us have this
same name), which appears to be stronger in this case than the
traditional animosity toward Turkic realities. So in this instance,
a sense of tradition won over the traditional historical model.
In Yerevan, the process of renaming, which took place soon af-
ter gaining independence, strictly followed the historical model
reconfirming the historical trend of the Armenians we discussed in
the Path of Ancestors. But it was not a nostalgia for pre-Soviet

1
This competition seemed to lose its actuality after the disastrous
earthquake of 1988 that left Leninakan in ruins. The last self-praising
joke concerning the center-periphery opposition says: We knew that
we were the center but we didnt know that we were the epicenter.
Center in this joke puns the slang ts'entr (Russian word for center)
meaning the best (see also Platz 1996: ch.1 for different aspects of
the Armenian center).
2
See Naselenie Yerevana 1986 for details of an ethno-sociological
study of Yerevan.
3
There was an opinion doubting the correctness of putting the name
Gyumri at a referendum, as well as the method of the referendum itself
in the case of Leninakan with a large non-indigenous population see
an article by Karl Seghbosyan with a telling title A Referendum for a
Historical Fact? (Azg, 1991, Oct. 19).

The Path of Renaming 47
Yerevan, as was the case in St. Petersburg and Moscow. As a mat-
ter of fact, old Yerevan was not only renamed but thoroughly re-
built in Soviet times,
4
so that going back to the pre-Soviet names
of a few old streets would please the hearts of only a small group
of citizens who could claim their ancestors were hin yerevants'i
(old Yerevan residents). At the same time, some of the new names
of the old streets had already become traditional for the present
generation and even for their grandparents. For example, the for-
mer central street, named after the 19
th
century governor of Yere-
van, Astafyev (T. Hakobyan 1959: 560), was renamed Abovian
Street in Soviet times, after the 19
th
century writer Khach'atur
Abovian, an icon of Armenian identity, and, naturally, was not
further renamed in post-Soviet times. Although the former name
of the street referred to Russian empire realities, it nevertheless
was not perceived as foreign by the old residents of Yerevan; they
even Armenianized its Russian name colloquially calling it
Astafyan.A new hotel and nightclub, the exact architectural an-
tithesis of the original buildings characteristic of this street, now
bears the nostalgic Astafyan name.
A special Commission on renaming that was created in 1991
was not interested in such minor historical leaps. It introduced

4
It is interesting that the construction mode adopted by the Yerevan
builders was (and continues to be) against historical preservation, so
that many old structures and streets were totally rebuilt rather than pre-
served. If the communist anti-religious campaign destroyed the reli-
gious buildings of Yerevan, the eager architects did the same with the
civil part of the city. Even the great architect Alexander T'amanian tore
down a medieval church to build his famous Opera House on the same
spot. Although he did not do this out of anti-religious zeal but followed
some constructionist and mystic ideas which we will discuss in the Path
of Rebellion and Festival, the result was the same. Old Yerevan was
constantly rebuilt, and tourists visiting the city were often surprised to
see an almost entirely new city, which was claimed by its inhabitants to
be more than 27 centuries old. Fortunately, the Urartian fortress re-
buni, the progenitor of contemporary Yerevan, happened to be located
out of the mainstream of the citys continuous reconstruction and was
excavated only in modern times, so that Yerevan was given material
proof of actually being very ancient. However, at present there are
some serious doubts that the fortress was excavated and reconstructed
correctly, so that even in this case we have to be ready for some thor-
ough future rebuilding.

48
a real historical renaming deserving of the model discussed in
the Path of Ancestors. As a result, streets that had communist
names gained new names mainly reflecting the heroes and reali-
ties of the 5
th
century, the Golden Age of Armenian culture.
Lenin Avenue was renamed Mashtots' Avenue in 1990, in honor
of the inventor of the Armenian alphabet,
5
now the adjacent Ki-
rov Street, which bore the name of a devoted follower of Lenin,
was renamed after Koryun, the disciple of Mashtots'. In accor-
dance to the historical context, Mashtots' Avenue starts its run
from a spot where it crosses a street renamed after Grigor Lusa-
vorich' (the Illuminator), the great predecessor of Mashtots'. This
street was already renamed, together with Mashtots' Avenue,
before the Commission began its creative work. Tellingly, its
previous name Karmir Banaki (of the Red Army) correlated
with the illuminating role of the Red Army that brought the
light of communism to Armenia. The Commission renamed
another street, which crosses Mashtots' Avenue close to its be-
ginning, to King Vramshapuh Street, after the king who commis-
sioned the great task of alphabet creation to Mashtots'.
6

Although the authors of this demiurgic job were intellectuals
(historians, philologists and anthropologists), they were commis-
sioned for it by the state and their ideas were supported by the
authorities. In any case, this was a renaming from above. It
was structurally opposed by a renaming from below. While the
streets were renamed in accordance with the historical model,
the stores, cafs, restaurants, casinos and other privatized ob-
jects (as they are called in the respective documents) located on
these streets, were named or renamed by their owners who fol-
lowed quite another line of thinking. The process of renaming
the businesses on these streets seems to continue indefinitely
the objects are constantly changing owners who immediately
begin to change their appearance and names, often, they are
not inwardly oriented, toward the nations history and territory,

5
The Lenin to Mashtots' renaming also followed a special logic to be
discussed in the Path of Memory.
6
Later it regained its Amiryan name. However, this was not a return to
Soviet realities (Amiryan was a figure of the communist past he was
one of the Baku 26 commissars) but was said to be a result of a too
pronounced Persianness of the kings name and its phonetic dissonance
for the Armenian ear as compared with the better sounding Amiryan.

but outwardly, toward the future and the world beyond (e.g. Eu-
ropolis, Eurostyle, Manhattan, Monaco) reflecting the
global trends of the time.
7
This resembles a cartoon showing a
big pointer consisted of many tiny pointers indicating the oppo-
site direction.
There is another strategy of renaming used by the former So-
viet republics and other administrative units, which enjoy full or
relative independence after the fall of the Soviet empire. Instead of
(or in addition to) expressing anti-Soviet feelings it also expresses
anti-Russian or, in a broader sense, anti-colonial feelings. That is
why the Russian names Bashkiria and Kirgizia were changed
respectively to Bashkortostan and Kyrgyzstan, the latter becoming
a real pronunciation problem for Russian-speakers. Nations with a
longer history and greater experience in having different names in
different languages for their nations and countries (like Armenians
or Georgians) have not used this strategy which focuses on a sense
of national dignity.
8
Their renaming strategy, as we saw, is mainly
oriented toward the depths of history.
All these manipulations of the name seem to be related to its
magic power and are done unconsciously at times but, as a rule,
with a special aim. An example of an unconscious use can be
seen in the phrase former Soviet Union, which became a set
expression, while former is quite unnecessary in many cases of
referring to this now historic state. It is as if we conduct a kind of
protective magic by pronouncing it each time in order to keep
this monstrous formation safe in the past we dont say, for ex-
ample, the former Roman empire. In the same way, by pro-
nouncing a name we seem to unfold and call to life the realities,
which are folded inside it. Thus, in December 1989 the Supreme

7
On the popular, non-official names of the quarters of contemporary
Yerevan see Mirzoyan n.d..
8
The only anti-imperialist renaming that I know targets the prefix
Trans of Transcaucasus rightly judging it to present a view from Rus-
sia over the Caucasian mountains. Presently the name South Cau-
casus symmetrical to North Caucasus is often used to substitute
Transcaucasus. But this term is considered to be geographically inac-
curate for Armenia, so instead of Andrkovkas some Armenian scholars
use a patriotic term Aysrkovkas, which could be translated as This-
side-of-the-Caucasus, trying to oppose this side and that side,
here and there.

50
Soviet of the Armenian SSR was driven into a real panic after
Levon Ter-Petrossian, the future President of Armenia, read
among the corrections to the Armenian Soviet Constitution pro-
posed by the All Armenian National Movement he was repre-
senting, a point on renaming the Armenian SSR to the Republic
of Armenia. The communist session was so eager to oppose this
point, which recalled the name of the Dashnak Republic of
Armenia of 1918-20, that it rejected all the proposals of the op-
position, while the session was ready to discuss and even likely
to accept some of these proposals, though they looked much
more revolutionary at the time (e.g., the point about deleting the
leading role of the Communist Party).
It is symptomatic, that the Georgians began their fight against
the Ossets who were claiming independence, by rejecting the
name South Ossetia.
9
In the late 1980s, the Georgians also put
into action a campaign of identity re-building on the basis of re-
naming. It appealed to the Armenians of Georgia who had for-
gotten their being Georgians in the past to return to the bosom
of their original nation it is claimed in particular that among
the catholic Armenians of Georgia there are many former Geor-
gians who were given Armenian names when being converted to
Catholicism in the 19
th
century. The title Recall Thy Name of
an article in the newspaper Zaria Vostoka (1990, May 13) il-
lustrates the logic of this name-oriented campaign, which hardly
needed any additional magic (see also Topchishvili 1989).
Another case of name oblivion, which uses the opposite logic
of Forget Thy Name, is the extraction of the name Armenian
Highland of a plateau in Asia Minor
10
from maps and scholarly
books currently published in Turkey and Western countries
evidently in order to forget the Armenians who lived there be-
fore being expelled in 1915-18. Only Armenian geographers and
historians continue to use the old name in memory of their lost
historical homeland.

9
Hence the title South Ossetia: On the History of the Name of the
booklet written by an Osset scholar, Yu. S. Gagloiti (1993), in response.
10
This name was introduced by geologist Herman Abich at the end of
the 19
th
century and was widely accepted in the first decades of the 20
th

century.

The Forking Path of Name Anarchy
The changing of names is most characteristic of revolutions,
which in many aspects are related to the world of magic. No
wonder the demiurgic power of naming is widely used to create
a new world in place of the annihilated one. The French revolu-
tion began this tradition in the late 18
th
century, and the Russian
revolution continued it in the early 20
th
century. Besides using
the creative power of naming, revolution in its turn gave it a new
quality freedom.
11
Being freed of tradition and tradition al-
ways plays a great role in naming names stepped out of their
national borders. This does not mean that traditional names were
inaccessible to foreign influences before the revolution. On the
contrary, most Armenian names are of foreign origin. However,
these foreign intrusions were always in the context of the history
of the Armenians and are actually a good reflection of this, while
the revolutionary freedom of name changes gave an individual
the freedom of appealing to any foreign reality in search of a
name. Revolutions in general are fighting against tradition, but
the revolutionary freedom in naming in fact destroys the tradi-
tion even more thoroughly, since the name is itself a strong tradi-
tional marker of national identity. A liberated person may fol-
low new ideas
12
(as in the creation of the name Lekdar, an ab-
breviation of the call Lsir eritasard, komunist dardzir Listen,
young man, become a communist) or the exotic beauty of un-
known words (like in Dizenteria dysentery
13
), and may also
move freely to any country (cf. Poget from Po get River
Poe). This globalization of names can be compared with the
globalized names of the Yerevan street objects in the 1990s.
However, many such names finally came back to their national
home. For example, those having the name Lentrosh, an ab-
breviation of Lenin, Trotsky, Shahumian, had to change it to

11
Cf. the twice declared (in 1918 and 1924) rights of Soviet citizens to
freely change their first and last names (see Papernyi 1996: 187).
12
See Papernyi 1996: 184-187 for the name to concept (e.g., Vladimir-
skoe Highway to Enthusiasts Highway) and concept to name (e.g., Tri-
umph Square to Mayakovski Square) renaming trends respectively in
the early Soviet and Stalinist cultures.
13
It was believed that the few unfortunate women bearing this name
were dissipated among the bearers of Dezi (Dezik) abbreviatiated form
of the Shakespearian name Dezdemona.

52
Lendrosh after Trotsky was expelled from the allowed list,
giving it a new faithful meaning of Leninyan drosh (Lenins
flag). After the discredit of Lenins name, a Lendrosh may
change further to just Levon, an Armenian traditional name re-
calling the former political name with some of its letters. I know
one Lekdar who also changed his name to Levon, evidently for
the same reason. But more telling is the story of metamorphoses
of the name Lestabera. Given initially after Lenin, Stalin and
Beria it was changed to Lesta after Berias political bankruptcy,
but soon, when Stalin followed the infamous path of Beria, the
bearer of the name changed it to Tat'evik, a traditional Armenian
name, evidently feeling tired of following the unstable fate of the
heroes of her name.
14

The anarchy of revolutionary name changes, as in these last
examples, enjoys a relatively short-lived freedom.
15
Although a
non-traditional name may sometimes manage to withstand time,
eventually finding its niche in the network of national name giv-
ing, as happened, for example, with the Shakespearian Hamlet in
Armenia. Unlike personal names, the names given to peoples
and countries, as we saw in the Path of Naming, stick to them for
a much longer time, sometimes forever. Of course, provided a
people does not long to be rid of it, as we discussed in relation to
the term former Soviet Union. But even in this latter case this
is not an absolute truth: there are communists and many elderly
people who presently mourn the loss of this name which is a
symbol of the glorious past for some anda symbol of lost mate-
rial security for others. Also, although Soviet propaganda was
obviously exaggerated when it claimed that a new type of social
reality, the Soviet people, had already been formed, many
people who presently appeal to the preventive magic of the word
former, forget in their anti-Soviet negation that a process of a
kind of national consolidation had nevertheless been initiated in

14
I am indebted to D. Vardumyan for the story of this name.
15
In Leninakan/Gyumri, the more or less flexible system of naming
children came to a sudden end after the earthquake of 1988. The tradi-
tional system of naming children after relatives was recreated here to
commemorate the perished (Margaryan 2000: ch.2.2), this return to
tradition involved all the strange names that were already present in the
Leninakan naming network before the disaster.

the recent Soviet past.
16
That is, the magic of naming could lead
to the shaping of a kind of nation, as happened in the case of the
names Azerbaijan and Albania/Aghuank'.

The Forking Path of Faking
The creation (invention) of history by early historians raises the
problem of faking and interpretation regarding these early his-
torical texts. The History of [the Country of] Aghuank' is es-
pecially interesting in this respect, since in this case we have not
just the creation and interpretation of a peoples history, but also
an attempt to compete with another historical text, in this case
Khorenats'is History of Armenia let us recall the invention
of a new ancestor for the Albanians. Although such history con-
structions formally resemble the modern methods of historical
falsification, they cant be classified as such, since the medieval
attitude toward sources differed from the modern one (cf.
Akopian, Mouradian, Yuzbashian 1987: 170, ftn. 11; see also
Sarkissian 1991: 68-80). However, some modern historians fail
to see this difference. For example, R. Thomsons criticism of
Khorenats'i seems to be addressed to a modern historian-falsifier,
rather than to a medieval author (Khorenats'i 1970: 56-61, espe-
cially p. 58). Such an approach is actually an anachronistic re-
vival of hypercriticism directed at Khorenats'i.
17
At the same
time, the opposite, hypocritical, approach to the History of Ar-
menia which was typical of the Middle Ages, is also present in
contemporary Armenian studies.
18
However, one has to differen-
tiate another type of modern reverential attitude toward Khorena-
ts'i from that of the medieval authors. For example, the archae-
ologist Simon Hmayakian compares the father of Armenian

16
Cf. the imperial overlapping of definitions Russian and Soviet in So-
viet times and differentiation of russkij (ethnic Russian) and rossijskij
(Russian in the sense of being related to Russia) in post-Soviet times.
17
For a criticism of R. Thomsons hypercriticism of Khorenats'i see G.
Sarkissian 1991: 58-86.
18
For a criticism of hypocriticism concerning Khorenats'i, see G. Sark-
issian 1986: 39-45; 1991: 86-88. The Azerbaijani interpretation of the
history of Caucasian Albania discussed in the Path of Naming is actu-
ally based on a similar hypocritical attitude toward the work of
Kaghankatuats'i cf. F.Mamedovas relying completely on this medie-
val source, since, in her view, its author knew the situation much better
than anyone else (Mamedova 1987: 12-13; Shnirelman 2001: 171).

54
historiography, from whom the Armenian people was begotten,
to a kind of a totem, and his History to a kind of a fetish a
sacred book which one can only i n t e r p r e t. This fetish of the
Armenians is torn to pieces symbolically (criticism as an act of
tearing to pieces) and literally, as a book of Armenian history
was torn to pieces in Sumgait in late February 1988 by the Azer-
baijani pogrom-makers who said to its owner, an Armenian
schoolmistress, that Armenians have to write their history
anew.
19

A modern falsifier of history is a trained historian who con-
sciously misinterprets sources to attain his/her goals. Falsifica-
tion seems to play such an ordinary role in history constructions
nowadays that it has become the most popular accusation in his-
torical discourse. However, a misunderstanding in discourse
might be a result of the different models and historical traditions
followed by opponents rather than being the result of falsifica-
tion. This draws the modern historian closer to his medieval
predecessors. For example, Armenian and Georgian historians
may interpret a number of historical and cultural phenomena
concerning the region they live in with a certain slant because of
the textbooks these historians used to read in school.
20
An Azer-
baijani historian who studied Azerbaijani textbooks on the his-
tory of Azerbaijan would never agree with his Armenian col-
league who learned history from contrasting textbooks and vice
versa. The dispute between Georgians and Armenians may often
be based on feelings of national pride, as in the dispute regarding
Mashtots's invention of the Georgian alphabet, and may deal
with only a few years of history,
21
while the Armenian and

19
I noticed that on the bookshelf in Hmayakians office, where he
kindly presented this interesting approach to Khorenats'i to me, a newly
printed copy of the 1913 edition of the History was prominently
placed with its cover facing us. See Hmayakian n.d. for a general out-
line of this approach.
20
Thus, the history of the region changes considerably depending on
the nationality, Armenian or Georgian, of Ivane and Zakare, the two
influential feudal princes of the 12
th
-13
th
century.
21
For example, in the dispute about the origin of a unique architectural
style common to both countries since the seventh century AD. This
dispute is also based on the feeling of national pride. However, Arme-
nian-Georgian historical debates may at times also go back to very an-
cient times. For instance, the Near Eastern Mushks of the first millen-

Azerbaijani historical disputes may deal with centuries and even
millennia.
22

During Soviet rule, opponents from the national republics
used to appeal to the elder brother Russian specialists from
Moscow as arbiters of their disputes. This resembles political
situations, where the conflicting sides such as Armenia and
Azerbaijan or Georgia and Abkhazia were seeking justice in the
Kremlin. However, the elder brother, as a rule, couldnt solve
the problem because it was principally impossible to satisfy both
sides that stand in polar positions. In addition, the center was
always suspected of having interests in one or both of the oppos-
ing sides (as was also the case in ethnic conflicts). The Soviet
method of history building was itself an elaborate system of fal-
sifications and free manipulations of historical events, so that it
could hardly help in solving marginal historical puzzles, espe-
cially when they were related to the recent Soviet past of the na-
tional republics. Historical science of the glasnost period began
its revisions with simple inversions all the positive values were
automatically claimed as negative ones, and vice versa. Very
soon a number of serious problems arose, since it turned out that
many key events were consciously eliminated from the history of
the Soviet Union and its constituents.
23
Many schools and uni-
versities even decided to temporarily stop teaching modern his-
tory until new textbooks were published. This tradition of con-
stantly rewriting history was reflected during the time of pere-
stroika in a joke characterizing the Soviet Union as a state with
an unpredictable past.
Post-Soviet historical constructions continue the same tradi-
tion. Even today one can observe that recent events experience
transformations in accordance with constantly changing interpre-
tations. For example, the bloody repression of the military revolt
in Baku by Soviet troops in January 1990 was classified by a
Moscow TV channel immediately after the dramatic event as a

nium BC are considered to be related to the proto-Armenians by Arme-
nian scholars, and to the Meskhs (one of the tribes of Georgia) and to
the proto-Georgians in general by Georgian scholars.
22
For example, when treating Azerbaijanis or Gharabaghian Armenians
as newcomers or autochthonous people.
23
For example, it is very difficult to learn much about the first Repub-
lic of Armenia (1918-1920) from Soviet era textbooks.

56
reaction to an anti-constitutional attempt at armed seizure of
power. In January 1991 the same channel provided a new ver-
sion presented by Azerbaijani TV: the same dramatic events
were now paradoxically interpreted as a repression of the democ-
ratic demonstrations that were protesting against the local gov-
ernments connivance of the Armenian pogroms (the last large-
scale pogroms against Armenians took place in Baku just before
the military repression). Finally, in January 1996 the same TV
channel presented the latest Azerbaijani version of the event; it
was now classified as a repression of the movement aimed at
democratic reforms and the territorial unity of Azerbaijan. This
time it referred to the initial cause of the rallies in Baku as being
the decision of Mountainous Gharabagh (an autonomous prov-
ince of the former Azerbaijanian SSR with a majority of Arme-
nians) to secede from Azerbaijan. Thus the same repressive ac-
tion, which created many innocent victims, was interpreted as
being the Kremlins reaction respectively to the f i n a l part of
the rallies (attempt of an anti-constitutional armed coup), to the
mi d d l e part (Armenian pogroms), and the b e g i n n i n g
(peaceful demonstrations), the accent now being moved toward
this last one.
When speaking of history constructions, one also has to take
into account the obvious non-scientific or quasi-scientific his-
torical reconstructions, which can be found in almost every
country. Although these patterns of national history may
sometimes look rather fantastic, they can better manifest the
models of identity constructions, which in scientific reconstruc-
tions may be present only implicitly. While modern scientific
falsifications are typologically close to the medieval models of
history making, modern fantastic reconstructions of national his-
tory could be compared with the works of ancient historians like
Herodotes.
24

The Circling Path of Manipulations with Time
The strategy of renaming discussed in the beginning of this Path,
that is, the journeys in time to the most desired points in the past,
is sometimes used by the opposed parties as a war tactic, a
means of retaliatory name aggression. These cases deal with
the different political statuses (reflected in respective names) a

24
I am indebted to Professor Sergei Arutiunov for this last correlation.

territory at issue may have at different times. For example, the
war in Abkhazia, which started in August 1992, was preceded by
two successive resolutions passed respectively by the parlia-
ments of Georgia and of Abkhazia. The first declared that the
new constitution of Georgia would be based on the constitution
of the first republic of Georgia of 1917-1921. According to this
constitution, Abkhazia was a part of Georgia. In response, the
Abkhasian parliament appealed to the Abkhazian constitution of
1921-1931, according to which Abkhazia had the status of a So-
viet republic. This was regarded by the Georgians as an act of
secession, and Georgian troops invaded Abkhazia to prevent the
disintegration of their country.
The actual war was preceded by this war of names involving
symbolic manipulations with time and was a result of the lack of
convergence of the two times recreated. Such journeys in time
are one of the most typical peculiarities of post-Soviet state
building. Almost every newly independent state of the CIS has
passed resolutions, which attempt to eliminate the Soviet period
from their history. While most of the methods discussed in the
Path of Ancestors relate to expanding the national history (tree)
by appropriating alien history (roots and branches), this new
method, on the contrary, tries to reduce, and reshape it by cutting
down undesirable periods (segments of the trunk). An example
of such manipulations of history was the resolution passed by the
Russian Duma on March 15, 1996, which actually restored the
Soviet Union and thus declared all the events that had happened
after its collapse as non-existent, although this attempt to revital-
ize the troubled tree remained only a curious archival fact. These
manipulations are especially characteristic of regional conflicts
where the two opposed sides usually create parallel histories
which deny each other.
25
Such situations fit the semantics of pos-
sible worlds, as Suren Zolian (1994; 1995a) illustrates with the

25
The more usual cases, when one side (as a rule, the subordinate one)
passes a resolution appealing to a certain period of its history, while the
other side simply nullifies it, are of less interest in this context, since
the resolutions are directly fighting and not trying to avoid each other,
as in the discussed cases. Thus, the Abkhazian parliament already had
declared its independence in August 1990, but the Georgian parliament
simply nullified it. In the same way the first resolution of the Moun-
tainous Gharabagh session was nullified by the Azerbaijani parliament.

58
example of the Gharabagh conflict: when describing a conflict,
one is dealing neither with the world that exists presently nor
with the one that existed in the past, but with a world that mu s t
be. From another perspective, each of the arguing sides tries to
escape from its opponent by moving to some invulnerable point
in the past, as we see in the symbolic phase of the conflict be-
tween Abkhazia and Georgia, which was soon followed by a real
and bloody war.
In addition, the state may use other symbolic means in order
to undertake journeys in time. For example, the way Armenia
symbolized its independence after gaining it politically, provides
a good opportunity to look into the workings of such a time ma-
chine. Armenia perceived its independence as a return to the
first Republic of 1918-20, much like Azerbaijan and Georgia
did. In this context, it would hardly be a surprise that the first
Republics state symbols were passed down to the new Republic.
However, while the old national flag and anthem
26
did not meet
serious objections in the parliament, the old coat of arms did, and
a contest to create a new coat of arms was even announced. This
contest did not provide a final answer, although it made it very
clear that in fact only two versions exist in peoples minds, one
based on the pattern inherited from the first Republic, the other
based on the coat of arms of Soviet Armenia. The parliament
debates concerning the coat (March 25, 1991) show that the
main problem was not the symbolism of the two coats (which
itself provides interesting material for the issues of identity and
history building
27
), but rather the approach to the history: those
who rejected the Soviet coat of arms, were in fact rejecting 70

26
The pessimistic words of the old anthem (based on the melody of an
Italian song a telling case of national choices) were replaced by more
optimistic ones. An interesting dispute took place concerning the flag.
A deputy raised the question of changing its colors or even the design
to avoid the undesirable transformation of the national red-blue-orange
tricolor to the Soviet red-blue-red combination as a possible result of
fading under the hot sun of Armenia. Interestingly, the closeness of the
two flags was also discussed during Soviet rule: there was an opinion
that the colors of the Soviet flag were chosen by patriotic Armenian
communists to resemble the national tricolor.
27
Cf. the presence of the Mt. Ararat, the traditional symbol of Arme-
nian identity, on both coats see H. Petrosyan 2001b: 38-39.

years of Soviet history.
28
At first, President Levon Ter-Petrossian
was giving preference to the artistic design of the Soviet coat,
but near the end of the session, when it became obvious that the
central issue was history and not aesthetics, he changed his mind
and the coat of arms of the Republic of 1918-1920 was accepted
for the new Republic.
29
Thus all the components of state symbol-
ism manifested that the new Armenian state made a leap along
the time axis back to the first Republic skipping its immediate
predecessor, Soviet Armenia. The trend to go back exactly to the
same point was so great in Armenia, that the declaration about
independence was read at the first session of the new Republic of

28
Following the heraldic rules, one would expect to have a combina-
tion of the coats of the previous two Republics in the coat of their suc-
cessor, the third Republic of Armenia, the proportion of the elements
borrowed from these coats manifesting the political orientation of the
new Republic. Iconographically, this could be expressed, for example,
by shaping the shield of the first Republics coat in the manner resem-
bling the Soviet coats framing or using its Mt. Ararat image realized
by the great Martiros Sarian. A deputy I was consulting accepted this
idea of historical continuity and assured me that he would propose it at
the Parliament hearing on the question of the coat of arms. But instead,
he proposed another idea based on the same principle, although not
directed toward the recent history of Armenia but toward her roots.
He proposed to add another heraldic animal, the Urartian one, to the
four animals on the coat of the first Republic symbolizing the four Ar-
menian dynasties. The proposition was rejected, since the coat was al-
ready criticized for being overcrowded with animals, it was even called
a zoo for this reason. It is characteristic that the deputys historical
construction followed the Armenian model discussed in the Path of
Ancestors.
29
The coat of arms of the first Republic lived too a short life to acquire
its final shape, so that the designers commissioned to recreate it for the
third, the present-day Republic of Armenia, had to use the surviving
reproductions of the original sketches. Two stamps, however, have
been preserved in archival documents, one showing Noahs Ark on Mt.
Ararat, the other without it. Evidently, the executive organs of the State
had to use some temporary seals while waiting for the Parliament to
pass an official law concerning the coat of arms. So the new Republic
had two options to iconographically symbolize her history. The deci-
sion was the Presidents he chose the biblical version with the Ark.
(The author was a consultant in the governmental commission respon-
sible for the realization of the coat.).

60
Armenia by a deputy whose name happened to be Aram
Manukian, which was the name of one of the famous founders of
the first republic. Analogous symbolic returns to pre-Soviet
times was typical to each former Soviet republic of the Trans-
caucasus.
Parallel to the euphoria of eternal return, such repetitions of
the past made some people anxious of vicious circles in history.
Thus, an elderly woman who was rejoicing with her compatriots
for regaining the once forbidden past, was taken aback with a
feeling of anxiety when this return to the Beginning began to be
realized with such frightening precision up to the name of
Aram Manukian. The long ambiguity toward the coat of arms,
which Levon Ter-Petrossian seemed to experience at first, could
speak of his unwillingness, at least unconsciously, to go back
precisely to the time of the first Republic. However, he couldnt
resist the fatal return to the past and forced the parliament to
vote in favor of the old coat. If we have accepted the old flag
and anthem, we have to also accept the old coat of arms, he
concluded. This starting point should have already been undesir-
able for him because of his hatred of the Dashnaks who were the
ruling force during the first Republic. One may speculate that
this was the hidden reason for his persecution of the Dashnaks:
to restart from this starting point without Dashnaks and thus
avoid the vicious circle in the history of Armenia.
30

These political performances have many features in common
with archaic magical ceremonies. During such ceremonies, the
ritual action and a properly pronounced spell transform the per-
formers into the totemic ancestors, while the whole society tem-
porarily moves to the blessed period of the Beginning.
31
Actu-
ally, these first parliament actions were the last echoes of the
rallies that manifested many peculiarities of the archaic festival,
as we will see in the Path of Rebellion and Festival. However,
festivals never last long. In the same way, the magical transfor-
mations and journeys in time, which were realized by the par-
liaments, could only last for a short period of time. In Armenia,
we will see, the social structure of the society, which underwent

30
I borrowed this idea from Armen Petrosyan (personal communica-
tion).
31
On the structural similarities of modern political and archaic ritual
performances see Abrahamian 1990a.

festive reconstructions during the rallies, mainly returned to its
initial condition afterwards. Civil society was created in Arme-
nia, in fact, only in the square during the rallies. Georgia gained
civil war instead of civil society and later, its former communist
leader in democratic disguise. Azerbaijan ran a wide range of
situations violent and peaceful, democratic and nationalistic,
presently resembling the authoritarian Soviet regime embodied
in the former communist leader.
32

Armenia seemed to resist the return to the communist past
longer than her neighbors, at least during Levon Ter-Petrossians
times and mainly due to his anti-communist image. However,
during his regime, very soon after the revolution of the late
1980s, the institution of the president in fact replaced the institu-
tion of the communist party (see Zolian 1995b). The much-
anticipated return of Karen Demirchian, the former communist
leader, to power came to its dramatic end on October 27, 1999,
when he was assassinated together with other deputies in a ter-
rorist action at the Armenian Parliament. However, the present-
day president of Armenia, Robert Kocharian, represents, at least
genetically, the communist elite of the Soviet past, albeit of a
lower level he began his political career as a communist leader
of an enterprise in Mountainous Gharabagh.
We should also include Russia in this observation to follow
the four models discussed in the Path of Ancestors. It is symp-
tomatic that the Russian Duma which, like other post-Soviet par-
liaments, proudly went back to the state symbols of pre-Soviet
times the coat of arms and the flag of the Russian empire, nev-
ertheless got stuck on the anthem: in 2000 deputies voted in
favor of the former Soviet anthem instead of the expected impe-
rial one. As expected, Russia also got her leader with an iron
arm
33
and KGB past. Let us also recall the nostalgia for the So-
viet past for the great masses of a once comparatively prosperous

32
On the state and nation building in the three republics of the Tran-
scaucasus see Abrahamian 1997.
33
Cf. the communists dreams of Stalins return, Andropovs short-
lived efforts in regaining discipline through terror or the popular dis-
cussion of perestroika times initiated by I. Kliamkin and A. Migranian
on whether Russia needs an iron arm (Literaturnaia gazeta, 1989,
August 16, p. 10; September 20, p. 10). On the post-Soviet reflections
of this theme see Mau 2000.

62
people who are now the poor of the countries in question.
34

So, while the three republics of the Transcaucasus tend to
symbolically return to the times of the first Republics by at-
tempting to jump over the Soviet period, in reality they often
seem to end up exactly in this recent past of their history, which
they are trying so hard to avoid and forget.

34
See H. Kharatyan (ed.) 2001 for the description and discussion of the
problem of poverty in post-communist Armenia.

The Path of Language

FOUR

THE PATH OF LANGUAGE
Mother Tongue and the Cult of Translation

The Original Path of the Mother Tongue
As we saw, the most beaten track in our park seems to be the
path leading to the nations glorious past, hence the name his-
torical for the Armenian root-oriented national tree. But we
also saw that the most ancient layers of the history are pulled
out by means of the language. That is how the Path of Ances-
tors crosses the Path of Language.
Although in the set of factors forming national identity lan-
guage is sometimes thought to be not as important there are
many cases when persons who do not speak the mother tongue
nevertheless claim to have the identity of the language they dont
speak and other cases, where different peoples with different
national identities speak the same language. In any case, this fac-
tor is at least the most audible component of national identity.
Even if not classified as the most crucial among national
characteristics, language often takes the prime role in cases re-
lated to the identity question. This is well illustrated by the fol-
lowing recent episode. During a popular Russian TV program,
children were asked to secretly choose a word and then use im-
ages and riddles to describe this word to a panel of adults. As in
a game of charades, the adults were then asked to try and guess
the word on the basis of the clues provided by the childrens im-
ages and riddles. Tellingly, several children chose an image of a
person speaking a foreign language as a clue to the word na-
tionality. In the same way, people tend to think consciously
about language only when encountering a foreign language. In-

66
deed, a persons mother tongue is not heard or distinguished
unless compared with some alien language,
1
as his/her national
self-awareness becomes a reality only when encountering an-
other nationality.
2
Perhaps that is why in Russian the word for
pagan is iazychnik (jazynik), from iazyk (jazyk) which in Old
and Church Slavonic meant both languageand ethnos
3
(Fas-
mer 1973: 551) the pagan, the alien is considered to be a per-
son who speaks a language. On the other hand, once ones own
language has been distinguished as a language from other lan-
guages, foreign languages often appear as a pseudo-language, as
incomprehensible mumbling. Thus Hellenes considered all the
peoples who didnt speak Greek to be barbarians, and the word
barbaros, which was also adopted by the Armenian language,
originated from words meaning mumbling (Acharian 1971:
420).
4
Interestingly, the barbarian English took revenge
upon the arrogant Hellenes with the modern meaning of gib-
berish for Greek. The Russian word for German (and a
Westerner in general) nemets (nemec), presents an even starker
case, as nemets (nemec) descends from nemoi (nemoj), dumb
or mute (Fasmer 1971: 62) a foreign language is not heard
by Russians.
There is also a less probable opinion that barbaros derives
from the Armenian bar' word (with reduplication), penetrating
later into the Greek and through it into other languages (see
Acharian 1971: 420 for this opinion of Schrder). That is, in-
stead of incomprehensible mumbling the barbarians are initially

1
Perhaps, that is the reason why the best experts on a language are
sometimes people for whom this language is either not their mother
tongue, or who bear some alienness in their personality or back-
ground. For example, the best explanatory dictionary of the Russian
language was compiled by Vladimir Dal', the famous Russian lexicog-
rapher and ethnographer, whose father was Danish and mother German.
Dal's work was supplemented by J. Baudouin de Courtenay, another
famous specialist in Russian of foreign descent.
2
Cf. the forming of the self-image through the other in the mirror
see Abramian 1983: 137-168.
3
Armenians chose the ethnos meaning to designate pagan
het'anos derives from ethnos.
4
Cf. the Chinese anatomatized explanation of the barbarians inabil-
ity to speak properly some of them are described as having tongues
fixed in the inverted position (Yuan Ke 1987: 199).

The Path of Language 67
attributed with a word, even with a double word (bar-bar-os)
cf. the Russian jazynik. In any case, the different etymologies of
the word barbaros could illustrate the logic of introducing an
alien into ones own world: incomprehensible speech becomes
an alien speech deprived of human characteristics (barbaros
from mumbling) to become a language, a word (barbaros from
bar' word) of an alien whom we would like to understand but
are unable to cf.: Scythians are barbaros for Athenians, while
Athenians are barbaros for Scythians (Acharian 1971: 420
citing Anacharsis, a Hellenized Scythian). It is noteworthy that
our own mumbling eventually returns as a foreign language
helping us to understand ourselves.
5

However, the perception of an alien quality distinguished by
speech continues to play its role in modern times. Perhaps the
Stalinist state security services of Armenia were thinking in the
same archaic way when in the 1930s they incriminated Hrach'ya
Acharian, a prominent Armenian linguist, for being a spy for
numerous foreign countries on the basis of the many languages
he knew.
6
Intriguingly, in the Armenia of the mid-1990s, the
alienness of those speaking foreign languages emerged as a
similar problem for the former President Levon Ter-Petrossian,
who was known as a polyglot.
Paradoxically, then, the mother tongue the language
through which forms of national identity are articulated does
not usually appear as a language to its speakers. Rather, people
who know only their native tongue just speak it. Indeed, the
mother tongue becomes a symbol of national identity only for
those who know other, foreign languages. Hence the universal
idea on the superiority of a mother tongue when compared with
other languages, which is rightly considered to present evidence
of the emergence of the phenomenon of nationhood. The model
of such a comparison was studied by Liah Greenfeld on the ex-
amples of the 16
th
-18
th
century European nations (Greenfeld
1992: 67-70, 244) and was recently re-examined by Armen

5
Cf. the evolution of perceiving alien cultures in the history of anthro-
pology from non-human to exotic and inferior to a means to under-
stand ones own culture.
6
Traditional national animosity played its role even in this absurd
drama, as Acharian, though forced to plead guilty to this absurd accusa-
tion, was nevertheless said to have denied being a Turkish spy.

68
Aivazian (2001) with similar Armenian examples beginning with
the fifth-century Armenian author Eghish (Khach'ikyan 1992:
249; Eghish 2003: 817) and lasting until the late-18
th
century.
Eghish concludes the comparison of the Armenian language
with nine other languages: Armenian is sweet and capable of
embracing all these languages in itself. This idea was further
developed by Grigor Tat'evats'i in the late-14
th
century:
Armenian is sweet; and an Armenian is able to learn all lan-
guages completely and correctly, but others learn Armenian in a
faulty and distorted version, because their languages are imper-
fect (Arm. Aivazian 2001: 22, 29-30).
7
Four centuries later, M.
Ch'amch'ian explained this latter observation by the fact that
Armenian was not subject to the confusion of languages during
the destruction of the Tower of Babel, continuing to be the origi-
nal language spoken by God, Adam and Noah (Arm. Aivazian
2001: 32-33, 53-54). No wonder that this appeal to the original
language correlates with the historical, Armenian, model dis-
cussed in the Path of Ancestors.
8
While the English version of
language comparison correspondingly correlates with the om-
nivorous model: the excellency and sweetness of the English
tongue is concluded from its capacity to gather, like bees, the
honey of good properties of other languages, leaving them the
dregs (Greenfeld 1992: 69-70, citing Richard Carews Epistle on
the Excellency of the English Tongue (1595-96)).
In modern times, the mother tongue becomes a symbol of na-
tional identity for bilinguals, marginals or nationalist intellectu-
als who explicitly champion their native language as a n a -
t i o n a l cause. Often, such individuals are specialists in linguis-
tics, as was the case in Armenia during the flowering of national
consciousness in the late 1980s, the time of the linguist President

7
Passages in Armenian translated by Arm. Aivazian (2001: 52).
8
Paradoxically, the appeal of early (and some modern) Armenian na-
tionalists to the antiquity of the Armenian language can find some cor-
roboration in the modern trend in reconsidering the relation of Arme-
nian to proto-Indo-European on the ground of the newly found deep
Indo-European archaisms in the Armenian language traces of laryn-
geals, the structure of a number of occlusives, etc. (see Toporov 1982).
This situation resembles the not so rare mysterious coincidences of folk
etymology or natural-philosophic speculations with unexpected scien-
tific discoveries.

Ter-Petrossians political ascent. It is characteristic that Azerbai-
jan was lead at that time by another linguist President, Ebulfez
Elchibey. Let us also recall Stalin, the Father of nations, who
wrote a profound work on Marxism and the Problems of Lin-
guistics (although it was authored in reality by the academician
Vinogradov).
9

But the most radical advocates of a central role for language
in the process of national-identity formation usually stand quite
far away from linguistics. Such people prefer to speculate on the
advanced achievements in linguistics in order to gain scientific
substantiation for their nationalist political constructions. We
already know how Armenian nationalists broadly appeal in their
historical and political constructions to the hypothesis of T.
Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov (1984), which locates the homeland
of the Indo-Europeans within the historical ethnic territory of the
Armenians. The late general Dudayev, the rebel leader of
Chechnia, also used to refer to modern linguistic research, when
he claimed that the Chechens would dominate the other Cauca-
sian nations, as the Chechen language was the most ancient in
the region (see Mineev 1991: 8). Evidently, the general in his
own peculiar way interpreted the linguistic hypothesis of the
closeness of the present-day East-Caucasian languages (to which
group the Chechen language belongs) to the ancient Hurrian lan-
guages (see, e.g. Diakonov and Starostin 1988), to which the
Urartian language belonged. By the way, Dudayev had con-
structed his linguistically based theory of national dominance
in the Caucasus just before the bloody war in Chechnia made its
realization impossible. In this sense it is worth mentioning
Ranko Bugarskis interesting observation on the competing na-
tionalisms and interethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia as being pre-
ceded by their symbolic expressions in language (Bugarski

9
This linguistic interest of Stalin contrasts with his Georgian ac-
cented (foreign) Russian. It was also said that he avoided long
speeches in order to conceal his weak Russian, although this seems to
be a Russians articulation of his alienness.
The speech of modern First Men is a topic deserving of a special study
let us only mention the famous language of Lenin (see Abrahamian
1999a: 19), the mumbling speech of Brezhnev, the fluent shallow
speech of Gorbachev and the Bushonics of President Bush.

70
1997).
10

Linguistic theories are broadly used for building national his-
tory, especially the prehistoric past: in ethnogenetic construc-
tions, language often becomes the only evidence of the ethnic
roots of a society. And since these roots are widely held to con-
fer a nation some special right to occupy specific territories, lan-
guage often stands out among the set of factors shaping national
identity. Thus language figures directly or indirectly in a wide
range of nationalist phenomena: from speculative myths on na-
tional origins, to historical claims on a perceived national terri-
tory, to the formation and legitimation of irredentist political
ideologies. No wonder that ethnogenetic speculations play a cen-
tral role especially in Europe with its intricate ethnic history,
while they are much less popular in America with its relatively
brief history
11
and its long-held notion of being a cultural melt-
ing pot, especially as ethnogenetic speculations may raise the
well-known and avoided question of the native inhabitants of the
country. It is interesting in this respect that for modern American
culture, the dinosaur rather than the mammoth became the most
popular symbol, while both are represented equally abundantly
as paleonthological material. However, the emphasis on mam-
moths may inevitably call to life their contemporaries, while di-
nosaurs are quite harmless in this respect
12
they lived too
long ago to refer to one or another human race.
13
In light of all this, it is interesting to note that ethnogenetic
investigations were not encouraged in the Soviet Union until the
late 1930s. During the first decade of Soviet power, the interna-
tionalist school of M. Pokrovsky was the dominant perspective
in Soviet historical science. This school denied the validity of

10
Cf. Tishkov 2001: 17 on the speaking out of the conflict and ver-
bal violence preceding physical violence.
11
There is a vengeful European opinion thatthis lack of a past in
American culture is being compensated for by an extensive search for
the future, as can be seen in the exaggerated interest of the American
cinema and TV industry in science fiction.
12
It is characteristic that the cult of dinosaurs in American culture
eventually developed to a point where the dinosaurs got out of the con-
trol of their creators, as happened in Steven Spielbergs Jurassic
Park.
13
I borrowed this idea from anthropologist Igor Krupnik, who kindly
allowed me to use it here.

even the term Russian history, out of respect for the numerous
non-Russian ethnic groups who lived in Russia (Shnirelman
1993: 52-53). The linguistic theory of Nikolai Marr became an-
other factor discouraging ethnogenetic research in the early So-
viet period. Marrs ideas dominated Soviet academics in these
years. Marrs theory turned the language pyramid upside down,
inverting the unnatural image of many languages standing on
one peak that is, originating from a common source to the
natural position of one (future) language resting on a base of
many diverse origins. In short, Marrs fantastic theory denied the
principle of the tree-like differentiation of languages over time
(and hence of the importance of alien influences on particular
languages), asserting instead the development of language
through progressive stages embodied by social classes.
14
Perhaps the most absurd consequence of Marrs theory was
the position developed in the early 1930s by the Soviet archae-
ologist V. I. Ravdonikas, whose working method we briefly out-
lined in another cultural context in the Path of Ancestors. A fol-
lower of Marrs linguistic ideas, Ravdonikas formulated a novel
account of the ethnic origin of the German-speaking Goths who
lived in southern Russia in early medieval times. Against his
German opponents, Ravdonikas explained the German language
of the Goths in terms of Marrs stage-theory of language. His
argument boiled down to the claim that different peoples living
on different territories might create the same language independ-
ently, due to similar social-economical conditions (Shnirelman
1993: 57-58).
In 1936, Pokrovskys school was severely attacked as anti-
historical. This signaled a new trend emphasizing concrete his-
torical studies in the Soviet social sciences. Paradoxically, how-
ever, this sharp change in research agendas was, until 1950,
framed as a continuation of Marrs work. In that year, Marrs
school itself was also officially denounced after Stalin published
the aforementioned linguistic work. In any case, from the late
1930s to the present day, ethnogenetic speculation together
with the linguistic one has represented the most popular
framework for discussions on national history and identity on the
territories of the former Soviet Union.

14
On the mythological aspects of Marrs bizarre linguistic theories, see
Alpatov (1991: 6-111).

72

The Forking Path of Purism
Together with the ethnogenetic speculations discussed in the
Path of Ancestors, the particular paths along which national
identities crystallize, also shape and constrain the language pol-
icy of states, or at the very least, affect the formulation of na-
tional language policies. Moreover, such policies can help us to
understand a societys past and, as in the Yugoslav case, to fore-
cast possible future political trends. But national language poli-
cies tell us, naturally, more about the present, especially about
the ethnic structure and ethnic problems of the societies in which
they are formulated. For example, both the language policy of
the former Georgian Soviet republic, and that of the newly inde-
pendent Republic of Georgia, clearly reflect all the political
problems Georgia has had and continues to face in regard to its
ethnic minorities. For instance, the Constitution of the Georgian
SSR of 1978 declared Georgian as the republics state language
(alongside Russian), while the constitution of the Abkhazian
Autonomous Republic within Georgia declared Abkhazian as the
autonomous republics state language (alongside Georgian and
Russian). Although the process of adoption of each of these
documents had different backgrounds (see Jones 1995: 546-547,
nos. 6 and 14), this symmetrical feature of the two constitutions
foreshadowed the secession of Georgia from the USSR, and then
the secession of Abkhazia from Georgia.
In comparison with Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Georgians
were always more radical in questions concerning national lan-
guage and nationalism in general. As a matter of fact, mass pro-
tests in Georgia against Soviet proposals to impose Russian as
the only state language in the republic prompted the adoption of
the aforementioned articles in the 1978 Georgian constitution on
state-languages. These demonstrations forced the Soviet authori-
ties in Moscow to give Georgian the status of a state language. In
Armenia, only a few intellectuals raised objections to a similar
proposal to declare Russian as the republics state language.
However, the authorities, frightened by the mass actions in
Georgia, decided to declare Armenian and Azerbaijani state lan-
guages at the republican level, without waiting for similar mani-
festations in either republic. Thus, thanks to the activities of
Georgian nationalists, the three Transcaucasian republics gained
their national language as the second official state language, in

marked contrast to other Soviet republics.
However, language policy does not always correspond to the
ethnic structure of a society. For example, similar struggles
against the Russian language in Estonia and Armenia in the early
1990s were based on quite different ethnic situations. In Estonia,
the adoption of an anti-Russian language policy was obviously
directed against ethnic Russians living in the republic, who con-
stituted the bulk of the Russian-speaking population. On the
other hand, the adoption of policies meant to discourage the offi-
cial use of Russian in the practically monoethnic Armenian Re-
public were in fact directed against Russian-speaking Armeni-
ans, particularly refugees from Azerbaijan who attended Russian
schools before being expelled from Azerbaijan in late 1980s and
thus could only speak an Armenian dialect, at best. Thus the
same language policy may favor the consolidation of a nation in
one case (leaving aside the troubling moral aspects of Estonias
anti-Russian policy here), while artificially dividing an already
consolidated nation in another case.
15
Ironically, the destructive
effects of Armenias recent anti-Russian language policy were an
unintended by-product of a mostly symbolic policy, as Armenia
had already gained her independence from Russia.
16
On the other hand, the anti-Russian language policy in Arme-
nia was in a sense an expression of purist trends. Thus in Esto-
nia, the adoption of an anti-Russian language policy was de-
signed as an explicit step toward expelling the foreigners (the
Russians) who had occupied the country, while in the nearly
monoethnic Armenia the adoption of practically the same policy
reflected the nationalist discourse of self-purification, of expel-
ling the foreigner in ones self by expelling foreign Russian
words from Armenian daily life.
17
Thus, during one of the na-

15
On the national consolidation of Armenians shortly before adopting
an anti-Russian language policy see the Path of Rebellion and Festival.
16
Fortunately for the refugees from Azerbaijan, the extremist project of
decreeing an immediate and complete switch of the language of in-
struction in Russian-oriented schools to Armenian failed in Parliament,
and a more moderate and less painful project of stage-by-stage transi-
tion, beginning with the lower grades, was accepted. However, this
gradual transition policy has not always been strictly observed in edu-
cational practice.
17
A significant percentage of the relatively small ethnic-Russian com-

74
tionalist rallies of 1988, a well-known Armenian linguist called
on the people to begin freeing themselves from Russian by tak-
ing the first step of changing the script of their signatures and
nameplates on their apartment doors from Russian to Armenian.
Many of the linguistically oriented nationalist intellectuals active
in this early phase of nationalism-building subsequently set the
purist tone of the anti-Russian language policies adopted by
the post-communist Armenian government.
Generally speaking, purism should have played a consider-
able role in preserving Armenian national identity, since Arme-
nian culture and language are layered with foreign imports of
various age and origins, a fact which reflects the geographical
situation and historical background of Armenia. Thus, for many
years Armenian was thought to be a branch of the same linguis-
tic subgroup of the Indo-European languages as Farsi, due to the
wide number of Persian cognates in the Armenian language. This
position was widely held until 1875, when H. Hbshmann
proved Armenian to be a separate Indo-European language.
As we have mentioned, the adoption of anti-Russian language
policies in Armenia also reflected a certain post factum policy of
revenge or reaction against the Soviet states long-term policies
of trying to assimilate non-Russian societies into the Soviet order
through the local promotion of the Russian language in the for-
mer national republics. This phenomenon can be described as
political aphasia, since in some cases non-Russian former citi-
zens of the USSR not only refused to speak Russian, but also had
real psychological difficulties in speaking this language. For in-
stance, I would describe the following incident as a case of
temporary political aphasia. In July 1988, Soviet troops re-

munity in Armenia emigrated in the early 1990s. Estimating very
roughly, no less than one third of the 51,500 ethnic Russians registered
as living in Armenia in the 1989 Census emigrated in this period. How-
ever, most analysts attribute this emigration to the very difficult eco-
nomic conditions in Armenia in these years, rather than to the conse-
quences of Armenias post-Soviet language policies, though these poli-
cies did cause additional difficulties for the ethnic Russian community
and may thus have augmented the pace of immigration somewhat. In
the same years, an estimated 600,000 to 1 million Armenians (of the 3
million registered in the 1989 Census) left the country. However, since
1996 some of these Armenian migrs have returned, the Russians
seem to have left Armenia permanently.

acted cruelly and brutally against peaceful demonstrations at the
Yerevan airport, in the process shooting to death a student. My
bilingual informant couldnt speak Russian for a couple of days
immediately following these events.
18
Indeed, the Soviet states policy of trying to accelerate assimi-
lation through language policy was actually one of the factors
which stimulated the collapse of the USSR, in contrast with the
more common analysis that the permitting of local languages
helped bring about the dissolution by facilitating the rise of native
elites. In this respect, the Soviet empire inherited the language
policy of its predecessor, the Russian empire. For example, at the
end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the
Russian government initiated a very repressive language policy of
closing schools using national languages as part of its drive to
forcibly spread the Russian language throughout the empire. In
Armenia, this triggered a burst of nationalist reaction; in particu-
lar, Armenian nationalists responded with a series of terrorist acts.
As a matter of fact, this russifying language policy partly stimu-
lated the formation of nationalist parties in Armenia.
One must acknowledge that during the first two decades fol-
lowing the Bolshevik Revolution, the language policy of the So-
viet state differed considerably from the policy of the Russian em-
pire. This early policy was conciliatory toward the languages and
traditions of the many nations and national minorities that com-
prised the Soviet Union, and certainly encouraged the develop-
ment of many national languages by helping to create alphabets
for those which never had them. Thus in the mid-1920s, about 30
new written languages were created. By 1934, textbooks had been
published in 104 languages. But from 1936 on, an assimilatory
language policy typical of totalitarian states became more and
more prominent in Soviet national policy. In the 1980s, the drive
to implement an assimilationist policy based on Russian entered a
new phase. Between the late 1930s and the 1980s, this assimila-
tionist policy complemented the drive to confirm the final vic-
tory of Soviet ideology through the claim that a new ethnographic
entity, the Soviet people, had come into being in the USSR. To
corroborate this theory, Soviet anthropologists and sociologists

18
Cf. Boris Pasternaks difficulties in writing in German, a language he
knew very well, after the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933
(Pasternak 1990: 139).

76
rushed to empirically prove the existence of a new people shar-
ing a common Soviet identity and socialist culture and speaking a
common language, namely Russian.
19
However, the burst of nationalism in the late 1980s and early
1990s across the USSR showed that the formation of such an
entity was in fact a fiction. One could argue that the forced cul-
tural equalization aimed at by later Soviet policies resulted in a
forced increase of entropy that brought the Soviet empires liv-
ing organism to its thermodynamic death.
20
And the forced
unification of language, obviously, played a significant role in
this process.
In Armenia, where the genocide of 1915 forms a key theme
or root paradigm,
21
the russifying language policy of the late-
Soviet period was interpreted as language genocide.
22
How-
ever, we should note that the purist fight against russification
in Soviet Armenia developed alongside a contrary tendency,
namely the growing social identification of attending Russian
schools with enhanced social prestige. However, the seemingly
contradictory spread of both of these trends in Armenian society
reflects the linguistic dilemmas of subordinate groups well aware
of both their bilingualism and their status as an ethnic minority.
Those who spoke only Armenian, on the other hand, faced no
identity problems related to language, as they spoke only the
mother tongue. Again, I would reiterate that the mother tongue is
not perceived by its speakers as a language as such unless it is
compared to some other language. Thus the fight for a national
language in Armenia has been closely related to the problem of
bilingualism.

19
See, for instance, Kim 1974; Sovetskii narod 1975; Bromlei and
Chistov 1987: 12, citing Gorbachev; Bruk (1986: 141) listing this entity
in an ethnodemographic directory.
20
On the collapse of the USSR as a result of increasing systemic en-
tropy, see Abrahamian 1990c: 67-68. Cf. Starovoitova 1998: Introd.
21
See Dudwick (1989: 64), who uses Victor Turners concept of the
root paradigm to characterize the key elements of contemporary Ar-
menian national consciousness.
22
The banners of the 1988 nationalist rallies in Armenia clearly express
this theme.

The Forking Path of Bilingualism
The close relation between bilingualism and nationalism is quite
natural, since a long period of co-existence between two spoken
languages in a given society may well eventuate in the gradual
death of the language with a lower status. Due to the creeping
effects of the post-1935 shift in Soviet policies in favor of grad-
ual russification, and the concomitant association of Russian
with honor and status in the Soviet hierarchy, the national lan-
guages of the non-Russian Soviet republics became identified in
official life and in employment opportunities with a lower social
status. The sweeping social consequences of these shifts explain
the intense preoccupation with the problem of bilingualism in the
Baltic republics, especially in Estonia, where the fight against
Soviet i.e., Russian-language domination was more acute
than in other former Soviet republics. Against this backdrop, the
attempt by some Estonian nationalists to develop a scientific
proof that bilingualism is harmful to human societies becomes
more understandable.
Attempts to assess the effect of bilingualism on the intellec-
tual qualities of the bilingual child have been the subject of much
discussion, research, argument and speculation since the begin-
ning of the 20th century.
Examples of arguments that bilingualism has a negative ef-
fect on the child often entail claims that the second language
negatively impacts the bilingual childs own world perception.
23

Similar notions can be traced back as far as the work of Rabin-
dranath Tagore (1961) in the late 19th century, who considered
textbooks in foreign languages incapable of serving as a medium
for understanding the richness of Indian culture. Tagores ideas
thus attempted to account for the very real differences between
the world described in these textbooks and the familiar world of
native culture (cf. Okonkwo 1985: 122). A contemporary phi-
losopher adds that while the main opposition in Western cultures
and languages is that between life and death, in the Indian cul-
ture, the principal metaphorical-conceptual opposition is be-
tween free and non-free conditions. Crucially, Indian tradition

23
See, for example, Okonkwo 1985: 118-126 (Nigerian case) and
Graburn and Iutzi-Mitchell 1992 (case of the peoples of the North). On
social issues and policy implications related to bilingualism, see Bilin-
gualism 1983.

78
identifies both life and death as non-free conditions (Piatigorsky
1965: 43). Thus the two languages of a bilingual Indian may
generate a fundamental internal contradiction on a very basic
conceptual-linguistic level. This illustrates the language-thought
relation in the context of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the in-
fluence of language on thought, here generalized to describe
global differences between Indian and Western philosophical
systems and modes of life.
Generally speaking, however, the cultural consequences of
bilingualism are much broader than the linguistic ones. No won-
der that Sergei Arutiunov (1989: 114-127) dedicated a special
chapter to the structural parallelism between biculturalism and
bilingualism in his penetrating book on culture, language and
identity. Since distinct languages closely correlate with distinct
representations of national character, bilingual people may
find themselves enmeshed in cultural tensions between distinct
and even conflicting national identities. In this way, one may
say, external ethnic conflicts may effect a perpetual inner
ethnic conflict at the level of the psychological identity of the
bilingual person.
More common, however, are arguments to the effect that bi-
lingual people may develop inferiority complexes due to an in-
definite ethnic identification, mapping inner tensions over
identity onto the outer world (see Christophersen 1973, and
Okonkwo 1985: 124). At times, for instance, bilingual people
fail to develop real fluency in either of their languages. Accord-
ing to Gasan Guseinov (1988: 36-41), such people can be labeled
as semi-lingual rather than bilingual. Such semi-lingual per-
sons, Guseinov suggests, may thus develop an aggressive dis-
position. This aggressive disposition, Guseinov claims, is the
product of a continuous inability to express oneself by means of
words. Guseinov tries to explain the psychological motivations
of the anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani town of
Sumgait in February 1988, by tracing the violence of the partici-
pants back to their semi-lingualism: When many such semi-
lingual people (who are nearly always marked by an inescapable
affectation) are assembled together, any conflict, even the most
inconspicuous one, which in principle can be settled by dialog
gives rise instead to rude violence.(Guseinov 1988: 37).
24

24
However, the young men charged with cruel killings and rape during

Certainly, such theories describe real dilemmas and frustra-
tions at play in the formation of ethnic identity and the develop-
ment of ethnic and national enmities. Most cognitive psycholo-
gists and social scientists, however, strongly disagree that bilin-
gualism in itself is somehow responsible for such problems. No
matter how grave the negative consequences of bilingualism may
appear, the positive role of bilingualism in the development of
national cultures can hardly be denied. The enrichment and de-
velopmental stimulus that follows from cultural interaction is the
flip side of the condition of marginality, as the bilinguals lin-
guistic capacity renders him or her potentially open to outside
influences. Without bilinguals, a society would be condemned to
a condition of near-total isolation in relation to the outside world,
for the bilinguals marginal position serves as a point of entry for
alien cultural elements into the ethnic or national community.
Monolingualism and purism, on the contrary, can easily lead a
nation especially a small nation into isolation and cultural
stagnation.

The Forking Path of Alphabet Identity
If language fixes national identity, written language plays an es-
pecially prominent role in attempts to symbolize, specify, con-
struct, codify and institutionalize this identity. Writing provides
nationalists with doorways into the genealogical past, and pro-
vides proof for asserting the antiquity of the nation and na-
tional identity. Moreover, the script of a language presents cru-
cial empirical evidence for scholarly arguments, and may well
provide clues to the reasons a given case of nationalism devel-
oped along either a selective, root-oriented, prestigious, or
omnivorous path. For instance, the fact that both Armenians
and Georgians have had a specific and identifiable script directly
traceable to at least the beginning of the 5th century favored the
subsequent development of Armenian and Georgian identity
along the historical path. However, the Georgians step out from

the Sumgait pogroms, didnt leave the impression of semi-linguals
I was present at several court hearings in Moscow in 1988. Rather,
Guseinovs hypothesis looks like a noble attempt to find an excuse for
the inexplicable burst of aggressiveness in Sumgait among ordinary
people without criminal backgrounds. For more on the Sumgait po-
groms see the Path of Violence.

80
this path and onto the prestigious one looking for a prestigious
Georgian inventor of their alphabet, the legendary king Parnavaz
of the 3
rd
century BC.
25
This aims to elide Mesrop Mashtots'
the inventor of the Armenian alphabet whom Armenian tradition
also credits with inventing the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian
alphabets from Georgian national history.
26
After all, the no-
tion that an Armenian invented the Georgian script ipso facto
reduces the national prestige of this script.
In any case, the revival of national language currently under-
way in both Armenia and Georgia automatically means a return
to the ancient graphical design of the native language. The situa-
tion is very different in cases where national languages had no
written tradition before the October Revolution, as illustrated by
Gasan Guseinovs account of an interesting situation he observed
in a Moscow marketplace in the summer of 1988. Guseinov no-
ticed that many fruit stalls run by Central Asians had been la-
beled with Arabic inscriptions, which neither shoppers nor the
vast majority of vendors could read. These labels were actually a
symbolic manifestation of ethnic and national values, or even
more broadly, of the higher values of the Orient in comparison
with Russian language and culture. Guseinov subsequently de-
scribes this phenomenon as an orientation toward phantom val-
ues, drawing an analogy to the oft-heard claims of amputees
who feel their amputated extremity (Guseinov 1988: 38-39).
However, given the nature of symbolic forms and the feeling
of national identity, such artifices might in the end generate a
real, not a phantom, extremity (identity). In this case, we
should note that Arabic is not so much a national language, as a
language of the Koran and of Islamic fundamentalism. Hence the
symbolic abnegation of the Russian script may here facilitate the
spread of Islamic identity and related forms of political funda-
mentalism, rather than the formation of national identities coter-
minous with the nation-state building projects of the former So-
viet Central Asian republics. Of course, I am not prognosticating
the political evolution of the originally Muslim former Soviet
republics, but simply trying to show the multiple, complex and

25
See Gamkrelidze 1989: 304-305 for a discussion on the probable
historical basis of this legend.
26
See the Path of Ancestors for the Armenian/Georgian controversy
regarding the origins of Georgian script.

extensive political and cultural power that the codification of
written language often entails.
This short-lived graphical burst of identity in a Moscow
marketplace
27
reflects both a deepcultural background, and the
peculiarities of Soviet national policy during the first years of the
Soviet regime. During the early Soviet period, the new regime
devised alphabets based on Latin letters for those officially des-
ignated nations and national minorities lacking a written lan-
guage. Here, the Bolsheviks underscored in practice their ideo-
logical commitment to the subsequent independent development
of national languages, free from the dominating influence of the
Russian language. But by 1936, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party had reversed itself and criticized the latiniza-
tion of these new alphabets. By the end of the 1930s, when Rus-
sian domination became the official trend not only in language
but in almost every sphere of internal policy, all alphabets, ex-
cept Armenian and Georgian, were officially reconstructed on
the basis of Cyrillic scripts. Thus the vendors at the Moscow
marketplace were in fact trying to purge these Russian-
oriented alphabets by returning to the Arabic of the Koran in
search of some authentic national identity. Following the alle-
gory of our park, they were trying to leap from the omnivo-
rous path of Stalinist assimilatory policy into a kind of histori-
cal path.
Moldova presents an especially interesting case of the some-
times intricate relation between the fight for national identity and
the character of the official script of the mother tongue. In-
deed, the attempt to fashion a distinct Moldovan identity could
be called a case of alphabet nationalism, since Moldovan na-
tionalists both in 1917 and in the late 1980s made the principal
of adopting a Latin alphabet against the Cyrillic script of the
Russians a primary element of their various nationalist pro-
grams.
28
Here, the Latin alphabet obviously affirmed the relation

27
By the mid-1990s, these same vendors preferred to conceal their na-
tionality, in part because of the adoption of openly racist policies by the
Moscow authorities against non-Russians from the former Caucasian
and Central Asian Soviet republics. For instance, in the summer of
1996 without provocation the local police beat several Azerbaijani ven-
dors at the same marketplace.
28
For an informative discussion of the fight for Moldovan national

82
of Moldovan to Romanian, which passed from the Cyrillic to the
Latin alphabet in the 1860s. Beyond its obvious anti-Russian
overtones, the gravitation of the Moldovans to the Latin alphabet
also manifests the strong feeling of closeness to Latinized
Europe among Moldovan nationalists. For instance, a slogan ob-
served on a placard at a 1989 nationalist rally in Kishinev read
Legalize our Latin Identity (Livezeanu 1990: 180). Of particu-
lar interest here is the fact that Cyrillic is the alphabet of the Old
Church Slavonic, which since the tenth century has served as the
internal language of the Orthodox church, the traditional religion
of both Romanians and Moldovans. Thus the recent Moldovan
fight for a Latin alphabet identity in fact directly contradicts
the regions traditional religious identity. For this reason, the
Moldovan clergy initially opposed the movement calling for the
adoption of a Latin alphabet (Livezeanu 1990: 157, 163). In
Moldova, then, we see a directly opposite trend to that in the
former Central-Asian republics of the Soviet Union, where the
search for a viable identity has generated a push for adopting
Arabic, the alphabet of the regions traditional religious identity.
Contested relations between ancient scripts and oral mother
tongues may also play a significant role in the formation of eth-
nic identities and nationalist agendas. The case of the modern
Assyrians in Armenia, a national minority of about six thousand
according to the 1989 census, presents an interesting example. In
recent years, the ancient script of Aramean origin, which was the
literary language of the Aramean-speaking Christians of the Near
East, has been appropriated as a functional alphabet for modern
spoken Assyrian (also known as new-Syrian), which is usually
classified as a new-Aramean dialect of the Aramean language. In
this literary language, known as Syriac, numerous Christian
theological works were written, especially between the 3
rd
and
7
th
centuries, the period of the flowering of Syriac literature.
Later it was used as the ceremonial language of the Nestorians
and Jacobites in Iran, Iraq, Syria and other countries. In the
1980s, the revival of this script was perceived by some modern
Assyrians as further proof of their ancient Assyrian origin (dat-
ing from the times of the Assyrian empire of the 2
nd
1
st
millennia
BC), as if they had regained the cuneiforms of the dead spoken
language of ancient Assyrian. Intriguingly, the majority of ex-

identity, see Livezeanu 1990.

perts in ancient Assyrian language and culture come from the
younger generation of modern ethnic Assyrians. These younger
intellectuals, in turn, developed a movement to teach their elders,
the bearers of the oral language, their true ancient identity.
29

Thus we see that the knowledge of a dead language helps
modern Assyrians confirm their ancient roots.
30

However, such a knowledge may play, on the contrary, a
negative role in a politicians career. Thus, the expertise of Ar-
menias first post-communist president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, in
dead languages was successfully turned into a political liability
by his political opponents in the mid-1990s. Ter-Petrossian was a
philologist by profession, with a deep knowledge of, among
other ancient languages, Old Syriac. The opposition seized on
Ter-Petrossians bookish and aloof scholarly persona and his
lifelong interest in dead languages as a means of ridicule. This
ridicule indeed resonated with the populace, as a popular joke of
the early 1990s illustrates. This joke explained Armenias very
difficult economic condition at this time in terms of the presi-
dents eagerness to add Armenian to the dead languages he al-
ready knew. Several years late, during the presidential election
campaign of 1996, placards were hoisted at opposition demon-
strations imploring the people not to permit the president to turn
Armenian into a dead language. Similarly, the president himself
was often castigated as a political corpse, due to his knowledge
of dead languages.
Such jokes shed light on the hidden mechanisms at work in

29
Syriac was never taught in Armenia, but instead was introduced into
the circle of the modern Assyrian intelligentsia through textbooks pub-
lished abroad. In Soviet times, the language of instruction of the Assyr-
ians was Armenian or Russian.
30
In the end, the historical legacy of the ancient Assyrian past turned
out to be somewhat ambivalent for the contemporary Assyrians of Ar-
menia. In the mid-1990s, a pro-government Armenian womens or-
ganization, Shamiram, adopted the name of the legendary Assyrian
queen Semiramis (Shamiram). According to legend, Semiramis fell into
passionate but unrequited love with the Armenian king Ara the Beauti-
ful, then killed him in rage and conquered Armenia. This well-known
legend was appropriated by the opposition as a symbolic reference in
its criticisms of the political activities of Shamiram, thus fostering a
negative popular attitude toward the ancient Assyrian queen and, in
some cases, her purported living descendants.

84
the developmental history of identity construction. As a matter of
fact, the history of many cases of national identity construction,
including those discussed here and in the Path of Ancestors, is to
a significant degree a genealogy of ethnic anecdotes and jokes.
However, the centrality of jokes and parodies about the other
and about the fatherland in the construction of such identities
are easily overlooked, in part because nationalists as a rule are
very solemn people who usually lack a sense of humor.
Anecdotes about the President speaking dead languages bring
us back to the problem of the First Man
31
and his language.
Here we encounter a quintessential question: is this First Man
one of us, or some primal figure ruling over space and time?
32

But here we have stepped onto the Royal Path, which we will
follow a little later.

The Path of Translators
The invention of the Armenian alphabet by Mashtots' in 405
triggered a flowering of translations of foreign texts in ancient
Armenia. Thus the 5
th
century became known as the Golden Age
of translation. As a consequence, a number of ancient texts that
have been lost in their original languages or versions have sur-

31
Here we understand the First Man to be the archetypal image of the
leader called to symbolically embody society; this figure also embodies
the progenitor of a people in the beginning of time (as we saw in the
Path of Ancestors) or even of the world in general (in the myths on the
first sacrifice). Sometimes the chronological and hierarchical aspects of
the First Man could be focused in one ritualized figure for example,
in the traditional figure of the bridegroom (the king) in the Armenian
wedding (see Pikichian 2001b: 254-259).
32
In shamanistic cultures, the shaman often plays the role of the First
Man; speaks a specific, divine language incomprehensible to ordinary
people; and journeys to the land of the dead cf. the dead languages of
the philologist president. The priest, who originally was represented in
the composite form of the king-priest, likewise, often embodies the
First Man. Like shamans, priests in many cultures also speak an archaic
language incomprehensible to the majority of believers. Too much dis-
tance between shaman and tribespeople, priest and laity, president and
people, however, may generate a popular reaction against such ritual-
ized separations, as in the Reformation-era fight for a comprehensible
language of the Liturgy, or in opposition derision of the dead languages
of the philologist president Ter-Petrossian.

vived only in Armenian translations (for example, works by
Zeno, Aristid, Theon of Alexandria, various neoplatonic com-
mentaries on Aristotles works, and so forth). This translation
boom left a deep and lasting trace in Armenian culture in gen-
eral and in the Armenian language in particular. Thus, a church
dedicated to the Translators was erected in the 7
th
century; the
Armenian Church canonized Mashtots', together with the ca-
tholicos Sahak Part'ev (who commissioned him to do this sig-
nificant task) and many followers of Mashtots, and celebrates
two festivals dedicated to them. One of them, the Saint Transla-
tors festival, which observes the invention of the alphabet and
the translation of the Bible, is also celebrated as a secular festival
since the late 1970s. On the linguistic level, many calques
33
from
the Greek were introduced during the first few centuries of trans-
lation activities, and these calques continue to function in con-
temporary Armenian. Some modern authors and translators even
prefer such calques to more ordinary and less prestigious
words.
34
The calque principle, which is actually a legacy of the
Golden Age of translation, is one of the most popular tools used
by modern purists in their drive to create a true and pure Arme-
nian. The purist principle thus transmogrifies into a sort of hy-
pertranslation or translation mania, that is, a tendency to inter-
pret or to find a meaning or a proper word in the mother tongue
for everything in the world.
35

33
A calque is a semantic borrowing in which a native word takes on a
special or extended meaning developed as an analogy to a word having
the same basic meaning in a foreign language.
34
For example, modern Armenian translators of Rigveda chose the
word himn of Greek origin, or the word nerbogh, a calque from the
Greek (Acharian 1977: 445), for the Sanskrit word for hymn, even
though there is a more ancient and common word yerg meaning song
in Armenian. Ironically, yerg is much closer etymologically to the San-
skrit original (Acharian 1973: 42), and is even reflected in the name of
the Rigveda itself.
35
Sometimes this results in paradoxical situations, when Armenian is
claimed to be more articulate than the original language! Thus there
is an Armenian word agevaz (from agi tail and vazel to run, i.e.,
tail-runner) for kangaroo, a universal word of Australian Aboriginal
origin with unclear etymological roots. However, plausible etymologi-
cal speculations on the origin of kangaroo have nothing to do with
the purported explanation that the Armenian agevaz presents. More

86
The English word interpretation (meaning simultaneously
explanation of meaning and oral translation) elegantly cap-
tures the dynamic interplay between the foreign (needing
translation) and the native (needing interpretation) that we see
in reconstructing the impact of translations and foreign borrow-
ings on a mother tongue. This interplay often takes the form of
improvised juxtapositions of the unknown and alien to some-
thing familiar evoked by the word interpretation. In this light, the
Armenian trend toward hypertranslation corresponds to a clear
tendency in the etymology of Armenian words toward maximal
description. For example, while the English word rose for color
has one root, the similar Armenian word vardaguyn needs two
roots: vard rose and guyn color. It is difficult to say whether
this peculiarity of Armenian is a result of the Armenian national
character or, on the contrary, simply reflects the influence of the
semantic structure of the language on the national character. In
any case, the clear tendency of Armenian intellectuals to over-
interpret languages and word-origins correlates with certain as-
pects of Armenian culture.
36
Interestingly, modern urban slang
seems to prefer one-rooted words instead of the composite
words. For example, young people like to abbreviate the com-
posite word zhamats'uyts' for watch meaning hour indicator
to zham hour. Although purists hate such distortions of the lan-
guage, the abbreviated form zham seems to add a philosophical
and poetical zest to the language, involving the zham hour
into a broader time context zham is the root of zhamanak
time. Zham is used also for church possibly due to the
church bells announcing time; one may also recall sun-dials
carved on the walls of many Armenian churches.
The invention of the Armenian alphabet not only occasioned
a metaphorical cult of translation, but also a real cult of writing
and books in Armenia (see H. Petrosyan 2001b: 52-59). We thus
see one of the primary reasons why the Matenadaran, the famous

than that, the kangaroo uses its tail only as stabilizer and not as an ac-
tive instrument for running (jumping).
36
Cf., for example, the illustrative (figurative) character of Armenian
curses as compared with much more abstract Russian curses, which
broadly use suffixes and prefixes resulting in non-figurative con-
structions. The same opposition between illustrative and abstract can
also be seen in Armenian and Russian proverbs.

repository of ancient manuscripts in Yerevan, with which we
will meet again on the Path of Memory, became a kind of temple
for Armenians. The Matenadaran houses a large number of
books and manuscripts that are considered by their former own-
ers to be holy. In villages, such books are traditionally personi-
fied by a saint bearing the popular name of the book (for exam-
ple, The Red Gospel). Up to the present day, some of the for-
mer owners of these holy books make pilgrimages to the
Matenadaran to perform rituals of worship to their former pa-
trons, presenting the books with flowers (Greppin 1988).
37
After
the destructive earthquake of 1988, a colleague who participated
in rescue operations informed me that rescue workers gave al-
most the same care to books as to the people they extracted from
under the ruins (cf. H.Petrosyan 2001b: 58). I myself witnessed a
similar case in this same period, when I met a father who had
risked his life by entering his tumble-down building simply to
rescue his daughters textbooks.
The traditional Armenian respect and even reverence for the
book is, perhaps, a principal reason for the very negative attitude
of the populace toward the school reforms designed in the mid-
1990s. The reforms tried to introduce the novelty of a combined
textbook and exercise book, which was widely disliked. As an
informant told me, Books are for reading, not for writing in.
The attempt to introduce a common Western, and particularly
American, pedagogical device thus generated broad dissatisfac-
tion precisely because it reflected American teaching methods
and the much more casual, even disrespectful, American attitude
toward books and literary culture in general. This attitude is
deeply at odds with Armenian tradition. Of course, Im reflecting
my cultural roots here, but Armenians find it shocking to see
how American students casually deface their textbooks, and even
their library books, with multicolored markers.
38
Another poorly received novelty was the introduction of the
method of teaching the mother tongue in the first classes of pri-

37
I am grateful to Dr. Lucy Der Manuelian for pointing out this ritual.
38
In the Soviet tradition, Lenin stands out as a notable figure famous
for his disrespectful attitude toward library books. He even used to jot
down notes in the margins of books he was reading in the library of the
British Museum. It is this very disrespect which turns them into a rarity
today.

88
mary schools through play and with the use of images and pic-
tures prior to learning the alphabet. Many Armenians reacted
with particular hostility to this reform, which they saw as an at-
tempt to delay and hinder the childs learning of the national al-
phabet. Some parents went so far as to bribe teachers to teach
their children the mother tongue illegally by using the tradi-
tional method of introducing the alphabet from the first day of
education.
39

Perhaps the cult of the written word will remain a centerpiece
of Armenian nationalist programs and identity-formation until
computers with their enormous capacity to fix and at the same
time lose words bring the information revolution to Arme-
nian soil. Presently we are witnessing the fight for a computer-
ized Armenian script led by enthusiasts
40
against the general in-
difference of modern cyberspace toward national languages.

The Forking Path in the Direction
of the Path of Rebellion and Festival
According to the biblical story, the division of the original lan-
guage of humankind or, as linguists would say, the sprouting
of the first twigs of the linguistic tree occurred when God
stopped the building of the Tower of Babel by suddenly trans-
forming the language of its builders into many, mutually incom-
prehensible languages. There are moments in the life of a multi-
lingual society, however, which appear as the exact reverse of
this story, moments when the original language of communal
unity seems to be regained. These moments are precisely the
moments of cultural festivals. In the bilingual Yerevan of 1988,
such a reunion took place during the mass nationalist rallies,

39
This situation was aggravated at times by schoolteachers themselves,
especially by those reluctant or unable to learn new methods of lan-
guage instruction. Older mothers with a traditional or conservative out-
look also played a considerable role in creating the hostile attitude to-
ward the reforms, since mothers, as a rule, help their children prepare
homework, at least during the first years of primary school. Many
young mothers, on the contrary, assured me that the new methods were
very helpful and progressive, and they didnt see any harm to their
childrens national identity because of them.
40
See, e.g., website http//www/digilib.am for Armenian classical litera-
ture of the 5-18
th
centuries.

which in many respects resembled archaic festivals, as we will
see in the Path of Rebellion and Festival. During these festi-
vals, the opposed poles of Armenian/Russian bilingualism sud-
denly seemed reconciled, together with the other semantic and
symbolic oppositions that during normal times give cultural
life in Yerevan its distinctive qualities.
The momentary unification of this linguistic opposition
reached its zenith on the first day of the February meetings,
when a Russian-speaking leader made a speech which captivated
the crowd. Given the larger national and political context of
these events, one might guess that the people gathered in the
square would express dismay at a Russian-language speech
given in the middle of a rally for Armenian solidarity. But the
content of the speakers message disarmed any discontent. A
Central Committee secretary addressed you a moment ago, the
Russian-speaking leader said, and he spoke Armenian. And
what did he say to you? The speaker went on to contrast the
empty words of his predecessor and his own genuine solidarity
with the Armenian peoples longing for cultural autonomy. In-
deed, he said many things which pleased the crowd, even though
he said them in Russian. From that moment until the end of Yer-
evans remarkable season of political festival in November 1988,
the opposition between the two languages in fact vanished. This
opposition crept back into everyday life and national discourse
once the season of political festival had run its course, and the
outbreak of an intense controversy over the role of Armenian and
Russian-language schools in the education of Armenian children
reignited the antagonism of many Armenians toward the speak-
ing of Russian. This conflict culminated in the programmatic
victory of Armenian language and identity in educational policy.
Nevertheless, there was something specific and precious in the
festival unity that the post-festival Armenians have lost, some-
thing that made the mythical builders of the Tower of Babel
closer to God.

The Path of Music

The Path of Music 93

FIVE

THE PATH OF MUSIC
The Sensitive Ear of Musical Identity
and the All-Devouring R'abiz

The Path of Unheard Music
The music a people sings or plays can definitely tell us some-
thing about a peoples history and identity, much as language
does. Although I am not sure whether it is possible to construct
musicological trees as accurately as linguistic trees to trace the
original and forking paths of Homo musicus. In any case, we will
have, evidently, much more endemic, locally grown, as well as
exotically grafted trees along the musicological paths, which in
their turn may present a more tangled picture: music seems to be
more contagious than language: it may please the ear and not
necessarily the mind, so people dont need to understand it in
order to appropriate it.
In a broad ethnomusicological sense, music is a much more
penetrating and omnipresent phenomenon than just a melody or
song. It is present in the intonations of speech, rhythms of every-
day life and work, as well as in the musical sphere itself. Even in
the latter case it exists beyond the borders we usually think of.
For example, a lullaby is originally an endless song sung by a
mother until her child falls asleep; only a part of this song, or
rather pre-song, is fixed by the musicologists (and sometimes by
the performers) to become well-known folksongs. Many songs
of other folk genres, such as baby-nursing songs, songs sung
while milking a cow, feeding the poultry, etc., are analogously
cut from their pre-song endless flow.
1

1
Hr'ip'sime Pikich'ian (2005) dedicated a special chapter to these genres

94
Although, as we have already mentioned, music seems to
have less restrictions in penetrating the ear of a neighboring na-
tion, in some cases such restrictions do exist and may divide
neighboring peoples with precisely visible or rather audible
boundaries. One such case is the intrinsic difference between
monodic and polyphonic modes of musical performance. Some
peoples, for example the Georgians, are natural polyphonists,
while Armenians are a typical monodic people: participants of a
Georgian feast would usually form a nearly professional chorus,
singing their choral parts in harmonious polyphonic order, even
if this were their first concert; while participants of an Arme-
nian feast would prefer to enjoy listening to a solo singer or at
best would form a chorus singing in unison. Why is there such a
profound difference in the musical thinking of these peoples? I
dont know whether there is a perspicuous answer to this ques-
tion.
2
Another question is whether this difference in musical
styles is reflected in the national character of the performers.
One is tempted to speculate that polyphony is an ideal metaphor
for the consolidated and harmonic Georgian society,
3
while

and the mode of their performance known as dzenov asel to say in
voice (see Abeghian 1970: 476). Singling out an artificial fragment (a
song) from the natural pre-song continuum is actually the audio version
of a more general method of framing cf. framing in carpets, which
enables the viewer to catch (visualize) a small section of the endless
space of the carpet design (see Maclagan 1977: 32-33; L. Abrahamian
2002: 22). Cf. also landscapes and still-lives fixed by the artist. In the
latter case the frame reorganizes the original nature a little (or consid-
erably) no wonder it becomes a dead nature nature morte, still
life. One may compare this latter phenomenon with an analogous prob-
lem in microphysics: the instrument used for fixing a micro-world real-
ity, inevitably effects (kills) this reality.
2
See Zhordania 1988 for the geography of ethnic polyphony and other
aspects of this phenomenon.
3
Such is the stereotyped characteristic of the Georgians in Armenian
self-criticizing jokes. For example, the big cauldron, where Georgians
are being boiled in hell, is said to need a vigilant guard: if a single
Georgian managed to get out of the cauldron, he would help all his
compatriots escape. While the cauldron where Armenians are being
boiled, does not need a guard: even if somebody managed to get out of
the cauldron, the rest of the people would pull him back in. (In reality
during the post-Soviet years, Georgians manifested quite a different
picture of national consolidation, which was very far from this ideal

Armenians are as individualistic as their monodic melodies.
Further speculations may involve the monodic Armenian and
polyphonic Georgian national identities and even monoethnic
Armenia and polyethnic Georgia. Leaving aside such metaphori-
cal speculations, let us note only that the obvious mon-
ody/polyphony difference between the two musical styles drives
Armenians closer to their Near Eastern rather than to their Cau-
casian neighbors. While in other cases they are much closer to
the latter, as we will see, for example, in the Path of Tradition.
Another intriguing speculation naturally concerns the relative
ages of the polyphonic and monodic paths. Which choral style is
more archaic? Or, to formulate this question in another perspec-
tive: which is less difficult for a group, to sing differently or to
sing in the same way?
4
Another question could be whether the
two styles were interrelated. Was there an original polyphonic
path, which forked for some unknown reason into many monodic
paths?
5
Or, on the contrary, the many monodic paths eventually
met or will meet in a polyphonic path? Or, finally, do the
monodic and polyphonic paths just run parallel and meet artifi-
cially only in modern times as a result of the creative will and
mastery of modern park designers? Komitas, who transformed
Armenian monody into polyphonic music, can serve as an illus-
tration of this last point.

characteristic.) To follow the four models of the Path of Ancestors, let
us also mention the Russian cauldron, which, like the Armenian one, is
said to not need a guard: the escapee would put some new logs into the
fire and crawl back into the cauldron. Azerbaijanis are not presented in
this national hell.
4
A joke on the beginning of Georgian polyphony, invented, obviously,
by a jealous monodic Armenian, tells that once upon a time a group of
Georgians gathered for some feast occasion and began to sing a well-
known song; but since they were tone-deaf, each singer sang in his own
manner. Later this diverse tone-deaf singing was canonized to become
polyphony.
5
For example, the polyphonic chords of J. S. Bach were transformed
into monodic mini-solos, when the bow with loosely fixed hair trans-
formed into the modern fiddlestick with rigidly fixed hair, so that vio-
linists were doomed to score all the strings of their violins in quick se-
quence by running over them with their modernized fiddlesticks
(bow to stick transformation is preserved in the English names of
this violin constituent).

96

The Path of Komitas
Every culture has its key figures whose images focus many in-
trinsic characteristics of the culture in question. In a sense these
figures approach the First Man whom we will meet again on the
Royal Path. But while the king could be another from the out-
side somebody standing above or outside the society, even an
outsider let us recall the oft repeated foreignness of kings, the
key figure personality is another from within
6
. He is sensitive
to any structural changes in the society but at the same time
bears all the archaic structures of the past and anticipates those
of the future.
Indeed Komitas (1869-1935), the great composer and collec-
tor of folk music, is such a figure in contemporary Armenian
culture in a broader sense than just the musicological Going
back to the aforementioned monody/polyphony opposition, it
could be said that Komitas embodied the best of the monodic
style let us only mention his unique performances preserved on
old phonographs and his voluminous collection of folk songs
while at the same time he introduced polyphony into Armenian
musical culture. Komitas dealt with this same opposition, which
we discussed in the ethnomusicological context, in the context of
Oriental/European music, that is, he was embodying a wider op-
position between East and West. An analysis of his attitude to-
ward folk music shows that he was also enacting a deeper oppo-
sition between the pagan (devilish) and the Christian than is
evident from the image of a monk collecting and singing folk
(pagan) melodies.
7
This last opposition is also related to the op-

6
On different aspects of another see Airapetian 2001: Index, s.v. inoj.
7
Cf. his negative attitude toward the zur'na, a strident wind instrument
of the family of oboes with a sharp and loud voice (see Komitas 1941:
17-27; Pikichian 2001a: 244). Judging from his collections, one may
guess that he seemed to pay less attention to the samples of folk music
that were obviously of magical pagan origin. This does not mean, of
course, that he was not collecting such samples the Church disap-
proved of his ethnomusical activities for just this reason, he simply
focused his attention primarily on those samples of folk music that
were structurally close to the classical, post-Mashtots' period of Ar-
menian music. In 1912-13, Komitas seemed to shift his professional
interest toward this type of folk music previously neglected by him,
which demonstrates that Komitas presented a more complex and vibrat-

position of secular/religious (in a broader than musical sense)
and of folk/elite. There are also other, minor oppositions embod-
ied in this key figure, which are not so significant from an eth-
nocultural perspective but demonstrate that Komitas is a true key
figure, since he seems to embody a l l the possible semiotic op-
positions that make up Armenian culture. One such opposition is
sane/insane Komitas spent the last 20 years of his life in a
mental hospital in Paris, a result of his traumatic experience in
1915 in the first days of the Genocide. No wonder Komitas be-
came a symbol of the victims of the Genocide the most para-
digmatic theme in contemporary Armenian culture. During these
long years of seclusion, Komitas kept silent, thus adding another
opposition, of speaking/being silent, to the list of oppositions
embodied by his dramatic life. This seemingly insignificant op-
position gives a sudden clue to the theme of articulating (speak-
ing out) the topic of the Genocide cf. the title of Paruyr
Sevaks poem Anlr'eli zangakatun meaning never-ceasing bel-
fry literally never-silenced in Armenian, with a telling rela-
tion between the unstopped speech of the bell and Komitas
muteness. Compare also the possible opposition of hearing/not
hearing that can be derived from his non-hearing attitude to-
ward specific pagan music. The last opposition gives us a further
clue to an interesting phenomenon from the present: one can find
the portrait of Komitas as a symbol of Armenian culture in many
homes in Yerevan, while the inhabitants would generally prefer
to listen to r'abiz music rather than Komitas works. But to un-
derstand what r'abiz means in contemporary Armenian culture,
we should examine this phenomenon a little deeper, especially as
it goes beyond the musical sphere to embrace a much broader
sphere of urban realities in Armenia.
8

The Path of R'abiz
R'abiz is an armenization (the voicing of the last consonant and

ing center not only for the pagan/Christian dichotomy but also for all
the other structural oppositions that form the skeleton of Armenian cul-
ture. I am indebted to Karo Chalikian for this discussion.
8
The following section is co-authored by Hr'ip'sime Pikich'ian. For a
more detailed analysis of r'abiz in the context of modern urban anthro-
pology see Abrahamian and Pikichian 1990; cf. also the 1989 article by
the same authors on the automobile culture of Yerevan.

98
hardening of the initial r) of the word Rabis, the acronym of
the all-union professional organization of arts workers (Rabot-
niki iskusstva in Russian), created in the Soviet Union in the
early 1920s which brought together a broad range of cultural
workers (musicians, artists, performers, etc.) to create a trade
union of cultural workers, state orchestras, and creative unions.
Whereas in Russia this word, like similar acronyms of other or-
ganizations the product of their time says little in the present
context, in Armenia the fate of Rabis was quite different. Here,
the word proved unusually tenacious. Prior to the forties, Rabis
meant the republic trade union committee, yet even after the for-
ties, when one of the offshoots of the Rabis the Bureau of Or-
chestra Musicians (BOM) came under the aegis of the city so-
viets, right down to our time, the musicians making up the BOM
continue to consider themselves members of the Rabis and draw
no distinction between the two organizations (see Abrahamian
and Pikichian 1990: 38).
An important function of the Rabis (and the only one for its
successor, the BOM) was to provide the public with ordinary
musical services, including festive celebrations and solemn occa-
sions. At first, both the music and instruments were entirely na-
tional: the aforementioned zur'na (a strident sharp-sounding
oboe), the duduk (a less shrill oboe),
9
sring (reed pipe) among
the winds; dhol (double-sided drum), dap' (tambourine), and na-
gara (drum) among the percussion; the k'amanch'a (three-
stringed bowed fiddle), t'ar' (long-necked, finger-plucked in-
strument with double resonators), and k'anon (a kind of zither)
among the strings. This pertains only to the Armenian Rabis, not
the all-union organization that gave birth to it and passed rather
quickly from the scene of Soviet cultural life.
Today, few know of the existence of the BOM in Yerevan;
many do not even suspect the existence of the formerly vital and
today ephemeral Rabis. But almost everyone knows the word
r'abz, which has an entirely different connotation. The following
is a brief history of the metamorphoses of this word.
In the twenties and the thirties, the Rabis included the best
musicians performing Armenian national and Oriental music.
10

9
In the mid-1980s, 70 of the 130 musicians in the Yerevan BOM
played the duduk.
10
This repertory is eloquently attested, for example, by the membership

But starting in the late thirties and forties, they began to leave for
more prestigious state ensembles and philharmonic societies that
were created at this time, bringing about an influx of nonprofes-
sional musicians into the Rabis. It was through these new musi-
cians that a narrow strata of musical culture that had been previ-
ously denied viability or made peripheral now began to filter into
a much broader musical sphere. The new musical style brought
to life by these musicians began to be known as r'abiz, after the
Rabis organization that united the performers of this music. Once
having penetrated the official musical culture and even having
received a kind of official status, these strata gave rise to entire
schools of original music. The very fact that the clarinet, the ac-
cordion, and the guitar were adopted as instruments of r'abiz af-
ter the war, presaged changes in its musical style. Only with re-
spect to the music of the fifties and sixties, though, may one
speak of an independent r'abiz style.
In the sixties, two main groupings were formed in the Rabis:
one specializing in a joyous genre and performing at restau-
rants, weddings, and banquets, the other specializing in sad
music and playing at funerals. Incidentally, the same musicians
might play at both weddings and funerals. This recalls the fa-
mous New Orleans funeral musical processions, which turned
into joyous musical parades on their way back a comparison to
be used in a moment. It should be pointed out that the word
r'abiz among the population at large was connected with the fu-
neral rite proper and designated a special mournful music, since
before the war funeral melodies were played exclusively in the
traditional manner.
The singers and performers of the new r'abiz style, among
whom were outstanding, brilliant musicians, would search out
particulars about the life of the departed and the cause of his/her
death and on each occasion (or at least for each type of event)
would improvise, creating a new song. These songs are very

IDs of the Leninakan musicians of the Rabis. In the twenties and thir-
ties, beneath the signature stamp of the Republic Committee of Art
Workers of Armenia there was also an inscription, The Collective of
Oriental Musicians of Leninakan. (In the late forties, in their place
appears the inscription Administration of the Collective of Oriental
Music of Leninakan, while today there is a reference to the local de-
partment of the BOM.)

100
close to the Blues in mood and practically didnt change
throughout the history of the genre unlike the other genres of
r'abiz. In a similar way, the authentic Blues is one of the most
conservative musical styles in America, which moves independ-
ently and parallel to jazz, which is constantly changing. The mu-
sical language of r'abiz, being a blend of several musical tradi-
tions (primarily Armenian national, gusan bard-style, and
maqam-type style
11
), is marked by delicate Oriental harmony and
an abundance of melismas, short improvised musical ornamenta-
tions, which allow the musician to achieve the desired psycho-
logical effect through purely musical means.
Besides the conservative funeral style, these qualities are
widely used in the different genres of r'abiz, which may even be
classified in terms of national color: Azerbaijani, Greek, Moldo-
van, Gypsy, Indian (movie music), Argentinean (tango), Russian
(modern urban folklore). Of course, it is music performed by
local r'abiz musicians who think in Armenian. All these vari-
ants are characterized by an Armenian national motif and text,
but with special hues of style from the particular national musi-
cal culture (melody, rhythmics, nuances, individual elements,
phrases, and finally the manner of presentation of the musical
performance and its general color). Some of these (e.g., the
Moldovan) are highly instrumental, others (e.g., the Russian) are
predominantly sung. Often these variants form a contrast not
only in their musical aspects, but also in regard to social pres-
tige.
12
Thus, the Greek r'abiz is characteristic of the milieu of
Armenian repatriates, predominantly craftsmen who originated
from Istanbul, or those who found refuge in Greece and Bulgaria
after the Genocide of 1915.
13
The Indian r'abiz was popular in
the working class districts of Yerevan, where Indian movies
were often shown in the 1970s. The Azerbaijani r'abiz was

11
Maqam, the main musical genre in the Arabic music, which is also
widespread in Iranian and Turkish music, is related to the Uzbek/Tajik
maqom, Azerbaijani mugham and Indian raga.
12
For more details on these varieties of r'abiz see Pikich'ian 1982.
13
Greek musical culture produced its own r'abiz-type phenomenon
rembetika. A visually and musically well-illustrated history of this
genre is presented in the documentary Rembetika: The Blues of
Greece directed by Philippe de Montignie in 1983 (based on the book
Road to Rembetika by Gail Host Warhaft).

popular primarily in the rural areas bordering Azerbaijan. In
these regions, prior to the war with Azerbaijan over Mountainous
Gharabagh, the Azerbaijani mughams were also popular; many
truck drivers were said to have welded their radio dials to the
spot where they picked up the Baku radio programs. During the
conflict, however, they had to free their radio dials, since this
genre became less popular or at least was considered politically
incorrect. The Russian r'abiz is performed most often to diver-
sify or enliven the program and usually forms an interlude: the
performance begins with the rhythms and few lines of some
well-known Russian song (usually belonging to the prison folk-
lore sub-genre), which soon transforms into an Armenian song;
both songs are performed, of course, in r'abiz style. Finally, the
Moldovan r'abiz enjoys deserved respect among the admirers
of the various national genres of r'abiz for the technical virtu-
osity of its performers.
But what is more important to us here is that the word r'abiz
gradually came to denote not only a type of music, but also eve-
rything pertaining to the representative and consumer of this mu-
sical culture. It came to be used in evaluating the person as a
whole, in terms of habits, tastes, clothing, vocabulary, and so
forth, and inevitably with a certain shade of scorn. Those as-
cribed to the r'abiz sub-culture would be described as persons
wearing r'abiz shoes, doing r'abiz deeds and even using r'abiz
pens. Such labeling, obviously, would be given by somebody
with expressed anti-r'abiz feelings. The r'abiz themselves, of
course, do not perceive or call themselves as such; only musi-
cians legitimately and painlessly designate themselves by this
term. And not always painlessly: many notable musicians are
justified in not understanding and feeling offence at the new
value judgment the word r'abiz has taken on. In particular, they
contrast themselves with the musicians of the vulgar, street
r'abiz. Yet even without a special musicological analysis, even in
the best specimens of modern professional r'abiz, one may hear
that lowly, at times street stratum, without which this musical
phenomenon could not emerge.
It is extremely curious that r'abiz music exhibits unusual vi-
tality and flexibility. It is not antagonistic to but rather incorpo-
rates everything that willfully opposes it, thereby creating its
own new variants. Thus, in response to the folkloric, ethno-
graphic music that has been widely popularized in the 1970s and

102
80s, a new variety of r'abiz appeared that may be called folk-
loric. As a matter of fact, r'abiz immediately answers every new
hit in whatever genre with a new song or even a new specific
modification of one or another genre of its own. One such modi-
fication that played a crucial role in the history of r'abiz was the
musical arrangement of r'abiz in the jazz/pop mode. This was
first done by professional musicians with conservatory educa-
tions but unsuccessful careers in serious music, who were
playing for the r'abiz consumers only to make a living. Actually
they despised r'abiz and used their professional skill to raise this
low genre, which they were doomed to perform. The appear-
ance of this new type of musician in restaurants reflects the
change in the scale of prestigiousness among the social group of
the r'abiz. This new trend actually gives r'abiz a more civilized
form, one that is no longer offensive even to former critics, who
in fact seem to be secret admirers of classical r'abiz. Many of the
old-timer r'abiz (referring to the social aspect of the term) who
usually listen to music in their automobiles have in their collec-
tion of tapes at least one cassette of authentic, now exotic r'abiz
music. As a matter of fact, for the population at large this new,
arranged, r'abiz has become the national music.
R'abiz arrived in the civilized diaspora in this civilized
form. This happened mainly through audio recordings, but also
through musicians from Armenia who toured or emigrated to
diaspora communities in the 1970s. Nowadays, with so many
Armenians from Armenia (the so called Hayastants'is) settled in
the USA, one can also find the real r'abiz people among them,
bearers of the authentic r'abiz culture. But originally, r'abiz was
an exported music in the diaspora: it couldnt be created under
the conditions where anything national is being preserved and
cultivated with much more care than in Armenia.
14
However, the
acquaintance with and love of the Oriental maqam-type music by
diaspora Armenians living in or originating from Oriental coun-

14
By the way, in comparing national dancing styles of diaspora Arme-
nians and the r'abiz people (both in Armenia and diaspora) we see a
similar dichotomy: diaspora Armenians usually dance canonically
(many of them learn to dance national dances in special schools or
clubs), while the r'abiz people improvise in r'abiz style, using move-
ments from various traditions from Caucasian lezginka to Oriental
belly dances.

tries helped in the process of naturalizing r'abiz, which bears, as
we know, such Oriental melismas. After being naturalized in the
civilized West, r'abiz came back to Armenia (for example via
tape recordings of Harout Pamboukjian) as a decent advanced
form of the national savage product.
Let us also briefly look into what is not r'abiz, even though
stands close to it. For example, in Grigor Aghakhanyans first
album, Top Ten of R'abiz, only the introductory verbal prelude,
imitating in humoristic (or rather satirical) manner the r'abiz
peoples mode of speaking, could be classified as something re-
lated to r'abiz culture, while the songs themselves, representing
the most popular r'abiz songs, are performed in pop arrangement,
without any r'abiz features. It has to be remembered that r'abiz is
a style and not a melody,
15
so that releases like this, as well as
other pseudo-r'abiz realities (for example, shows or bands using
the r'abiz label in their names or agenda) exploit r'abiz culture
rather than follow r'abiz music. Nune Yesayan presents another
r'abiz-related confusion: many arrogant critics place her per-
formances among the r'abiz realities. But, as a matter of fact,
Nune is not a representative of r'abiz music. She is just arranging
folksongs in pop style, though a strict critic may find some r'abiz
elements in her show, that is, in the paramusical sphere. Al-
though one such critic referred to some gaudy show details,
which are borrowed from Western pop, rather than r'abiz culture.
It is characteristic that many critics of r'abiz culture may label
any foreign tacky production as r'abiz, actually globalizing this
concept. Returning to the role of educated musicians in the evo-
lution of r'abiz style, we can conclude that the creation of civi-
lized r'abiz was, on the one hand, an advance in the evolution of
r'abiz music, but, on the other hand, it was actually a break in the
process of its natural development. This does not mean that all
the educated musicians were just arrogant editors of r'abiz mu-
sic. Once the doors were open for serious musicians, some

15
It is impossible to imitate r'abiz music without being transformed,
even unwillingly, into a r'abiz performer. Interestingly, early Soviet
pop musicians were intentionally including jazz parodies as part of
their programs during their concerts, since, as the famous Soviet pop
band leader Leonid Utiesov said during his TV interviews, it was im-
possible to parody jazz, so that the musicians were openly playing the
banned music style as its parody.

104
really talented performers created high-quality masterpieces and
even new genres clearly within the r'abiz style. Perhaps, the best
example is the late violinist Karo Hayrapetian, who not only in-
troduced the violin into the r'abiz instrumentarium but also de-
veloped a new branch in the already existing Moldovan style
it is no wonder that Karo Hayrapetian had several long years of
musical experience in Moldova. Musicians like Karo Hayra-
petian were going the r'abiz way (to use a similar jazz expres-
sion) and not using r'abiz in serious music as George
Gershwin did with jazz and Theodorakis tried to do with rem-
betika. As a matter of fact, educated musicians in Armenia either
exploited the r'abiz style, as the aforementioned restaurant per-
formers, or were dissolved into r'abiz, as seems to be the case
with Karo Hayrapetian. Up to now there are no Gershwins in the
circle of arrogant Armenian serious musicians. While r'abiz is
typologically close to jazz let us recall the peripheral and
low origin of the two musical phenomena, each merging in the
borderline of diverse musical styles, their all-devouring nature,
the role of improvisation, and the fact that social phenomena
grew from both these musical forms, as well as both using nick-
names for their performers, and let us not forget the blues-like
funeral r'abiz style. However, this comparison is only typologi-
cal, since the disinterestedness of the professional musicians and
their shallow civilized production the arranged, cleaned up
r'abiz did not give this phenomenon many opportunities for de-
veloping into a unique modern Armenian style.
16

Despite these unfavorable conditions, r'abiz nevertheless con-

16
Spanish flamenco can serve as another analogue to r'abiz although in
this case we are dealing with an encounter of two original foreign mu-
sical traditions the Gypsy and a maqam-type Arabic with the Span-
ish musical tradition only joining this peripheral phenomenon later
not without the authoritative support of general Franco, who seemed to
play a considerable role in making flamenco an all-Spanish symbol.
However, in comparing r'abiz with flamenco, Armen Petrosyan rightly
notes (personal communication) that in Armenia there were no intellec-
tuals like poet Federico Garca Lorca, composer Manuel de Falla or
guitarist Andres Segovia, to raise r'abiz from its low status to the con-
cert houses (Lorca and de Falla organized the famous cante jondo festi-
val in Granada in 1922 see Vaisbord 1970: 20-22). The few r'abiz
festivals in Yerevan in the mid-1990s were typical mass-culture events
rather than creative concerts.

tinues its all-devouring march. It should be mentioned that while
in the sixties a majority of European instruments, in addition to
the national ones, came to be played in the r'abiz style, in the
seventies r'abiz conquered almost every instrument available
to musicians. Although it was popular in Yerevan and other cit-
ies of Armenia to give children a preliminary and high school
musical education, this does not effect the r'abiz way. On the
contrary, this only helped it survive. For example, at a music
school in one of the regional capitals close to Yerevan nearly all
the pupils in the mid-1980s were able to perform classical com-
positions in two styles the classical proper version (for the
teachers) and the r'abiz version (for a nonacademic audience). At
times families even insisted that the pupils play in the latter, fa-
miliar style. A reworking in r'abiz style can apparently be done
by any disciple of r'abiz culture, and not just by professional mu-
sicians. As a friend told me, for a long time he wondered what
familiar r'abiz melody a teenage neighbor of his was whistling
all day long, when suddenly he realized that it was a piece by J.
S. Bach the very same piece he himself had been listening to
for the past several days in his first floor apartment with his win-
dows wide open in the summer heat. In other words, r'abiz is a
kind of universal musical language, into which nearly all musical
genres may easily be translated.
It is telling that the metamorphosis of r'abiz music ran paral-
lel to the transformation of the r'abiz social group. In the1970s,
many of the r'abiz were incorporated into a new prestigious so-
cial group, the ts'ekhavik (from Russian tsekh meaning guild,
small enterprise, also a constituent of a bigger enterprise spe-
cializing in concrete production), who actually represented a ver-
sion of underground capitalism in the organism of the socialist
economy. In the 1990s, a group of newly established nouveaux
riches stepped forward to overshadow many former, now im-
poverished ts'ekhaviks whose business activities depended and
fed on the now defunct soviet economic system. This new social
layer has no fixed name some call them puzati (after the Rus-
sian word meaning pot-belly), others prefer the ironic label
New Armenians a calque from the Russian definition New
Russians of a similar nouveau riche layer. Generally speaking,
it should be pointed out that social stratification in the modern
city is extremely unstable and blurred. Parallel hierarchical sys-
tems may coexist, but usually they overlap, ultimately giving rise

106
to two contrasting groups. This contrast may not involve wealth
or social status, but rather what could be termed an existential
ideal, a system of values (which is also a reflection of social
stratification). In the eyes of a non-r'abiz person, both the ts'ek-
havik and the New Armenian are representatives of the r'abiz
culture, which actually reflects their peripheral origin. In the late
1990s, the New Armenians began to penetrate the legislative and
power structures of the Republic. Many seats in the present Par-
liament of Armenia are occupied by them or, rather, semi-
occupied, if we follow their pejorative labeling ppzogh, literally
squatters after the squatting pose they allegedly use another
direct indication of their low social origin. Squatting is a wide-
spread pose of resting, for example, in Asia and Africa; its origin
could be traced back to the Asian toilets that require this pose.
For those who are accustomed to Western toilets, durable squat-
ting is a rather uncomfortable pose, so the new opposition be-
tween the r'abiz and their successors, from the one side, and their
non-squatting opponents, from the other side, reveals new nu-
ances in life-style and East West orientations of this urban so-
cial opposition, which for the first time also began to be ex-
pressed in political terms.
We have already said that the r'abiz (not the musicians) do
not perceive themselves nor call themselves as such. The word
was divorced from its musical meaning in the early seventies,
when one of the main oppositions in the city was between the
hippies and the r'abiz. Naturally, this distinction was drawn by
the hippies themselves and not the r'abiz, who labeled these op-
posing groups differently. In Yerevan, the term hippie had little
in common with its well-known prototype. The r'abiz and, for
that matter, most of the Armenian reading public in the city
learned of the hippie movement in 1970, when it had already
passed its peak, from a series of articles in a local newspaper.
After this, the term hippie came to be applied to long-haired or
otherwise distinctive young people. However, besides this large-
scale phenomena of unintentional hippies, there also was a
short-lived small social group of young people in Yerevan, who
considered themselves hippies. The Armenian hippies never
formed communes, their protest was expressed in a Western ori-
ented lifestyle (including music) and was mainly focused against
the r'abiz, the most traditionalist group in the city. The antago-
nism between the two groups reached such a pitch in those years

that one could see young people with hand-made pins proclaim-
ing Death to the r'abiz! The attitude of the r'abiz toward the
hippies was no less aggressive.
Unlike the hippies, the rabiz themselves prefer more a com-
plex hierarchical structure, a sort of r'abiz view of the world,
with the r'abiz at the top. For example, according to one such
urban social classification that we recorded in the early seven-
ties, the lowest rung was held by the dodziks. An informant elo-
quently described a representative of this substratum as a typical
mummys boy with violin case in hand. The possible origin of
the term for this group is the word dod (Armenian jargon,
dunce, fool) and, at the same time, the diminutive Dodik (from
David). Next came the kor'zhiks, those who (in the classifiers
explanation) instead of eating like regular people
17
prefer a
kind of shortbread, or kor'zhik evidently referring to students.
Above these were the hippies, the informants antagonists, and
on the highest rung, the classifiers own group, the khar'oshi,
this word originating from the Russian word khoroshij good, so
that this highest rung means the good ones.
The above classification is far from universal. The term
khar'oshi, for example, already existed in Yerevan and still con-
tinues to function today without a considerable change in mean-
ing, and it also has a specific meaning in prison argot signifying
the second (after thieves) highest rung. The hippie has already
been forgotten, and the two lowest groups in the aforementioned
private hierarchy (the dodziks and the kor'zhiks) never formed
real subgroups in the social structure of Yerevan, but neverthe-
less are informative for understanding the general picture of the
city in those years. Blue jeans at one time the obligatory hall-
mark of the hippie
18
have long been a symbol of prestige even
among the khar'oshi, while the long hair and beard (in conjunc-

17
As we will see in the Path of Tradition, the ritual of eating (feasting)
codifies an important social-structural information.
18
This obligatory attribute of the hippie culture is a good example of
the peculiarities of the Armenian (and Soviet) hippie movement: for a
Western hippie jeans were the cheapest and least prestigious garment,
while for the Armenian hippie they were a rather expensive, hardly
accessible and highly prestigious symbol. Cf. Shchepanskaia 2004 on
the anthropology of the Leningrad and Moscow juvenile subculture of
mid- and late-1980s.

108
tion with a violin) became respectable among the r'abiz, since
they create the impression of the popular and highly honored
violinist, the aforementioned Karo Hayrapetian, who elevated
r'abiz music to the heights of the theatrical stage. Many
khar'oshi, as we already noted, have now moved to higher social
layers and even to the Parliament of Armenia.
R'abiz music clearly will not win a position of honor in na-
tional and international culture through the back door as fla-
menco and jazz did. However, at least one of its high-quality
representatives managed to leap over the wall of the local anti-
r'abiz intellectuals oriented toward the West. I am referring to
the famous duduk player Djivan Gasparyan whose music was
welcomed in the West, although not as r'abiz but as a penetrating
style fitting different musical directions like eco-jazz, meditation
music or industrial gothic. Discouraged Armenian intellectuals
attribute this sudden success (by 2002, Djivan Gasparyans
duduk had already been heard in 16 foreign films, including
some mainstream American movies) to the virtues of the
duduk and Armenian national music, rather than to r'abiz. Al-
though it is not difficult to hear many typical r'abiz nuances in
Gasparyans music.
19
By the way, presently (in 2004) he is still
heading the Yerevan Rabis trade-union organization. In any case,
if the musical style of r'abiz is doomed to stay a local low
style, its social inheritors, the r'abiz social subgroup and its suc-
cessors seem to have overgrown the initial musical meaning of
this phenomenon. Whatever fate r'abiz music will have, one
thing is evident: a product of the modern city, a narrowly speci-
alized musicological phenomenon, can easily and flexibly grow
into an entire subculture, even vying to replace the entire culture
itself where it previously held a modest and unobtrusive place.

19
It is interesting that Djivan Gasparyan himself does not seem to sepa-
rate his duduk playing from r'abiz music. In the 1990s he shot some TV
clips and gave a number of concerts, where he appeared as an ordinary
r'abiz singer to the surprise and disappointment of his fans who ad-
mire his extraordinary duduk playing.

The Path of Faith

SIX

THE PATH OF FAITH
1700 Years of Christianity and
the Pagan Armenian-Christians

The Path of Pioneers
Religion has proved to be one of the most important ingredients
of national identity, although the modern worldwide campaign
against Muslim terrorism and the Muslim jihad in response seem
to recreate a more primitive and rigid dualistic division of peo-
ples instead of the flexible and sophisticated one that the compo-
nent of religion was allegedly establishing in the new era of athe-
ism and globalized religions.
There are well-known cases when religion becomes the rea-
son for dividing a people into different ethnic groups and even
nations,
1
who may later acquire other ethnic characteristics as
well, like the Orthodox Serbians and Catholic Croatians recently
began to distinguish their respective languages in what was for-
merly considered to be a common Serbian-Croatian language.
Similarly, the Yezidis of Armenia, an ethnic group of Kurdish
origin with a specific religion usually traced back to Zoroastrian-
ism, strongly distinguish themselves from Muslim Kurds of the
Transcaucasus. Both groups speak the same language known as
Kurmanji. Nevertheless the Yezidis, whose identity is based
mainly on their religion, presently also add the language factor to
their identity, claiming their language to be Yezidi, which the
Muslim Kurds have misappropriated by naming it Kurmanji. The
original Yezidi name, according to a Yezidi informant of mine,

1
For examples see many books on nationalism by Anthony Smith, e.g.
Smith 1986: ch. 5; 1991: 7.

112
remained unknown for the international scholarly community
because Yezidis were less represented in the scientific world as
compared with the Kurds, who enjoyed even a branch of science
known as Kurdology. In the early-1990s, my informant, one of
the influential spiritual leaders of the Yezidis of Armenia, was
trying to interest academic authorities in opening a similar
branch of Yezidiology in the academic and educational institu-
tions of Armenia. The general Yezidi opinion is that it was the
Muslim Kurds that betrayed their Yezidi faith and converted to
Islam, while the Yezidis preserved the ancient faith of their an-
cestors.
2
The Yezidis see a new confirmation of the old model of
betrayal in the recent conversion of some of the Yezidis of Ar-
menia to the Kurdish identity, which was a result of the revolu-
tionary activities of the Kurdish leader Ocalan in Turkey.
3
Leav-
ing a more detailed discussion of these interesting confessional
and political mechanisms of nation making for another occasion,
let us accentuate the demiurgic power of religion, which in this

2
In contrast to this generally held belief, the Yezidi religion could
rather have had newly introduced rather than uninterrupted centuries-
long ties with Persian Zoroastrianism for example, through the teach-
ings of the medieval Sufi Sheikh Adi bin Musafir, one of the key fig-
ures in Yezidism, who used Zoroastrian patterns in his religious doc-
trine. On the syncretic nature of Yezidism and its Sufi origins see
Arakelova 2002; Voskanian 1999/2000; cf. also Shakh 1999: 245-246.
In this case, it would be the Yezidis who have stepped into a forking
path of a new nation-forming religion.
3
An interesting peculiarity of the Yezidi identity is that an educated
Yezidi, as a rule, obtained a double, Yezidi-Kurdish, identity or might
even change his national identity to Kurd at least in Soviet times (see
Khalyt 1985: 120). The Muslim Kurds of Armenia (almost all the
population of nearly 5,000) left the country by the end of 1988, follow-
ing the local Azerbaijanis, although the Kurds were not forced to leave
like the Azerbaijanis. In the mid- and late-1990s, some educated
Yezidis with expressed Kurdish identity, who were connected with the
European centers of the Kurdish movement, managed to convert the
Yezidi population of some regions of Armenia to the Kurdish identity.
Among the arguments in favor of the new, scientifically supported
identity (Yezidis as a constituent of a more general Kurdish nation),
Ocalans authority was used: he was said to accuse the Turkish gov-
ernment of making the uneducated Muslim Kurds immediate executors
of the genocide of the Yezidis and Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.

The Path of Faith 113
case is a routine of an anthropologists fieldwork
4
and not a phi-
losophical construction of a theorist of nationality.
Although there are few Muslims
5
and some Catholics among
Armenians, the Armenians, like the Yezidis and Jews, are usu-
ally classified as a specific religion-bonded ethnic group (cf., e.g.
Smith 1991: 6). The religion in question is the Monophysite
branch of Orthodox Christianity, which we will discuss more a
little later. The feeling of their religious uniqueness is so strong
among Armenians that it could be compared with the Georgian
(prestigious) model discussed in the Path of Ancestors. How-
ever, this pride is overshadowed by a peculiarity typical for the
Armenian (historical) model the yearning for being the
f i r s t. Thus Armenians are very proud that they were the first to
introduce Christianity as a state religion early in the 4
th
century
AD, an event which was celebrated in 2001 with great pomp in-
cluding the visit of Pope John Paul I and other magnificent hap-
penings to be discussed later in this Path. Though the Georgians
had already celebrated the same anniversary with much less
pomp 1700 years of the adoption of Christianity in Georgia a
year earlier, this event remained only a local Georgian self-
satisfaction of the traditional Armenian-Georgian competition
for being the first and the best. True, the date of 301 is not gen-
erally accepted, and Western Armenology insists on the date of
314 (see, e.g. Suny 1993: 8), but even this date is quite an early
date to please the pioneer complex of the Armenians the

4
I will only sketch two episodes here to better understand the dynamics
of the identity changes. In 1989, a large group of Yezidis was protest-
ing against a definition of Yezidis as Kurd-Yezidis by a professor of
Kurdology, a Yezidi himself, during a TV interview. The demonstra-
tion took place in front of the Communist Party Central Committee
building (presently occupied by the Armenian Parliament), and some of
the more militant protestors even visited the office of the professor
which was nearby, to teach him a practical lesson in Yezidi identity. To
his luck, the professor was out of the office. Soon after, he fled to Mos-
cow, and as far as I know (as of 2004), is still there. However, already
in 1999, large groups of newly converted Kurds were regularly protest-
ing against Ocalans death sentence. This time the demonstrations of
protest were taking place in front of the UN office and foreign embas-
sies, reflecting the changing times.
5
On the Khemshil (Khemshin) group of Muslim Armenians see
Kuznetsov 2000; Ezhegodnik 1990: 152-153.

114
Roman Emperor Constantinus I didnt declare Christianity the
official religion in 313, he only declared his Tome of Tolerance,
which put an end to the persecution of Christians in his empire,
while the converted Armenian king Trdat (Tiridates) III and the
first Catholicos Grigor (Gregory) the Illuminator in fact declared
(no matter, in 301 or in 314) a kind of o f f i c i a l Tome of In-
tolerance some consequences of this intolerance toward the
pagan identity to be discussed in the Path of Memory.
In any case, the confessional identity became a kind of tradi-
tion for Armenians and not a question of faith in the strict sense
of the word. Hay-k'ristonya (Armenian-Christian) is under-
stood by the Armenians as a single whole, the two characteristics
being linked certainly by a hyphen. An informant of mine per-
ceived herself as a Christian precisely because of this Arme-
nian-Christian characteristic, even though she was not baptized.
At the same time, many Armenians might say with some satis-
faction, Now he/she has become a true Armenian in regard to
someone who has just been baptized. This was the reason why in
Soviet times the rate of baptism was higher in Armenia as com-
pared with many other traditionally Christian regions of the
USSR. We learned about these never discussed figures when a
special commission from the Kremlin came to the conclusion in
the early-1980s that there was a low level of anti-religious
propaganda in Armenia. The commission was said to have found
many receipts for baptisms and mistook this identity-oriented
practice for the purely religious one.

The Path of the Armenian-Christians
Religion is believed to be but one of the set of characteristics that
form a national identity. As all scholars of ethnic and national
phenomenon accentuate, there must be a s e t of such character-
istics, since a sole characteristic is not enough for this miracle of
imagination to take place (cf., e.g. Smith 1991: 14). However,
religion in rare cases might become the sole characteristic to
carry the entire burden of national identity at least implicitly.
An interesting case of such religion-identity linkage is the telling
history of a small group of Circassian Armenians in the North-
west Caucasus known as Cherkezogai (after the Russian Cherkes
Circassian and Armenian Hay Armenian with the russified
initial g). This group was formed, according to one probable
opinion, in medieval times by a group of Armenian warriors who

married Circassian women (Arakelian 1984: 43-58). The lan-
guage and all other ethnic markers of this group were Circassian,
except the faith, which remained Armenian Christian. One may
speculate on the roles of mothers and fathers in establishing eth-
nic characteristics on the basis of this case study. In any case, the
factor of religion somehow managed to preserve a kind of Ar-
menianness for this group, although it is not so clear how con-
cretely these mechanisms worked. Perhaps, we have another
manifestation of the Armenian-Christian dual entity we dis-
cussed earlier. Although the group lost almost all its ethnic char-
acteristics for centuries, the moment Circassian Armenians be-
came a rich and firmly established community in the region in
the second half of the 19
th
century, they immediately recovered
the Armenian language by founding schools and inviting teach-
ers from Armenia, and brought back many other national mark-
ers, including the name Armavir for their town named after the
ancient capital of Armenia, though this peak of stability was
rather short and faded away in the beginning of the 20
th
century
with the burst of revolution and civil war in Russia (Arakelian
1984: 122-126). Thus, faith played the role of a magical rope, by
means of which a group was able to pull out from non-existence
(not from its dozing memory, as some scholars of nationalism
may think) all the missing characteristics of a nation. The other
constituents of national identity, language, for example, seem to
be linked more loosely with the self-consciousness of a group.
This same Armenian-Christian phenomenon also mani-
fested (and continues to manifest) itself in the well-known and
often discussed historical fact that the Armenian Church also
took on responsibilities of the state during the long periods when
the Armenian people were deprived of statehood we will dis-
cuss some aspects of this dual responsibility in different Paths of
our Park/Garden of Identity. It is characteristic, that in a group
without national statehood, as were the Persian Armenians of
New Jugha, there was an obligatory traditional toast to the health
of the Catholicos,
6
that is the spiritual leader of the nation, as a
people of a state would propose a toast to the health of the king

6
According to Tamar Gevorgians analysis of written sources regard-
ing the history and culture of the New Jugha Armenians (paper pre-
sented at the 11
th
conference on Armenian Popular Culture, Institute of
Archaeology & Ethnography, Yerevan, 2001).

116
or its substitute like Stalin was praised at every feasting table
during the time of his rule in the Soviet past.
Christian in Armenian-Christian, as a matter of fact,
does not include Catholic. Following this popular rigid logic,
one may conclude that Catholic Armenians are less Armenian.
Thus, in Gyumri, where many Catholic Armenians live among
non-Catholics, people (especially the older generation) would
differentiate the Frank (Armenian Catholics)
7
from the Hay
(Armenians) (Malkhasiants 1945 /4/: 629), putting into the Hay
the same confessionally flavored meaning as in Hay-k'ristonya.
However, the situation here (and elsewhere in historic Armenia)
never approached the situation of Yugoslavia with confession-
ally differentiated Orthodox Serbians and Catholic Croatians.
More than that, the Catholic Armenians of Javakhk' province
(Javakheti, Georgia), together with the Orthodox Armenians of
this region, have preserved archaic elements of the traditional
culture (its pre-Christian layers) even more than Armenians of
other regions for example, we had to go to this province to take
photographs of some traditional elements of vernacular architec-
ture (e.g. cattleshed room) for our book on Armenian culture
and identity (see Abrahamian and Sweezy /eds./ 2001), since it is
the only place where they are still functioning. But with this we
are approaching the next Path, the Path of Tradition. The Catho-
lic Armenians of Javakhk' who originated from Western Arme-
nia, shared the same millet in Ottoman Turkey with the rest of
the Armenians and actually presented the same traditional cul-
ture. Later in Georgia, this shared traditional culture helped the
Armenians, both Catholic and Hay-k'ristonya, to preserve their
culture within the context of a Georgian environment.
The case of the Catholic Armenians of Poland is in direct op-
position to the previous example. Living among Slavonic Catho-
lics, they eventually lost their Armenian identity. Thus we can
conclude that when a group shares the same faith with the larger
group it lives with, the chances of losing its traditions and even-
tually even its identity are increased.
The phenomenon of the Armenian Mekhitarist Catholics also
presents an interesting case. Their Catholic faith didnt prevent

7
The name frank for Catholics follows the Armenian medieval tradi-
tion of defining Europeans as the franks, after the people who gave the
name of the first early-medieval great state in Europe.

them from creating valuable volumes on Armenian (pre-
Christian and folk Christian) traditions (cf. Bardakjian 1976).
One might think that they were not absolute Catholics and
even that they were hiding their true Armenian-Christianness
behind the Catholic mask as a matter of fact, there were such
suspicions among their jealous Catholic ill-wishers. But I think,
it was just their different faith that helped them approach the pa-
gan realities of the non-Catholic Armenians without Catholic
prejudices as if they were studying some other people. The
Mekhitarist phenomenon could be called intellectual national-
ism; it was (and continues to be) a nationalism of the clergy that
lacks a national flock.

The Parallel Paths of Grigor the Illuminator and the Virgins
The conversion of the Armenians to Christianity has two parallel
stories or paths, which joined and began to run together after
Grigor the Illuminator was released from his prison pit and saw
his remarkable vision soon after his discharge. Both stories are
described in the book written by Agat'angeghos in the 5
th
century
AD (see Agat'angeghos 1983; Agathangelos 1976) and continue
to be favorite stories for the Armenians both in folklore and
scholarly research, which in a sense may present a new kind of
folklore.
8
Here we will outline only several mythological peculi-
arities of these stories, which usually remain unnoticed.
The Path of Grigor the Illuminator is the path of a Christian
preacher: after undergoing terrible ordeals (13 or 14 years in a
prison pit), he miraculously cures the anti-Christian king of a
beastly disease and converts him into the first Christian king of
Armenia, becoming himself the first catholicos of the Armenian
Church. That is, this path establishes the double, earthly and
spiritual, supreme power in Armenia, the modern reflections of
which we will see in the Royal Path.
Different editions of Agat'angeghos book and other related
sources and research give different information on the origins of

8
Today in jmiatsin and Khor Virap, near the principal monuments re-
lated to these stories, one can hear the authentic or slightly differing story
of Agat'angeghos from pilgrims and clergymen. Folk versions were col-
lected by Ghanalanian (1969). Of the latest academic/folk versions see,
e.g. Abrahamian 2001a; E. Petrosyan 2001; H. Hakobyan 2000.

118
Grigor,
9
but what is important for our discussion here is the fact
that the king and the catholicos were thought to be r e l a t i v e s.
More than that, the father of Grigor happened to be the killer of
king Trdats father so that Grigors ordeals were not only a
result of an anti-Christian persecution, but also of a vendetta.
Agat'angeghos does not specify the kindred relations of Grigor
and Trdat, he just asserts the fact of their blood relations. The
killer of Trdats father could be his relative in reality Eghish,
for example, notes that the killer was the victims fathers
brother (Eghish 1957: 72), but says nothing about his newborn
son, the future Grigor the Illuminator. N. Adonts' (1928) thinks
that the story about the blood relationship of Grigor and Trdat
was introduced by Agat'angeghos under the influence of the Per-
sian epic tradition, but I think that the mythological background
for such a construction is even more archaic. The symmetric po-
sition in the hierarchy of power and especially the original ani-
mosity of Trdat and Grigor (at their fathers level expressed even
in the classical form of a killing) makes it possible to relate this
pair to the universal mythologeme of the rival b r o t h e r s
10

no wonder that in the late 1980s in Khor Virap, where the his-
torical prison-pit is located,
11
a pilgrim assured me that Trdat and
Grigor were cousins.
Another mythological allusion concerning Grigor is his long
stay in the deep pit. Even formally this theme seems to correlate
with the well-known fairy-tale plot about the junior brother who
was treacherously thrown by his elder brothers into a deep pit or
a well eventually emerging glorified (see Sravnitel'nyi ukazatel'
siuzhetov 1979: nos. 301 A and B). The biblical version of this
plot is the story of Joseph and his brothers. The elder brothers
12

9
See A. Ter-Ghevondians commentary on pp. 511-513 of Agat'angeg-
hos 1983; see also Ashchyan 2000: 10-12.
10
On the mythologeme of rival brothers, which can be traced back to
the rival t wi n s, see Zolotarev 1964; Abramian 1983: 137-168;
Abrahamian and Demirkhanian 1985.
11
Khor virap means deep pit in Armenian.
12
There are usually two elder brothers, so that the junior brother is the
third brother, and, in a more general sense, represents the idea of the
cosmological triple structure, which he resurrects after returning from
the underground (the third world) (see Elizarenkova and Toporov 1973:
67-68; Toporov 1977b: 94, 102; 1977c; 1979: 18-20).

in this plot usually present an entity opposed to the junior
brother, so that we often have a story of two rival brothers cf.
the brother allusion of Trdat and Grigor, which could be traced,
as we tried to show elsewhere (see Abrahamian and Demirkhanian
1985: 71-72), to a more archaic version of the rival twins. And
finally, the hero in the pit (well) is concerned in some vague way
with the idea of sin
13
let us recall Grigors responsibility for
his fathers crime, which can serve as further evidence of Grigors
closeness to the hero of the aforementioned plot.
The other story about the Conversion is the path of the virgins,
who fled Rome because of anti-Christian persecution, preached in
Vagharshapat (present-day jmiatsin/Echmiadzin) and were mar-
tyred (in all 37 persons) by the same king Trdat III. Although the
virgins are traditionally praised as Christian martyrs, as a matter of
fact they were killed because one of them, the fabulously beautiful
Hr'ip'sime, refused to marry the king who fell fatally in love with
her. So the path of the Armenian Conversion is strongly flavored
with stories of unrequited love
14
and vendetta.
As we have already mentioned, the path of Grigor the Illumi-
nator and that of the virgins intersect in the vision of Grigor. In
this vision, Grigor saw a man descend from the opened heavens
to make a heavy blow with a golden sledge on the center of the
city, flattening everything around it as a result. A terrible roar
was heard from beneath the earth, which he later learned, was
the master of Hell. Suddenly a golden mound-like construction
rose at the site of impact, becoming the base of a fiery column
with a cloudy capital crowned with a cross made of light. Simul-
taneously three similar columns rose from the three respective
spots where St. Hr'ip'sime, her tutoress St. Gayane and the rest of
the virgins were martyred. But these columns had red-colored
bases as a sign of the blood shed by the martyrs. The four col-
umns developed until they formed a heavenly temple, which,
probably, served Grigor as a model for constructing the original

13
See Toporov 1977b: 94, no. 31. This seems to be a more general
characteristic of any sacrificed hero (or anti-hero) cf. the original sin
of mankind that Jesus Christ expiated on the Cross.
14
By the way, according to Agat'angeghos (1983: 139), the virgins fled
Rome not only as a result of the emperor Diocletianus infamous perse-
cution of Christians, but also to avoid his possible sexual persecution of
the irresistible Hr'ip'sime, whose portrait was already in his possession.

120
version of the jmiatsin Cathedral at the site of the blow and the
first column. Grigor also ordered that three chapels be built on
the sites of the three other columns of the vision. They were later
replaced with beautiful churches by Grigors successors. This
remarkable vision described by Agat'angeghos (1983: 733-755
15
)
contains many invaluable illustrations for reconstructing and in-
terpreting Armenian ancient culture and living traditions. I have
undertaken attempts at historical and mythological interpreta-
tions of this vision elsewhere (see Abrahamian 2001a), so here I
would only like to outline one unexpected characteristic in the
mythology of the Christian martyred virgins, which, however,
has something in common with the discussed mythological lay-
ers of the image of Grigor the Illuminator.
At issue is the strange circumstance that Grigors vision actu-
ally classifies the virgins together with the recipient of the heav-
enly fighters blow, the master of Hell his death, as well as the
death of the virgins is followed by the rising of similar columns.
Although the virgins perished earlier, the simultaneous rising of
the columns at the place of their deaths indicates that they were
also the indirect recipients of the heavenly fighters blow. This
fighter can easily be identified as the well-known mythological
figure of the Thunderer; let us refer only to his lightning-weapon
in the shape of a golden sledge. This helps to reveal a much more
ancient and universal dragonish figure of his regular opponent in
the defeated master of Hell, while the vision in general could be
considered an Armenian version of the so called Principal Indo-
European Myth.
16
The vision also corresponds ideally to the

15
Here and hereafter in Agat'angeghos 1983 paragraphs are indicated,
not pages.
16
This myth was reconstructed by V. Ivanov and V. Toporov (1974)
and is well represented in ancient Armenian culture (see Abrahamian
and Sweezy /eds./ 2001: Index, s.v. Indo-European basic myth; Ha-
rutyunyan 1981; 2000: 78-195; A. Petrosyan 1997c: 6-7, 15, 20-24; cf.
Abeghian 1966: 414-418; see also the beginning of the Path of Nam-
ing). Further studies brought the authors of the reconstruction to the
idea that this myth reflects a more than Indo-European universal reality.
In Grigors vision, in any case, the victory over the dragonish opponent
(personifying the pagan faith) is followed also by a release of water
(interpreted as the waters of Baptism) involving sheep and goats (also
with a Christian moralistic interpretation), the basic elements of the
classical versions of the Principal Indo-European Myth.

model of the building sacrifice (Bauopfer): out of the body of the
sacrifice rises a certain construction (e.g., house, fortress or tem-
ple, as in St. Grigors vision) or unfolds the Universe itself
(Baiburin 1983: 69). (We will discuss some aspects of the Bau-
opfer in more detail in the Path Decorated with Statues.) The
typological closeness of the Christian martyred virgins to the
dragon would not look so strange if we consider them in the ar-
chaic context of the initial sacrifice, which presupposes an idea
of evil or sin related to the figure of the initial sacrifice
17
let us
recall the motif of s i n in the mythology of Grigor the Illumi-
nator (the sin of his father).
This initial intertwining of the pre-Christian and Christian
remains an essential characteristic of the Armenian Christian
faith, which has preserved, for example, the pagan ritual of
slaughtering a sacrificial animal and at the same time many pe-
culiarities of early Christianity, which other Christian religions
have lost centuries ago.

The Forking Paths of the Two Natures
That Eventually Meet Again
Any nation will have key dates and events in its real or mytho-
logical history that join the set of specific characteristics forming
its identity. Let us recall the role of the French revolution of
1789 in relation to the image and especially the self-image of the
French regardless of the historical/mythological context of this
event. Another example is how the Russians give a special ro-
mantic and noble significance to the failed Decembrist rebellion
of December 1825 regardless of the somewhat doubtful values
of many of its programs. Or a historically insignificant event
might turn into a crucial turning point when constructing na-

17
This is more obvious in the serpentine code of the mythologeme of
initial sacrifice see Abrahamian 1994, where, in particular, the dragon
and virgin blood is analyzed in the context of fairy-tales about dragons
demanding virgins to release some water. I want to stress here that the
dragonish aspect of the Christian virgins refers to the ancient layers of
these figures, and not to their Christian/historical interpretation. Since
the vision dealt with the story on the beginning of the temple, it auto-
matically involved the archetypical model of the building sacrifice,
which, in its turn, brought forward some even more archaic levels of
this mythologeme.

122
tional trees like the ones discussed in the Path of Ancestors. Or,
on the contrary, certain crucial events may be deprived of their
glorified or dramatic fame, as Lev Gumilev (1993) attempted to
reconsider the history of the Mongolian yoke in Russia. Let us
recall (also from the Path of Ancestors) how the academician
Fomenko tried to deprive an entire forest of national trees of
nearly all such events and dates.
Many crucial dates are related to a peoples faith in one way
or another, as, for example, the date of Conversion is for the
Armenians. However, there is a date in the history of Armenia
that undoubtedly played a crucial role in maintaining Armenian-
ness in the shape we have it now. This date is 451 AD. The sig-
nificance of this date for the Armenians is twofold, since there
were two famous events that happened during this year, respec-
tively on May 26 and October 8, both related to the question of
faith. The first was the battle of Avarayr to preserve the Christian
faith against the Persians who wanted to convert the Armenians
back to Zoroastrianism (at that time, a part of Armenia was un-
der Persian rule). This battle turned out to be one of the most
popular events in the history of Armenia (see, e.g. H. Petrosyan
2001a: 3). It provided the initial story of the national hero and
the traitor and served as a model for a more general and intrin-
sic duality in the history of Armenian culture, as we will see in
the Path of Dispersion. Although the Armenians officially lost
this battle and its hero Vardan Mamikonian was slain in battle,
they believe victory was actually theirs, in the sense that as a
result they managed to preserve their Christian faith. Since that
time any successful action by the Armenians which is based on
the peoples solidarity has been compared with the battle of Ava-
rayr, as, for example, were the rallies to be discussed in the Path
of Rebellion and Festival. Such comparisons became so typical
and even banal for the modern Armenian reality that people
would say: We are tired of all these symbolic victories, its time
to have some real ones.
The second event was the World Council of Chalcedon,
whose decisions the Armenians rejected, as a result becoming a
nation with a specific national religion. As the battle of Ava-
rayr placed Armenians beyond the Persian (Zoroastrian) influ-
ence, rejecting the Chalcedon Council placed them beyond the
influence of the Byzantine Church, putting the Armenians in the
characteristic situation of being in between (to be discussed in

the Path of Mediators), even though at the time Armenia was
divided between Persia and Byzantium.
We will not go into the details of the Council of Chalcedon,
to which a huge literature is dedicated.
18
We will only shortly
outline some anthropological aspects of the Christological dis-
course that was at the base of the Councils resolutions. This dis-
course had already begun during the first, Nicaean Council of
335 and at its core was the problem of the nature of Jesus Christ,
or, to be more precise, the problem of the correlation between
the divine and the human natures in his personality.
19
The Arme-
nians rejected the Chalcedon Definitions that stated Jesus Christ
as simultaneously a perfect man and a perfect God, with the na-
ture of his Father and that of ours, being the son of God and the
son of Mary. On the correlation of the two natures it was said
that they are unmixed and unchangeable, indissoluble and in-
separable (Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 329). The Armenians retained
the definition of the previous, Ephesus Council of 431: One is
the nature of the personified Logos of God or, in a more for-
mula-like form, x , One [nature] of the two
natures (Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 314). Hence the name Mono-
physite that was given to the Armenian Church together with
other Churches following this definition.
The Chalcedon Definitions in fact introduced an intermediate
version in the discourse on the nature(s) of Christ, while the po-
larities in this discourse were represented, respectively, by the
Armenian Church (solely divine nature) and Nestorianism
(solely human nature), the latter approach being anathematized
during the Ephesus Council. It is characteristic that the Chal-
cedon Definitions allow o n l y the Savior to combine the two
natures in such a mystic way. Interpreters especially accentuate
this: the definitions do not mean that the divine embraces the
human, nor does the human become divine through this union of
the two natures (Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 330). While in cultures
where incarnation and reincarnation are more usual phenomena,
for example in Indian or aboriginal Australian traditions, such a

18
See K. Sarkissian 1965 for a detailed analysis and literature of the
question.
19
For a historical background and analysis of the discourse see, e.g.
Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 311-347 (ch. 7: The Great Christological Dis-
course).

124
discourse would hardly become a dramatic corner-stone
20
with
crucial consequences for ethnic histories, as was the case with
the Armenians.
Interestingly, the principal idea of Nestorius, the author of the
solely man extremity of the discourse, was based on his anti-
Virgin attitude: he refused to recognize Mary as the one who
gave birth to God () in order not to decrease the unat-
tainable highness of God, hence the human nature of Jesus in his
heresy (see Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 312-313). This attitude can be
typologically compared with rituals (widely practiced around the
globe) of exterminating the mothers impact in shaping a son in
her womb by ridding her bad blood from the boy by provok-
ing bleeding at the nose, tongue or genitals, removing the pre-
puce as the symbol of the mothers vagina, cutting off uterine
hair, etc. (see Abramian 1983: 77-78). Liberated from the low
and impure feminine impact (human nature), the boy acquires his
spiritual (masculine) nature, often being born by some mytho-
logical creature after a temporary death.
21
But an even more
striking anthropological correlation to the Christological dis-
course, especially to the Chalcedon formula, can be seen in the
universal notion on double fatherhood concerning the cult of
twins: one of the twins is thought to be conceived by a h u ma n
father, while the other is conceived by a d e i t y.
22
In the Chal-
cedon formula, a similar idea of double fatherhood (natures) was
actually put into the single personality of the Lord.
I would like to stress here that we are discussing the arche-
typal background and anthropological correlations of the resul-

20
This does not mean that in these cultures the miracle of incarnation
was considered a less serious and mystic event. Cf. the conclusion of
religious scholars and adherents that Ramakrishna was an avatar a
direct, fully conscious manifestation of Divine Reality in human form.
They came to this conclusion by examining Ramakrishna in person and
not in theological disputes a few centuries later. Cf. also the mystic
presence of a totemic ancestor in the personality of any Australian abo-
rigine this and similar complex coexistence misinterpreted by some
scholars as the pre-logical thinking of the savages.
21
See Eliade 1965 for these and other types of mystical rebirth in initia-
tory symbolism.
22
On the idea of double fatherhood of the twins see Harris 1913;
Shternberg 1916; Ward 1968: 4, 12-14; Zolotarev 1964: 594; Abramian
1983: 157.

tant formula of the Council of Chalcedon, and not the historical
circumstances of its shaping. The latter is no less interesting and
well illustrates the religious aspect of the eternal fight between
West and East: Rome (represented by Pope Leo with his Tome
of Leo) first opposed to the rising authority of Alexandria (its
Patriarchs beginning to play the role of the Pope in the East), but
soon, after defeating Alexandria (the Patriarch was dethroned),
the Pope was involved in a more typical opposition between Old
and New Rome (see Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 324-329) Chal-
cedon being located in the vicinity of Constantinople
23
was rep-
resenting just this New Rome. The final somewhat controversial
Chalcedon Definitions were in fact a result of these tactical ma-
neuvers of the religious leaders of the East and the West. The
Armenians stayed with the Alexandrian formula, proposed by
the former Patriarch Cyril, that is, in the temporary East (in the
context of Pope Leos fight), but they actually stayed, as we have
already mentioned in this Path, between another East and West,
between Persia and Byzantium.

The Path of Rejection and Ethnic Survival
There are many speculations as to why the Armenians didnt
accept the Chalcedon decisions and stepped to their separate
forking path from the common path of faith some six centuries
before it forked into the two major paths of the Orthodox Church
and Catholicism marking a new phase in the ever-present oppo-
sition between East and West. One can find a detailed discussion
and bibliography on this question in the book by Karekin (Ga-
regin) Sarkissian (1965), the future Catholicos Garegin I, whom
we will meet again on the Royal Path. Here I will outline only
some of the views summarized by Sarkissian (1965: 12-14). The
Council of Chalcedon was rejected by the Armenian Church only
about a half a century after the event itself. The decisions by the
Council of Chalcedon, it seems, were not even discussed before the
Dvin Council at the beginning of the sixth century. To explain this
strangely long time span of neglect by the Armenians to the break-
ing news in the Christian world, which even provoked several re-
bellions in Egypt, Palestine and some regions of Syria and was a
topic of very sharp discourse during almost 70 years that followed
(Ter-Minaseants' 1908: 332), the Church historians were forced to

23
Presently it is located within greater Istanbul.

126
even focus on the personalities and intellectual abilities of the ca-
tholicosi of the period of neglect (see, e.g. rmanean 1993: 55-56).
However, many authors accentuate the coincidence of the afore-
mentioned two key events: the first, the battle of Avarayr, took
place in May and obviously overshadowed the second that was
held in October. In any case, the Armenians were not present at the
Council. The majority of the opinions are actually based on this
fact. Thus, the view listed under point 3a in K. Sarkissians sum-
mary asserts, [T]hat not being themselves present at the Council,
they were deceived and misled by others. Other views refer to
political intrigues: it was under the pressure of the Persians that
they were brought to reject the Council, this being a means to make
them stand in opposition to the Byzantine empire, the rival of the
Persian kingdom (point 4a). rmanean (1993: 57) sees in the re-
jection even an act of revenge, supposing that that Armenians
should have negative feelings toward the Council patronized by the
Byzantine emperor who rejected the Armenians appeal for help in
their fight for faith against the Persians. That is, again the two key
events overlap.
There is also a view that is especially interesting for us since
it paves a forking path in the direction of the Path of Language.
According to this view, the Armenians were not able to under-
stand the true meaning of the formulas used in the Tome of Leo
and the Chalcedonian Definition; for linguistic reasons it was not
possible to produce an accurate Armenian translation (Sarkis-
sians point 5). Another view, which supposes that the Armeni-
ans confused the Chalcedonian doctrine with Nestorian Chris-
tology, and, therefore, became opposed to it through their strug-
gle with Nestorianism (point 6), is, in fact, a consequence of the
former linguistic view,
24
if we follow, for example, Boris Us-
penskys opinion that the Armenian clergy misunderstood the
Greek term hypostasis as person which brought the Chal-
cedon resolutions back to the already anathematized Nestorian
heresy (Uspensky 1969: 163-164). We are dealing in fact with a
result of the influence of language on religious thinking in ac-
cordance with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claiming the more
general influence of language on thinking.
25
So, although lan-

24
K. Sarkissian (1965: 21) discusses it separately and in the religious
context.
25
Broadening the perspectives of this hypothesis and as a tribute to this

guage as a factor responsible for national identity, we know, is
often overemphasized by nationalists, it really could play, though
indirectly, as in this case, a considerable role in consolidating
national identity, since this misunderstanding actually pre-
served the Armenians Armenianness. Or, in other words, we
have a confessional version of the Tower of Babel: the World
Councils, a globalistic way to God, starting to be destroyed as a
result of the misunderstanding of the common religious lan-
guage. And it is characteristic that here too the Armenians were
the first ones in accordance with their pioneer complex.
However, K. Sarkissian (1965: 20-21) rejects the linguistic
argument and claims the religious one. He concludes his analysis
of the rejection of the Chalcedon Definitions by the Armenian
Church claiming that the Armenians attitude was primarily
religious and theological, not political and that the rejection
was a very natural and reasonable act, closely consistent with
their doctrinal position, when seen in the context of their histori-
cal and theological tradition. This conclusion based on a thor-
ough analysis of a scholarly clergyman, sounds quite religiously
correct. However, some thirty years later, in December 1996,
the same clergyman, now as Catholicos Garegin I, signed a joint
declaration in Rome with Pope John Paul II containing a Chris-
tological statement that almost absolutely coincided with the
Tome of Leo and the Chalcedon Definitions. It stated that in the
person of Jesus Christ, who was a perfect God in His Godliness
and a perfect man in His manliness, His Godliness was joined
with His manliness in such a union, which is real, perfect, un-
mixed and indissoluble, without any kind of separation. This
statement was sharply criticized by many Armenian clergymen
and intellectuals and was characterized as a step back to Chal-
cedonism, a violation of the Armenian Church traditions that were
achieved through much suffering, or at best was an ecumenical
step with unpredictable results for Armenian identity. It is difficult

narrow path forking in the direction to the Path of Language, let us add
that language in a sense has to influence national character and identity
as well, since it deals with traditional perceptions and ways of thinking.
As one small example let us mention the national sense of humor,
which is an integral part of national character and which together with
universal humoristic patterns consists of a great deal of untranslatable
language jokes and puns.

128
now to guess what the late Garegin I was thinking when he signed
this declaration. One thing is obvious: this time he was not making
a religious statement but a political one.
As for the enigma of the Chalcedon Council rejection, what-
ever the reason was or rather the many reasons were for this re-
jection, one can see its results from the perspective of the present
dayin the fact that its effect was to preserve Armenianness
between the Persian and Byzantine identities.
26

The Path toward the Temple
In these times, the Church is not the only provider and supporter
of Armenianness, as our Park/Garden of Identity with forking
paths shows. Moreover, the 70 years of communist rule were
marked with a militant fight against religion with a resultant
paradoxical rise of a new official religion, as we will see in the
Path back to Prehistory. At the same time, a form of Christianity
survived in Armenia, which is usually referred to as popular or
folk Christianity and which regained many archaic pre-Christian
worship peculiarities.
27
In rural Armenia, for example, one can
find many sanctuaries, most of them rather primitive in construc-
tion, that were built by individuals who have seen prophetic
dreams let us recall Grigor the Illuminators vision of the
heavenly temple followed by building activities. These simple
personal sanctuaries survived the anti-religious campaigns of the
communist activists, unlike a number of elaborate churches in
the cities. An informant of mine from a village in the Lake Sevan
basin told me that in Soviet times a local communist party func-
tionary destroyed one such sanctuary with the result of a sudden
twist of his neck. This strange condition was cured only after the
holy place was restored. Interestingly, this same punishment was
said to have struck Tamurlane after he had sacked an Armenian
church in Utik, so that he had to return a stolen trophy to be
cured (see Ghanalanian 1969: 175; Marutyan 2001a: 73).
Restoration of pre-Soviet realities and symbols after the fall
of the Soviet regime involved, naturally, religion as well. In the
search for a truly national identity a few religious movements

26
We will return to the ethno-defensive mechanisms of this phenome-
non in the Path of Dispersion.
27
For visual illustrations of folk Christianity worship see Abrahamian
and Sweezy (eds.) 2001.

tried to go even deeper into the past of their nation than the 70
years of Soviet rule. In accordance with the Armenian model
discussed in the Path of Ancestors, they recreated the pagan
religion of their ancestors and/or tried to step back into the path
of the national/tribal religion (cf. Ts'eghakron literally meaning
religion of a tribe/kindred group
28
) from the trodden path of
world religions (Christianity).
29
The new democratic liberties
also favored the penetration of a number of foreign-based reli-
gious sects into Armenia, so much so that soon after independ-
ence Parliament was forced to introduce some temporary dis-
criminatory restrictions in their activities while giving privileges
to the traditional Armenian Church to help her recover after 70
years of Soviet discrimination.
30
As for the symbolic side of this
recovery, it seems to have taken a rather effective course. In the
Royal Path we will see how the Catholicos regained his archaic
symbolic role in the institution of supreme power. There are also
some signs that the Church tends to fill the niche of morals and
ideology that stands empty after the communists retiring. Thus,
a high ranking clergyman excluded some works presented by

28
On Ts'eghakron (with Bibliography) see M. Lalayan 2001. Interest-
ingly, Garegin Nzhdeh, the founder of Ts'eghakron and one of the most
authoritative figures among the neo-paganists, actually never opposed
Christian ideology (see Petrosean 2001).
29
Some political parties supported the return to pagan origins in one
way or another, as the Republican Party did, especially during the first
years of its activities. The neo-paganist trend was also considered to be
a means of regaining pagan militancy, which the Armenians had al-
legedly lost thanks to Christian timidity. We will return to this topic
in the Path of Violence.
30
The role of sectarianism in post-Soviet Armenia is a theme worthy of
a special study. Besides the confessional side of the problem, which we
will not discuss here, there are also social and psychological reasons for
the spread of sectarianism. Some sects (like the Evangelists) are be-
lieved to attract people because of their less official and family-like
atmosphere, others (like the Jehovahs Witnesses) because of their
pacifism, which gives the sectarians an excuse to decline from serving
in the army, and still others (like the Mormons) because of their good
organization and wealth. A delicate peculiarity of the sectarianism in
Armenia, which makes them relatively invulnerable, is that some
wealthy sects (like Baptists and Mormons) penetrated the country as
they rendered considerable assistance after the disastrous earthquake in
December 1988.

130
well-known artists at a large Yerevan exhibition of fine arts in
2001 dedicated to the 1700
th
anniversary of the Conversion as
ideologically incorrect, just like a communist functionary
would have done some 10-15 years ago, though based on differ-
ent ideological principles.
The gaining of democratic liberties did not leave behind
building activities in the religious sphere, which, as I have al-
ready mentioned, never stopped on the individual level even dur-
ing Soviet times. Now these dream-inspired formerly primitive
shrines may at times acquire a more elaborate and sometimes
non-canonic shape. Thus, in one of the regions of Armenia a
church having a hexagon in its plan was built in late-1990s by a
local resident, who said during a TV interview that the idea was
derived from his reminiscences of the thick glass tumbler they
used for drinking vodka in Soviet times.
The official Church also became engaged in building activi-
ties, and on a very large scale at that, since the late Catholicos
Vazgen I had always cherished the idea of building a cathedral in
Yerevan in order to crown 1700 years of Christianity in Armenia.
A contest was announced in 1992 for the best project, and
construction followed even though many people doubted that the
church could be completed by 2001. Nevertheless, Yerevan got
its St. Grigor the Illuminator Cathedral by just the moment
planned for its consecration. During this whole period I heard
different types of criticism concerning the idea of such a grand
construction project during a time of crisis for the country itself.
Faith-oriented people said it would be more effective for the
Christian future of the nation if the same money were used for
building a number of smaller churches; historically oriented in-
tellectuals thought that it would be better to reconstruct the many
half-ruined medieval churches, while more practical ones said
that it would be more reasonable to mark the anniversary by con-
secrating the spot of the future building and leaving the task of
its construction to future generations; and, finally, common peo-
ple were arguing angrily that it would be more reasonable to give
the money to the starving population of Armenia. The money
figuring in these and similar discourses was actually provided by
the Armenian diaspora and would hardly be collected for the
many purposes listed above. Rather, only a grand symbol like the
idea of a Temple had the chance to attract the attention (and
purses) of diaspora Armenians, since many of them perceive the

present-day Republic of Armenia itself as a kind of s y mb o l
of the native land we will return to this topic for a more de-
tailed discussion in the Path of Dispersion.
One thing is quite obvious: the new Temple from the mo-
ment of its conception to its final realization is something from
the list of symbols of Armenian identity. Even its grand scale
(which is not so visually obvious as a result of its architectural
peculiarities) seems to be based on the fixed idea of having 1700
seats inside the church. Its a challenge to both Christian and
non-Christian worlds, a new statement of the pioneer complex.
It is not my task here to analyze the merits and demerits of the
church. As soon as its symbolic aspect is accentuated, I will only
raise a few questions related to its symbolism.
An analysis of the projects presented to the contest show that
the majority of the traditionally designed projects were a combi-
nation of famous monuments from the history of Armenian
church architecture, which is not a surprise: the present-day gen-
eration of Armenian architects was not kept busy building
churches during Soviet times, so that their experience was only
theoretical and was based on masterpieces of the past. The St.
Grigor the Illuminator Cathedral is a good example of such com-
binatory architecture. However, one can see an interesting pat-
tern in the proposals submitted for this project: a great deal of
them draw on structural components of the famous temple of the
7
th
century Zvart'nots'. This demonstrates that modern architects
consider at least unconsciously this architectural masterpiece
as an indisputable reference-point. Zvart'nots' seems to already
play this role of spiritual reference-point starting in medieval
times; this may be the reason why its replica was built in Ani in
the beginning of the 11
th
century we will discuss some modern,
virtual and more mysterious replicas of the Zvart'nots' temple in
the Path of Rebellion and Festival. This three-tiered temple with
a circular floor plan ideally correlates with the structure of the
universal concept of the Cosmic Tree. Perhaps that is why a
three-tiered structure very much resembling the Zvart'nots' tem-
ple was placed in Noahs Ark on a relief carved in the Saint-
Chapel church in Paris (see H. Marutyan 1988).
All this demonstrates that Zvart'nots' itself could be a real
s y mb o l to crown the anniversary of Christian architecture in
Armenia. In this sense, even a very beautiful compilation of tra-
ditional samples could not compete with Zvart'nots'. Catholicos

132
Vazgen I certainly foreknew this, since he expressed his dream
as early as November 1988 (in an article published in the news-
paper Sovetakan Hayastan) to see the future Cathedral in the
shape of Zvart'nots', though bigger in size. More than that, fol-
lowing this idea of his, such a project was prepared by the archi-
tect Tiran Marut'yan, the author of a monograph on Zvart'nots'
and Zvart'nots'-type temples (T. Marutyan 1963). However, later
the Catholicos changed his mind under the influence of his con-
sultants whose line of argument was to look for masterpieces in
modern Armenia, rather than in its past.
31

The Zvart'nots' temple also had other peculiarities that made
it a good candidate for the new Cathedral in Yerevan. It would
not have been a reconstruction the ruins of Zvart'nots' are al-
ready a specific monument in and of itself and have the right to
survive as such but a replica, an enlarged copy using new anti-
seismic technology, resulting in its rebirth could have symbol-
ized the resurrection of Armenia in a general sense, including a
resurrection after the destructive earthquake of December 1988,
especially since Zvart'nots' seems to have been eventually ruined
as a result of an earthquake, though it was already thoroughly
destroyed by the Arabs at the end of the 10
th
century (see T. Ma-
rutyan 1963: 74-77; 1966).
However, Yerevan gained a different religious symbol, which
perhaps in the future will raise other identity-linked questions.
Thus, a 10-meter high monument of general Andranik, the fa-
mous hero of the Genocide period (whom we will meet again in
the Path Decorated with Statues), was erected by the end of
2002. The general is running two horses symbolizing Armenia
and diaspora, a fact which reminds us, perhaps, among other al-
lusions, of the costs of the temple, which were covered almost
solely by diaspora Armenians. In any case, Yerevan lost a rare
opportunity to gain a powerful spiritual criterion, landmark and
reference-point, which would have inevitably influenced the
quickly changing appearance of the city.
Despite the many pretensions and feelings of discontent that I
recorded from my informants, potential and occasional visitors
of the new Cathedral (e.g., it looks like scenery, it is not an
appropriate place to speak with God or you feel yourself in a

31
I am grateful to Tiran Marut'yan for this information and for the op-
portunity to be acquainted with his project and related materials.

protestant, not in an Armenian church), the church nevertheless
immediately acquired a typical folklore framing. Thus, the first
wedding in the cathedral is said to be an unhappy one: a scorpion
was said to have mortally stung the bride when she was lighting
a candle, and the bridegroom couldnt stand this grief and died of
a heart attack.
32
I was unable to check the veracity of this story,
but at least the episode with the scorpion looks quite truthful
when the cathedral opened, the place destined for offering can-
dles was not ready yet, and so people used a basement beneath
the Cathedral, where scorpions are hardly strangers, for the pur-
pose of lighting candles. This underground room, which contin-
ues to serve as a candle-lighting space (as of 2005), quickly ac-
quired the look of a typical, non-official popular Christian sanc-
tuary a kind of pagan Christian shrine, very much like those
which pious people managed to create in their homes and in non-
functioning or ruined churches during the 70 years of Soviet
rule.
33
The secret popular non-official sanctuary beneath the
official state Cathedral indicates that beneath todays official
revived Christianity lies a stable layer of pagan Christianity
in the same way, as pagan beliefs lied (and continue to lie) be-
neath the newly adopted Christianity both in architecture and
religious festivals.

The Misty Path of Celebration
The celebrations of the 1700
th
anniversary of the Conversion
commenced with the beginning of the year 2001. An impressive
happening-performance was thoroughly planned for this occa-
sion. The moment the anniversary year came in, Catholicos Ga-
regin II who had beforehand climbed down into the same deep
prison-pit in Khor Virap where the first Catholicos Grigor the
Illuminator passed many agonizing years, came out of the pit
with a lit candle, symbol of the Light that illuminated Armenians
1700 years ago. This newly reborn Light was then transported to
the jmiatsin Cathedral, where representatives of all of the

32
Actually the first wedding took place earlier, when the church was
still in the process of construction, and had no dramatic consequences
at least on the folklore level. The bridegroom was the son of the con-
tractor.
33
See Abrahamian and Sweezy (eds.) 2001: Pl. 3.5 and 3.6 for illustra-
tions.

134
branches of the Armenian Church lit their candles from this
Light in order to relight the Light of Faith in all Armenian
churches, large and small, spread all over the world. In accor-
dance with the historical precedent, the Catholicos also illumi-
nated President Kocharian, who was personifying king Trdat in
this ritual performance,
34
and the king-president eventually
passed the Light to the gas burners of the tall cross raised exactly
on the spot where the statue of the communist God Lenin re-
cently stood. The scenario also involved 40 girls personifying the
virgins (instead of the original 37)
35
and many other picturesque
figures and scenes, this time as a performance-show without the
real king and Catholicos playing parts in it. But suddenly a
thick mist came down on the city, and the Armenian people, who
were mostly watching this revival of the great Precedent on their
TV screens, remained unaware of the events following king
Trdat III regaining his human form the broadcast was stopped
because of the lack of visibility. As an informant joked the next
day, Armenian history was lost in the mist. But another infor-
mant was more somber; she stated that God was angry with the
untruthful king and Catholicos and deprived them of the
pleasure of enjoying the great event.

34
In the Royal Path we will see that he is embodying the king in a more
general context as well.
35
Perhaps, in order to deal with a more typical round number (on the
round number see Airapetian 2001: Index, s.v. krugloe chislo). This
detail and the performance as a whole demonstrate the aforementioned
living tradition of the legend of Grigor and the virgins.

The Path of Tradition

SEVEN

THE PATH OF TRADITION
Identity Forged by Everyday Life

Another Path of Pioneers
We have already followed several paths contributing to the
common Garden of Identity, though we have avoided defining
nation and national identity itself. It is difficult to say whether
there is an intrinsic hierarchy in the paths toward identity or how
many characteristics (which paths) are necessary to start its in-
comprehensible mechanism. In the Path of Faith we saw that in
the case of the Circassian Armenians one characteristic, faith,
was enough to retrieve the others, traditionally comprising the
set of characteristics of groups living under normal circum-
stances. Sometimes language may play only a secondary role in
the identity forming processes and in other cases it could even
substitute for the concept of nation, as the Armenian language
was signifying Armenia and Armenians in early medieval
times.
1

Here we are faced with the problem already mentioned in the
Path of Naming: the two ways of translating Khorenats'is and
other medieval authors Hayots' patmut'iwn as History of Ar-
menia or History of the Armenians (both translations admis-
sible by Armenian grammar). Those translating it as History of
the Armenians (following R. Thomson see Khorenats'i 1978;
Agathangelos 1976) consciously or unconsciously avoid placing
early medieval Armenia and the Armenians into the context of

1
See analysis of the term yerkir haykakan lezui land of Armenian
speech by the 5
th
century author P'awstos Buzand in Grosby 1997: 21,
and Arm. Aivazian 2001: 19-21. For an English translation of this work
see P'awstos 1989 (V.30: [all the speakers]-of-the-Armenian tongue).

138
modern nationalist discourse.
2
Here I want to stress that for an
Armenian b o t h meanings are present in the form Hayots'
that of the land and that of the people living in this land. Actually
this translators puzzle expresses at the linguistic level (using
one word only) what a modern theorist would try to express in
many words when explaining the idea of a nation-state. Of
course, it would be incorrect to compare Armenian medieval
nationalism with European nationalism in the 18
th
-19
th
centuries,
when the origins of modern nationalism are usually being looked
for. However, the opposite view toward early Armenian realities
through the late-European spectacles also seems to be inaccurate
and is a typical product of Eurocentrism. Having similar prob-
lems, but being less Eurocentric than modern theorists of nation-
hood, Marx introduced a somewhat vague Asiatic mode of pro-
duction, which didnt fit his theory of capital based on the Euro-
pean experience. Only rarely do modern analysts try to make a
differentiation between European and non-European national
models cf. Anthony Smiths differentiation between Western
and non-Western or ethnic concepts of nation, the latter being
first and foremost a community of common descent (Smith
1991: 11).
Some specific characteristics of a (Western) nation, such as
mobility
3
and cultural homogeneity, were, according to Ernest
Gellner (1983: 73), the result of the process of industrialization. I
will leave a special discussion of the concept of nation for an-
other occasion,
4
however, I would like to note here that some
phenomena that are claimed to be obligatory for the invented
communities, seem to be invented or at least exaggerated by the
analysts who try to understand these communities. Even the in-
ventor of the invented communities himself, Benedict Ander-
son (1992: 37-46), seems to exaggerate the role of print-

2
Cf. Arm. Aivazian 1998: 127-128 for such an accusation addressing
R. W. Thomson. But while in Thomsons case such an attitude toward
Armenia/Armenians is implicit, F. Mamedova explicitly claims that
Armenians were always scattered in the world and never formed a state
that one may call Armenia see the Path of Naming, Ftn. 16.
3
We will return to the problem of mobility in the following forking
path discussing the concept of Home.
4
For an outline of the history of the debates about nationalism see, e.g.
Smith 2000.

The Path of Tradition 139
capitalism in nation making, by focusing mainly on the elite
and leaving aside the majority of the peasant population that
couldnt read newspapers. However, some virtual reality
5
has to
be shared in any case by the members of a community to raise it
to the taxonomic level of the modern nation. In this sense,
Andersons print culture actually plays the role of such a vir-
tual reality.
It is difficult to say whether there was such a virtual reality
that united Armenians in early medieval times into, let us say, a
kind of pre-nation (to avoid accusations of using modern terms
like nation for pre-modern times), but such a shared identity
nevertheless seemed to exist at least as far back as the 5
th
century
AD. In any case, medieval Armenians seemed to have many (if
not almost all) of the characteristics that a modern theorist would
apply to a modern nation (cf., e.g. Bromlei 1981: 27-28) leav-
ing aside, of course, the industrialization-evoked and other fea-
tures of modern times.
6
Following the already beaten Paths, we
can say that they had a sense of shared history and a faith in
history
7
with its principal sacred book by Khorenats'i, which-
ever century in early medieval times his hypocriticists or hyper-
criticists may claim it to originate from. Armenians also had the
common endo-ethnonym Hay, the name they called themselves;
let us stress that many nations of modernity, for example, the
French, whom analysts especially like to present as a classical
sample of modern nations, attained this feature quite recently,
only in modern times. The characteristic of language is also
working in favor of the Armenian pre-nation: according to H.
Acharian (1945: 363, see also 114-140, 362-439) and G. Dja-
hukian (1987:365), the Armenian language was much more ho-
mogenous in the 5
th
century than centuries later; the dialects that
could be spotted by linguistic analysis of the burst of literature

5
I borrowed this definition from Sebouh Aslanian.
6
On the Armenian version of modern Western-type identity see B. L.
Zekiyans book The Armenian Way to Modernity (1997). Its focus and
time period are reflected in the explanatory additional subtitle on the
title-page reading An Inquiry into the Impact of the Modern World on
Armenian Society from the Renaissance through Enlightenment up to
the Genocidal Catastrophe of 1915.
7
I use here the telling title, which Susan Pattie gave to her book explor-
ing quite another sphere of Armenian studies see Pattie 1997.

140
after the introduction of the Armenian script by Mesrop Mash-
tots', are even thought by Acharian to be sub-dialects rather than
strictly differing dialects, some of them even reflecting the Ar-
menian of originally non-Armenian-speaking groups. One may
recall the language policy of national language domination in
modern nation-states like France, however, we can only guess
about the reasons of such a linguistic situation in early-medieval
Armenia, which in any case seemed to be typologically closer to
that of a modern nation-state, than it is usually thought.
As we noted in the Path of Language, one more linguistic
characteristic of a modern nation was recently noted by Armen
Aivazian (2001) in early-medieval Armenian reality in the ex-
pression of the idea of superiority of Armenian when compared
with other languages, which phenomenon, rightly considered to
present an evidence of the emergence of nationhood, becomes
articulated in Europe only in the 16
th
18
th
centuries, when the
European-type nation emerges (see Greenfeld 1992). Interest-
ingly, the linguistic model, which showed up in England and
Russia at the peak of their political glory (Arm. Aivazian 2001:
47), first appears in Armenia in the writings of Eghish
(Khach'ikyan 1992: 249; Eghish 2003: 817), the describer and
allegedly witness of the Avarayr battle for faith, which we dis-
cussed in the Path of Faith. That is, the nation-linked linguistic
discourse emerges here not at its peak but at a critical period of
national history.
We already know, from the Path of Faith and other paths as
well, that the next principal characteristic, that of religion, was
also favoring the national idea in modern shape. Let us recall the
pride of the Armenians, especially in the year 2001, of being the
first official Christians. However bizarre this pioneer com-
plex of the Armenians may sometimes appear for an observer,
in this particular case being the first is important in the sense
of being the first who were forced by the s t a t e to convert to
Christianity, which soon, after rejecting the Chalcedon Defini-
tions, took the shape of a kind of national religion. That is,
religion introduced from above becomes a nation-stimulating
factor in a way comparable with the mechanisms of the modern
nation-state formation. Let us also add the consolidating role of
the script introduced early in the 5
th
century.
Of course, the process of consolidation could not take place
without a material base like the homogeneity of the language,

which had to be formed much earlier before it was fixed in the
5
th
century. Here one needs to go into earlier stages of the history
of Armenia and Armenians (both meanings of the term Hayots'
being actual in this case) in order to look for preconditions lead-
ing to this strange nation-like formation of the Armenians in
early medieval times (cf. Arm. Aivazian 2001: 14-15). Perhaps,
a future investigator of this theme, which we cant afford to go
into here, will focus on the problem of r e f o r ms in general
(the conversion to Christianity being one of them), which could
play an important role in creating the real and later the virtual
framework for consolidating the people into pre-national, na-
tional or post-national
8
communities.
9

To conclude this essentialist forking Path, I will address the
similar ideas of Steven Grosby (1997) on the ancient Armenian
nation. Speaking of Armenia in the 4
th
and 5
th
centuries AD, he
documents terms that would appear to indicate the existence of
two referents of the collective self-consciousness constitutive of
a nation of Armenia, a relation of a bounded areal jurisdiction, a
territory, and a language (and after 400 AD an Armenian script
common to Roman Armenia and Persian Armenia (Thom-
son 1994: 38) which was seen as common to Armenians and
their territory. Grosby also adds a third referent a belief in an
ancestry common to all Armenians (Grosby 1997: 21; cf. Smith
2000: 46-47).
Seeing a nation-like structure in early medieval Armenia does
not mean that the Armenian identity and nation never changed
during their history beginning from days immemorial. I am not
making such primordialist claims here but think that some conti-
nuity in the national identity of the Armenians exists, which can
be traced back at least to the 5
th
century AD. In any case, the
modern Armenian identity seems not to be as modern as mod-
ern theorists would have us believe (cf. Smith 1986: 212); at
least this question is worthy of a future detailed analysis. To use

8
Cf. Gorbachevs reforms, which prevented the peoples of the Soviet
Union to become a Soviet people. On Gorbachevs reforms, which
turned out to be in fact an invitation to a festival, see more in the Path
of Rebellion and Festival.
9
I am grateful to the archaeologist Simon Hmayakian for a constructive
discussion on the role of the reforms in the state of Urartu and in the
history of a nation in general.

142
the key concept of modern nationalist discourse, we can say that
this nation-like structure seemed to be invented by Armenian
nationalists much earlier than it was by their modern neighbors.
So that the root-oriented model of Armenian identity we have
discussed in the Path of Ancestors is not just a bizarre pseudo-
historical fantasy but reflects some historical realities. In other
words, Armenians seem to be doomed to be essentialists. In the
same sense one may compare the totalitarian trend of Eurocen-
tric modern instrumentalists to rejuvenate nations and Fo-
menkos fixed idea to cut all the national genealogical trees in
order to fit the Russian tree, as we discussed in the Path of An-
cestors. Of course, tall national trees need to have some
mechanisms of growth there should be some stable channels,
through which once a national identity is invented, it can pass on
to following generations. This is the most vulnerable point for
such reconstructions of ancient nationalism. We dont have
detailed anthropological descriptions of those times to recon-
struct reliable mechanisms of the information transfer. Many
such mechanisms could be of oral origin or could be rooted in
the low routine of everyday life, which never interested elitist
historians. For Armenians, a possible mechanism for the continu-
ity of their historical, root-oriented identity could have been
the historical by-products of the sermons of educated national-
ist clergymen
10
and liturgy in general. I mean historical key
stereotypes like the Avarayr battle
11
rather than history in a mod-
ern academic sense. Of course, those are just assumptions based
on indirect sources.
12
The presence of the Avarayr battle theme

10
On the canonical rules of sermon rhetoric including historical knowl-
edge of the events and figures to be spoken about in the sermon see
Mesropyan 2003: 143. In the Armenian Church tradition, the canoniza-
tion of the martyrs in the name of faith and fatherland is traced back to
the late 30s and early 40s of the 4
th
century AD see Vardanyan and
Badalyan 2003: 92.
11
On the introduction of celebrating the 1036 martyrs of the Avarayr
battle in the 5
th
century AD (the Vardanants' celebration) and the
changing of its date in the Church calendar see Vardanyan and
Badalyan 2003. Since the 14
th
century this festival has been celebrated
on the Thursday of the week preceding the Shrovetide.
12
Cf. Armen Aivazians attempt to spot historical realities (e.g., the
figure of Nerses the Great) in 18
th
century sermons (Arm. Aivazian
1998: 66-70) and its criticism in Aslanian 2003: 15-17.

in sermons has been supported by the presence of the heroes of
the battle in canonical spiritual songs (sharakan) at least since
the 12
th
century.
13

The classical medieval period (10
th
-13
th
centuries), which is
sometimes considered to represent the Armenian Renaissance
(Chaloyan 1963), is of special interest as the period of revival
of the early-medieval national invention.
14
No wonder Eghi-
shs nationalist praising of the Armenian language was re-
peated by Vardan Arevelts'i, Mkhit'ar Ayrivanets'i and Hovhan-
nes Yerznkats'i in the 13
th
century to be picked up by Grigor
Tat'evats'i late in the 14
th
century
15
and eventually by Mik'ayel
Ch'amch'yan in the 18
th
century (Arm. Aivazian 2001: 23-34), in
a time when the newly forming European nationalism, for exam-
ple, the Russian one, also used analogous formulas (Arm.
Aivazian 2001: 39-41). For the national realities of ancient
times, I have referred to nationalist i n t e l l e c t u a l s like
Eghish, while, as I have already mentioned, we know very little
about the p e o p l e who were comprising the community, in
which I am trying to see the features of at least a pre-nation. In a
sense here I am following modern analysts of nationalism, who
also often refer to patriotic intellectuals of the 19
th
century as the
inventors of the modern concept of nation. In the Armenian case,
those were intellectuals like the novelist Raffi, who were as-
signed a part of the demiurges of the modern Armenian nation
see, e.g. Suny 1993: 10.

13
I am grateful to Anahit Baghdasaryan for pointing out this indirect
source of historical identity. See Palyan 2003: 167-168 for examples of
Nerses Shnorhalis (12
th
century) mentioning of the Avarayr battle he-
roes in a special sharakan. Canonical sharakan songs were dedicated
also to other historical key figures like the saint translators (see Bagh-
dasaryan 2003).
14
Hamlet Petrosyan thinks that it is this period that should be consid-
ered as the time of Armenian national identity formation: this opinion
was expressed at the round table on Armenian identity at the Interna-
tional Congress on Armenian Studies (Yerevan, September 19, 2003).
The round table was organized around a paper reflecting ideas pre-
sented in this Path (L.Abrahamian 2003: 5-6).
15
It is interesting that the French example of national language superi-
ority was already expressed in the 14
th
century (Arm. Aivazian 2001:
37-38), a fact worthy of noting for understanding the French pre-
nationalistic trends.

144
And the question is not just the one-sidedness of the theorists
of nationalism but reflects a more general problem of interpret-
ing written sources. We have already discussed one case of mis-
interpretation of a medieval author in the Path of Naming. Such
misinterpretations are an inevitable by-product and sometimes
the only product of the interpretation of ancient written sources.
And, let me repeat, this happens not only because an interpreter
is unskillful or, on the contrary, lies skillfully, but also because
the sources are lying. And this seems to be their common and
essential nature and not an uncommon peculiarity. One involved
in the study of contemporary history may observe how some
possible faults in interpreting written sources might originate. As
an anthropologist working shoulder-to-shoulder with historians
of contemporary history (my work in the field differing from that
of the latter perhaps in focusing more on the living, non-written
sources), I had a few opportunities to spot the origin of a fault of
a written source, which should become a document for future
historians. Thus, looking for a particular leaflet during my field-
work in the streets and squares of Yerevan in 1988 (this minor
genre of written sources was produced in abundance during the
stormy rallies to be discussed in the forthcoming paths), I found
a hand-written copy of it, but missing a passage I needed. I was
able to trace the copy to the copyist, who turned out to be an
educated woman who omitted this passage intentionally, since
she simply disliked it. Let us hope that some historian in the fu-
ture will be more fortunate than I was and will find the original
copy of the leaflet in some rare archive collection, so that our
descendants can avoid a source inaccuracy in this case. During
the rallies I recorded many cases when even an oral source that
was immediately fixed into a written form had the same kind of
faults. These seemingly banal speculations lie at the base of the
ethnography of contemporaneity, which, in contrast with the his-
tory of contemporaneity, is more disinterested and less oriented
toward previously known (even if unconsciously) models.
16

In the case of the theorists of nation and nationalism we often
seem to have another twist of this problem of interpretation of
written and related sources. Many scholars are often trapped by
the ideal imagined communities presented by local nationalists

16
I am indebted to the anthropologist Ara Gulyan for constructive dis-
cussion of this problem.

like Raffi, who was following the ideal models of European na-
tionalism, and not the realities of his own community, which
would have looked quite different for an anthropologist using the
described indifferent method of observation. Or another exam-
ple: a scholar of the future, studying only written sources left in
the late-18
th
century by Armenian intellectuals living in Madras,
India, would come to the conclusion that Armenians in Armenia
had already achieved a European-type civil society in those early
times, though the Armenian anthropological reality was very far
away from this constructed ideal, which presently became an-
other pattern to feed the pioneer complex of the Armenians.
The situation with written sources can be compared with that of
sovietology, the Western discipline studying Soviet realities:
only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did some scholars
discover that they had been studying an imagined Soviet society
presented by communist propaganda or anti-communist dissent,
instead of the real peoples (cf. Bremmer and Taras 1993: xxii).
(We will return to this problem in the Path back to Prehistory.)
As I noted earlier concerning ancient nationalism, the p e o -
p l e, the object of the theories on nation, are often neglected by
their authors, which is a result of our lack of knowledge, and not
a matter of negligence. I have to stress here that I dont mean the
well-known fact of the later reflection by the populace on the
constructions of nationalists (and even theorists of nation and
nationalism) we have met some examples of this phenomenon
in the first three Paths of our Garden of Identity. I rather mean
the often-condescending view of the theorists from above of the
people who, being unaware of the theories of nation, might rep-
resent the national features through their everyday life. With
some exaggeration and with the risk of being accused of essen-
tialism, I would like to conclude this path by assuming that in
some cases (including the Armenian one), while theorists intro-
duce the nation on the level of t h o u g h t and shape it in
wo r d s, their invention unwittingly functions for centuries on
the level of deed.

The Path of a Nation-Family
We know from the Path of Language that Armenians have a long
tradition of translating foreign words, sometimes even untrans-
latable ones, into their own language, or creating new telling
words. However, this wasnt the case with the word nation.

146
When the modern concepts of nation and nationalism emerged
into the European discourse in the 19
th
century, Armenians natu-
rally gave preference to the Armenian word azg, since, like the
original Latin natio, it embraces such meanings as tribe, clan,
people, order, class. However, by acquiring this new mean-
ing,
17
the Armenian azg, in contrast to the not translated foreign
word nation, nevertheless didnt lose its traditional tribal and
family meaning.
18
Let us recall the commonly used word
azganum meaning family name, literally name of the azg, or
azgakan meaning relative, which are both devoid of the nu-
ances of the new abstract meaning and, on the contrary, seem to
pull the concept of azg-nation back to tribal realities. And this
tribal worldview is not a result of the magnetic force of the
word azg, it still seems to have strong roots in the Armenian
mentality. Let us recall the neo-pagan trends in the tribal relig-
ion Ts'eghakron, as we noted already in the Path of Faith.
Recently, Armen Petrosyan made an interesting comparison
between the Armenian traditional extended family, which proved
to represent one of the most archaic Indo-European kin groups,
and the Armenian azg-nation. Following . Karapetians (1966:
25) definition of azg as a familial-kin group, which includes
families of several generations, usually six-seven, rarely eight,
deriving from an ancestor-founder, whose name becomes the
generic term, Petrosyan concludes that the Armenian progenitor
Hayks large family (with seven descendants) could present the
mythological prototype, the most archaic version of the Arme-
nian patriarchal family. Here we again face the name-related
topic discussed in the Path of Naming (Ftn. 5): This considera-
tion shows once again that the ethnonym Hay and the dialectal
hay husband, head of family are affined with the name of the
patriarch Hayk (Hay-ik). The name of Hayk would have become
the generic name of Hayks azg-family and azg-nation. The
historical Armenian azg, i.e., the nation of Hayk, would have
been regarded as the current state of Hayks initial (divine) fam-

17
In an Armenian explanatory dictionary of the mid-1940s (Malkha-
siants' 1944 /1/: 8) this new meaning is listed under point 3.
18
In this sense Armenians fit Anthony Smiths description of the non-
Western model of nation as a fictive super-family (see Smith 1991:
12). On azg as the traditional kindred group among the Armenians, see
Karapetian 1958; 1966.

ily (A. Petrosyan 2002: 161).
Although the word azg does not have the direct meaning of
family, which, in the meaning of extended family is occupied
by the word gerdastan, it nevertheless is close to the same se-
mantic field. It is not a mere chance that in the streets of present-
day Yerevan a young man will address an unfamiliar man or
woman of his age as aper (colloquial from eghbayr brother) or
k'uyrik (diminutive from k'uyr sister) respectively, while unfa-
miliar representatives of his parents-age generation would be
addressed usually as hopar and mork'ur (colloquial from, respec-
tively, horeghbayr fathers brother and morak'uyr mothers
sister); elderly women are addressed as mayrik (diminutive from
mayr mother). The hayrik (diminutive from hayr father) ad-
dress is used relatively less frequently, at least among those who
use the aper and hopar forms.
19
Younger persons address those
fairly older than them as tati / papi (grandma/grandpa). That
is, the Armenian society azg-nation as a whole is modeled as a
family: children, parents father and mother and their broth-
ers/sisters. In this system of addresses one will rarely meet a
hork'ur (fathers sister) and k'er'i (mothers brother) the
Armenian terms of kinship include this gender specification for
parents relatives. But this does not mean that the modern mode
of addressing reflects some ancient family forms among Arme-
nians, as a follower of Henry Lewis Morgan might think. It sim-
ply shows that the nation is modeled in the classic family form:
father, mother and children, the hopar fathers brother and
mork'ur mothers sister presenting, respectively, an extended
father and an extended mother.
20
If we also add here the

19
And, on the contrary, those who use the hayrik address, as a rule,
dont use the hopar one. The prevalence of the mayrik address as com-
pared with hayrik could be correlated with the victory of tikin (the
Armenian equivalent of Madame) over paron (Sir), even under the
conditions of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of the paron address.
20
The absence of similar specification of parents sisters and brothers
in Russian (tiotia and diadia equivalents of the English uncle and
aunt), dont allow for similar speculations about Russian society, which
could be classified as otherwise close to the described Armenian situa-
tion, according to some informal family-oriented addresses, although
the possible avoidance of the Soviet general address tovarishch com-
rade without gender specification, brought the Russians to a strange
biological society already in late-Soviet times judging from the

148
akhpar brother used in Armenia to pejoratively denominate
diaspora Armenians (we will meet them again in the Path of
Dispersion), we will have the entire Armenian nation. This ex-
tended family context of the azg, which is absent in the word
natio and its derivatives, would inevitably introduce some family
nuances into the azg-nation and related Armenian concepts. In
particular, it may explain the paradoxical trend of the Armenian
nation-state toward a kind of a family-state. Thus the many
times stated clan system in Armenia (see, e.g. Dudwick 1997:
89-91) actually embraces all institutions from families them-
selves, to NGOs (see L. Kharatyan and Shagoyan 2001) to the
rare working collectives of todays period of economic decline
21

to the supreme power (e.g., the former president Ter-Petrossian
and his brothers). Even the terrorist group that attacked the Ar-
menian parliament on October 27, 1999, had a pronounced fam-
ily/clan nature. It is characteristic that the place of the assassi-
nated Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian was shortly occupied by
his brother, and Karen Demirchians son soon became the leader
of the party, which had been headed by his murdered father.
Let us note that the often-stated individualism of the Armeni-
ans also involves the f a mi l y: an individual always represents
the family implicitly, so that the Armenian word for individual-
ism anhatapashtut'yun meaning literally worship of an indi-
vidual is in fact a specific kind of family-worship.

The Path toward Home
The word for family in Armenian is ntanik', which is nom.
plural of ntani relative or rather the one of the home, if we
follow the Armenian word literally, which has tun home in its
structure (Acharian 1973: 132). Hence the meaning of the Arme-
nian family as everybody at home. On the other hand, tun not
only means house as a construction, but also its dwellers, clans

widely used addresses muzhchina and zhenshchina meaning respec-
tively man and woman.
21
The traditional family/clan orientation in rural Armenia today hinders
some commune-oriented international aid projects (see V. Sahakyan
2002). One may compare this with the opposite situation concerning
Stolypin reforms in pre-revolution time Russia, which were directed,
on the contrary, against traditional communal peasant structures.

of the discussed azg type, tribe and nation.
22
Thus the Armenian
word for family shows the importance of h o me for the Ar-
menian identity, the azg-family is perceived as collected within
the home. So that this well-known fact of the crucial role of fam-
ily and home for Armenians, which is supported by ample eth-
nographic and sociological evidence, is also supported etymol-
ogically (see Acharian 1979: 427-428). Tun also means coun-
try, world in a broad sense of the word, which has, according
to anthropological evidence, in addition to geographical mean-
ing, also a cosmological meaning.
23
That is, the Armenian na-
tion-state seems to be not only a family-state, but also a
home-state.
While the home of an Englishman is said to be his castle, the
home of an Armenian seems to be his universe, where he plays
the role of the Creator. In the traditional head-house, he cre-
ates stars on the dome of the sky during some principal festi-
vals by putting flour spots on the ceiling (H. Marutyan 2001a:
86),
24
and when settling into a modern new apartment, he often
completely changes the plan of the apartment in order to create
his own universe.
25

22
After E. Benvenistes (1970: I.3.2) analysis of the Indo-European
*domos / *domus (the Armenian tun derives from this form), its social
aspect, like the one present in the Armenian word tun, has been re-
garded as the original and most principal one (see Trubachev /ed./
1978: 73).
23
Cf. the chapter Home As the World by H. Marutyan (2001a) in
Abrahamian and Sweezy 2001: 73-97.
24
The head-house with corresponding inhabitants, both real and
mythological, could be correlated with the tripartite structure of the
Cosmos: hearth or t'onir corresponding to the lower world, the yerdik
smoke-hole to the higher world, and the home space proper to the
middle world the terrestrial space being represented by people (the
family) and animals, traditionally kept under the same roof in old
times.
25
This is the source of a Soviet-era joke which said, that Armenians
were never allowed to stay more than three days in the huge hotel
Rossiia in the center of Moscow in order not to give them enough
time to cover the hotels open balconies with glass frames, which is a
usual minor act of creation in any of Yerevans many-apartment
buildings. (Stephanie Platz /2000: 120/ uses this joke in the context of
her analysis of living space in Soviet Armenia.)

150
According to E. Gellner, as we already mentioned, the mod-
ern nation is supposed to have enough mobility to ensure its ho-
mogeneity within the boundaries of a nation-state. In the United
States this principle is well realized at the level of both family
and home. This is reflected, for instance, in the mode of building
contemporary usually family-oriented houses: at speedy rates,
like stage properties, made for seven to eight years of inhabi-
tance. In Armenia, on the contrary, the building of a house fol-
lows quite different models: a house is to be built solidly to face
eternity.
26
This does not seem strange, if we recall the cosmic
aspect of the Armenian home. During Soviet times, the rule of
obligatory registration fastened the house to the ground even
more strongly, giving it an additional eternal value.
The door, being an important part of the home,
27
its safeguard
and presently its calling card, often represents the home as a
whole, especially under the conditions of modern house planning
on a mass scale. In present-day Armenia, many people install
expensive and beautiful entrance doors even in large multi-unit
buildings, a rather strange luxury in contrast with the usual
gloomy interior of the stairways and entrances. The following
characteristic story illustrates the Armenian attitude toward the
door-and-house. In 1945, during the first days following the end
of the World War II, the Soviet army headquarters tried to pre-
vent the marauding on the occupied territory of Germany by cre-
ating special commands and commissions. A former head of one
such commission, Grigor Arzumanian, who later became a
prominent statesman in Soviet Armenia, told how he released a
soldier, an Armenian by nationality, who was charged with an
extraordinary act of looting. While other marauders had different
types of valuable things they had robbed, this soldier carried a
heavy, beautifully designed door on his back. He said that he
removed the door from an abandoned house and wanted to take
it back with him to his native village somewhere in the Lake
Sevan basin to build a new house for his family.
28

26
Though the destructive earthquake of 1988 cast doubt on this ideal
perception.
27
See H. Marutyan 2001a: 87-89 for ethnography and mythology of the
door in the traditional Armenian worldview.
28
I am grateful to Gagik Arzumanian, the son of Grigor Arzumanian,
for this story.

No wonder that the post-Soviet crisis struck most painfully
exactly at the family and home the principal paradigms of Ar-
menian identity. Thus, taking into account that for an Armenian,
the house is the Universe, one can say (following modern cos-
mological theories stating that there is no other reality out of the
borders of our Universe) that any change in the attitude toward
the home could be an evidence of serious changes in the psy-
chology of the Armenian people. If judging only from the well-
known formulas of the home ideology Tund shen mna Let
your house be prosperous
29
and Tund k'andvi Let your house be
ruined, one may think that the documented cases of Armenians
razing their houses to the ground in order to sell the components
as building materials (H. Marutyan 2001b: 400)
30
should be a
signal of the collapse of the Armenian Cosmos. True, such
destruction of ones own house mainly refers to the Armenian
refugees from Azerbaijan, who are going to eventually leave
Armenia they have already lost their former homes-Cosmos,
while their new homes in Armenia didnt have enough time to
achieve cosmic features. The local Armenians leaving Arme-
nia, whose number alarmingly continues to increase, as yet seem
to preserve their houses, leaving them to a relative as a precon-
dition of their future return. This refers more to the emigrants
from rural regions who mainly leave for Russia to join the in-
ternal diaspora, as it was called in Soviet times.
31
As for those
who plan to join the external diaspora, the situation is different
even if we judge only from the advertisements addressing peo-
ple who would like to sell their real estate, which appeared in the
late 1990s in the neighborhood of the American consulate in
Yerevan, the place where the long line of waiting people illus-

29
Tund shen mna could be etymologically interpreted as Let your
house stay standing shen is of the same root as shinel to make, also
in the sense of building, constructing. Cf. Tund shinvi Let your house
be built as a euphemistic substitution for Tund k'andvi Let your house
be ruined.
30
In many villages the building materials are more expensive than a
house built of them. (On the other hand, this also shows that these ma-
terials are needed for building new houses evidently for the new rich
of Armenia.)
31
The Russians define the similar but opposite situation of Russians
living in the former Soviet Republics as near abroad. We will return
to this and related problems in the Path of Dispersion.

152
trates the problem of emigration.
There are also cases where a local resident of a village has
sold only a part of his/her house as building materials,
32
how-
ever, these cases can be compared with the widely practiced
cases in Yerevan, where people sell their houses (larger apart-
ments) to buy a more modest and/or less prestigiously located
dwelling in order to use the rest of the money for survival. In
principle, this process could proceed in several steps up to los-
ing the last dwelling to become homeless, bomzh
33
(I know of at
least one such dramatic case). If we take into account that the
houses are not just ruined (directly and metaphorically) and
lost, but merely change their owners, one can say that we are
dealing with transformations in the social structure expressed in
the language of homes. The process of this new social restruc-
turing is more visible in the cities, in the first instance in Yere-
van introducing new editions in its still draft text.
34
That is,
judging from the home paradigm, we may conclude that al-
though the Armenian Cosmos has not yet collapsed, it is nev-
ertheless in serious danger.
One may also see some alarming signs in the other home-
band paradigm, the family. We cant go deep into the details
here, since this problem requires a large-scale and long-term so-
ciological analysis.
35
Especially as the inertia of the traditional
family may for a while resist the changes in the family structure.
For example, one case study by H. Kharatyan of the poverty in
present-day Armenia shows that the head of the family or, in Ar-
menian terms, the man of the home has lost his work and cant
help his family to survive. Now this function is passed on to his
daughter. However, he still holds the role of the first person, de-

32
See G. Shagoyans material tellingly entitled after her informants
words I ruined my house to pay my debts in H. Kharatyan (ed.) 2001:
131-137.
33
Bomzh is the abbreviation of the Russian bez opredelennogo mesta
zhitel'stva without definite place of residence, which, unfortunately,
became a common word in the modern Armenian vocabulary.
34
On the ethnosociological and urban processes in pre-crisis Yerevan
see Naselenie Yerevana 1986.
35
Cf. notes by an American anthropologist on the changes in personal
and group identities during the first years of post-Soviet Armenia (Platz
2000: 127 ff.).

cision-maker and the master of the home (Abrahamian 2001c:
414). While in other similar cases I observed a more rapid
change in the family hierarchy: the possibility of earning some
money by baby-sitting immediately gave a young woman some
privileges, including upgrading relations with her mother-in-law
the most rigid sphere in the traditional Armenian family.
Changes in the principal structural oppositions of the society,
like man woman, elderly young, rich poor, are very impor-
tant for sociological evaluations and forecasting, since those are
the most sensitive elements that may signal the basic changes in
a society. Some of these oppositions or even all of them can
change soundly during festivals and festival-like political mass
rallies, as we will discuss in the Path of Rebellion and Festival,
and also during crises. Such transformations in the social struc-
ture are usually not too long lasting, and the society, as a system
of stable structural oppositions, tends to return to the original
state, as this happens after carnivals. That is the reason why after
revolutions, only by force is it possible to fix the inverted oppo-
sitions. As for a crisis, the transformed oppositions could return
to their initial position, if the crisis does not last too long. For
example, during the first phase of Gorbachevs economic chaos,
womens activity in trade became accentuated, which was a kind
of a gender revolution in this traditionally male sphere. The so-
called shuttle-traders were mainly women, which, as a matter of
fact, should not surprise us, since crises often resurrect the ar-
chaic modes of production. And the shuttle-trade could be com-
pared with gathering, the most archaic womens economy: the
shuttle-traders wander through the market-lands picking up
any saleable goods. However, the moment the phase of consid-
erably large-scale commodity turnover began, gradually women
yielded their place in the trade to men, the womens gathering
being replaced by mens hunting. Only the homeless bomzh
made gathering their constant mode of life (Shagoyan 2001: 364-
365). It is characteristic that during the initial days of crisis after
the 1988 earthquake, women in Leninakan again immediately
regained gathering by looking for food in the ruined city for
the survived members of their families. Examples of such crisis
returns to archaic modes of production or crisis transformations
of certain economies are well known in the history of human-
kind. Thus, the impoverished nomads are forced to lead a settled
life by engaging in primitive agriculture, until they find an op-

154
portunity to return to nomadic cattle breeding. In turn-of the cen-
tury-Armenia, on the contrary, some impoverished peasants are
now forced to leave traditional agriculture (see H. Kharatyan
/ed./ 2001: 339). So that the long-lasting crisis may deprive the
present-day Armenian villager and, in perspective, Armenian
culture in general, of their centuries-old agricultural characteristic.
It has to be said, however, that despite the already mentioned
dangers and other real problems that threaten the modern Arme-
nian family, it is often considered endangered and even already
dead in the imagination of the observers. Here is one example for
illustration, where I was just a passive observer. An informant
residing in Yerevan told a foreign journalist that family ties be-
came very loose in Armenia as a result of the crisis and sup-
ported this statement with the fact that her mothers sister
couldnt come from a distant village recently to be present at an
important family event. The foreign interviewer later concluded
that the present-day crisis resulted in considerable destruction of
the family among Armenians, without specifying what his in-
formant understood by the term family. In reality, the infor-
mants words referred to other transformations of the traditional
Armenian family. The crisis has actually favored the develop-
ment of the small family, typical for a city by cutting ties
within the traditional extended family, which was formerly con-
joined with the village (cf. Platz 2000: 122, 134). In the given
example one can say that the crisis accelerates the urban proc-
esses in Yerevan. While paradoxically, in other cases, the same
crisis may produce a quite opposite result. Thus, to resist the re-
cent energy crisis, many small families were forced to swell into
an artificial large family by now including parents who had
lived separately or more distant relatives and friends. Because
such types of families did not fit American standards, they were
usually overlooked by American aid projects. The aid itself, as
the sad stories collected in the volume on poverty in Armenia
show (see H. Kharatyan /ed./ 2001), could in turn transform the
family by artificially breaking down the family into units that
correspond to the aid-providers requirements. Let us note that
the latter phenomenon the unintended role of aid projects in the
transformation of the family can be seen beyond Armenia. For
example, the US welfare programs favored the unintended artifi-
cial transformation of poor, small Afro-American families into
large ones of matriarchal nature, since only families without

able-bodied men could benefit from these programs.
In some cases an informants evaluation of the collapse of
kinship ties may confuse an observer who may not know enough
ethnographic background regarding the situation described. A
telling example is one given by G. Shagoyan (2001: 368) about a
good sister, who helped the informant in a critical situation,
although traditionally, as a member of another family after mar-
riage, she was not obliged to do so, and a bad brother, who
actually helped her to survive in accord with his family obliga-
tions, but was not able to provide additional aid, thus deserving
the label bad. In another example, an informant blamed the
crisis for her and her childrens distancing from relatives of the
same generation (respectively, third and fourth, counting from a
common ancestor) after the death of her parents (representing the
second generation), only because this natural process coincided
with the difficult 1990s.
However, let us keep in mind that under the difficult condi-
tions of the crisis, when the state was unable to effectively real-
ize the life-sustaining programs for its citizens, many people
nevertheless survived thanks to their kindred ties, especially
thanks to the aid coming from their relatives who had left the
country. This is a kind of permanent feeding capillary from the
new and as yet not so well established segment of the Armenian
diaspora, in contrast to the impressive donations of the old dias-
pora like the St. Grigor the Illuminator Cathedral in Yerevan. In
any case, the network of the family, this paradigm of the Arme-
nian identity, seems to be at the core of the riddle of Armenians
survival during the most difficult years. One may say that the
Armenian azg-family helps the Armenian azg-nation to sur-
vive and keeps its home-Cosmos still standing.

The Path of Dignity and Shame
We saw that the Armenian family and home are paradig-
matic for Armenian identity, the corresponding Armenian words
being related to or just meaning nation. Moreover, this family-
nation comes together inside the home to commemorate impor-
tant national and family events. Then perhaps the way in which
community-involving traditional events are organized might help
reveal the structure of this society. Let us illustrate this by com-
paring the organization of feasts (parties) in modern American
and Armenian societies. An American party is a typical replica

156
of American ideas of democracy and freedom. Everybody has
the right to approach the table and take as much of whatever
he or she would like to eat and drink. There is no hierarchy in the
organization of the space of the party. Guests usually split into
many smaller groups of two or three people to chat and drink
together. But these groups always interchange, for it is consid-
ered impolite, if these minor groups exist more than some ten
minutes. Here we also have, by the way, a good illustration of E.
Gellners idea on mobility and homogeneity of the modern na-
tion. The semiotics of the Armenian party, or rather feast, reveals
quite another structure of the society, which is typical patriarchal
and authoritarian, whatever disguise of Western democracy it
may use in its official calling cards. First of all, the tamada or
toastmaster is elected democratically to rule the table Ar-
menians use the word kar'avarel with the literal meaning of rul-
ing (originally a cart). The main characteristic of a good toast-
master is his knowledge of the rules, which in the first instance
supposes his knowledge of the right succession of toasts, that is,
the traditional values of the home (elders, children, hearth
another synonym of the family, occasional guest) and the place
of the participants of the party in the social hierarchy. The spatial
organization of the table also reflects the hierarchical structure of
the patriarchal society (without women present at the traditional
table
36
), while the prescribed obedience of the participants to the
common rules
37
and to the absolute authority of the toastmaster
demonstrate in a sense the true picture of political rights in
contemporary Armenian society. It has to be said that the Arme-
nian feasting table is a lightened version of a Northern Caucasian
traditional table, which demonstrates some aspects of even more
archaic perceptions of mens fortitude as compared with
womens weakness. Thus, the participants of a feast would never
leave the table to use the toilet during the feast despite the great
quantity of wine drunk. And in case they did, a man would not
be allowed back to the mens table and would join the women

36
Presently this rule is not usually followed, some active women even
taking responsibilities of the toastmaster at minor and non-official feast
events.
37
Cf. just drink and die, a joking reply of the toastmaster to the dec-
laration of a feaster who says he cannot drink any more and many an-
ecdotes related to this situation.

and children at the pissers table.
38
This stands in a striking
contrast with the American party with its freedom of pissing.
Once I was present at a party organized by Americans in Yere-
van, where the master of the house announced some information
about the peculiarities of the toilet in his apartment in the same
manner, in which the first toast would have been pronounced at
an Armenian table. American tourists desperately looking for
toilets during their visits to Yerevan, is also a common topic of
jokes, while those who tell these jokes avoid the rare and dirty
public toilets of their city,
39
following, evidently, the traditional
image of a true man of great endurance.
An important figure in Armenian (and in general Caucasian)
culture is the guest. Hence the special guesthouses in the com-
plex of a traditional dwelling, which could be traced back to the
mens houses in archaic cultures (see H. Marutyan 2001a: 96).
Although Russian hospitality is a well-known characteristic in
the list of traditional national features, Armenians consider it
inferior to the Armenian one, at least in its Soviet manifestation.
The following story, which became modern folklore, illustrates
this. In the story a Russian veteran visits his Armenian former
WWII combatant in Soviet times and, being upset by the ex-
traordinary scale of reception, writes a denunciation upon return-
ing home, accusing his host of living dishonestly based on the
fact that he himself, being a retiree like his Armenian acquaint-
ance, could never afford such costly hospitality. The storyteller
would add a moral epilogue that the Armenian host probably
spent all his savings and perhaps even took out a loan to make
such a credible showing. Stories about American hospitality are
even more dramatic these usually are the concrete stories
about an Armenian who paid a return visit to his Americanized
relatives house in America and received only a cup of coffee in
reply to the generous entertainment in Armenia or even was
asked to leave quickly because of some appointed event his hosts

38
I am grateful for this information to the ethnographers Barasbi
Bgazhnokov and Igor Krupnik. On anthropological correlations of
these rules of behavior at the feast table with the archaic differentiation
between men and women see L. Abramian 1983: 91-92.
39
A special Path could have been devoted to the aspects of purity and
dirt in the Armenian identity, an important opposition in any culture,
but I will leave this theme for another occasion.

158
had to attend.
40
Let us add to this folklore that the Americans
have the word living-room (without any guest mentioned) or re-
ception-room (with implicitly present guests) for what the infe-
rior Russians use the explicitly guest-oriented word gostinaia
guest-room. However, the most fantastic examples of guest
worship are found, perhaps, in the Northern Caucasus, whose
institution of hospitality overshadows even the Armenian one.
So we will look at some classical customs from this area for
comparison with the American attitude toward guests. Thus,
while an American saying states that After three days, fish and
guests smell bad, the Northern Caucasian etiquette allows the
host to ask his guest on the aim of his visit only after three days
(cf. Bgazhnokov 1983: 12). An even more bizarre custom of
olden days obliged a Caucasian housemaster to have an elaborate
table set with fresh meat dishes in the separate guest-house each
day in case a guest might come for a visit. Armenians are much
more rational but no less generous regarding their guests. One of
the most painful results of the general poverty during the crisis
was their feeling of inability in entertaining guests (cf. Platz
2000: 126-127). I know many people in Yerevan, who avoided
visiting their friends and acquaintances so that the friends receiv-
ing them would not feel ashamed for not being able to observe
the traditional custom of hospitality.
This, hopefully, temporal feeling of shame relates to a more
general concept of shame as a basic regulator in the life of a so-
ciety. Although the division of peoples according to cultures of
shame and sin, as proposed by Ruth Benedict (1946: 222-227,
2888-289, 293), is thought to be too schematic, European peo-
ples nevertheless seem to tend toward the culture of sin, with
protestant ethics representing its Western pole, while Asiatic
peoples tend toward the culture of shame, with Confucianism
and Japanese bushido representing the latters Eastern pole (see
Arutiunov 1994). The case of the Caucasus is characterized as a
landscape between shame and sin in the title of an interview
with the anthropologist Sergei Arutiunov, which we cite here.

40
Cf. the Abkhazian legend on their forefathers coming late to the
original distribution of lands. When he explained to God that the reason
of his coming late was a guest who had visited his house, God gave
him his own land as an award for his hospitality (see Krylov 1999: 192,
no.10).

Although the Caucasian case seems to correlate with this title
only geographically as a region between West and East, while
Caucasian ethics (adat) actually presents a conceptual pole of the
culture of shame. This characteristic of between shame and
sin better fits the Armenian case, which in many senses repre-
sents an intermediate between East and West, as we will see in
the Path of Mediators.
Armenians, as the first Christians, had to be also the first
in introducing the Christian culture of sin into a society which
shared many Caucasian classical features of the culture of
shame. The shame of being inhospitable that we discussed a
little earlier, one of the manifestations of this culture of shame,
still seems to sustain the Armenian identity in the beginning of
the 21
st
century. However, the too prolonged crisis in Armenia
may excite an apprehension that the culture of shame in gen-
eral, as a characteristic of Armenianness soon would cease to
exist (see H. Marutyan 2001b: 398; Abrahamian 2001c: 410-411).
On the other hand, the Christian concept of sin is not very ac-
centuated in the modern Armenian mentality. Thus, while a reli-
gious medieval Armenian would traditionally accept misfortunes
like an earthquake as a result of his own sins,
41
the atheistic
modern Armenians took the earthquake of 1988 as the Kremlins
punishment for their political sins rather than Gods punish-
ment for their Christian sins.
42
Even educated people would say
Gorbachev pushed the button, referring to the alleged use of a
geological weapon the Soviet military was said to have worked
out secretly. This opinion was supported by the peculiarities of
the quake, rumors about suspicious activities of the Soviet troops
in the region prior to and immediately after the quake, stories

41
Artsruni Sahakian presented a special paper (The Earthquake Per-
ception in Medieval Armenia) on this topic at a conference dedicated
to the fifth anniversary of the 1988 earthquake, which was held in Yer-
evan in 1993.
42
I recorded only one opinion of a pious Christian on the earthquake as
Gods punishment of the people living in the epicenter for their lack of
faith and two opinions, both from survivors who were evacuated to
Russia immediately after the disaster, that the earthquake was Gods
punishment for the Armenians maltreatment of the local Azerbaijanis
the retaliatory ethnic cleansing in Armenia took place in the period
right before the earthquake. Azerbaijanis, naturally, accepted the earth-
quake as a revengeful reaction of their own God.

160
about silenced seismologists, and occasional publications about
such a weapon in newspapers long before the earthquake was
evoked to take in hand the rebel Armenians. A popular joke of
the period asks how the Kremlin will manage to punish the re-
bellious Republics located outside the seismic zone (meaning the
Baltic Republics) illustrating this general attitude very well.
However, in many cases Armenian identity, on the contrary,
seems to have an essential i n wa r d orientation. Thus, when
interpreting national history, Armenians often prefer to look for
traitors rather than external enemies. In the Path of Violence we
will see how this inwardly oriented trend manifests itself in the
Armenian culture of violence. However, the absence of self-
blame in the case of the recent earthquake reflects rather the ab-
solute conviction of infallibility and hence the lack of the feeling
of sin in national activities preceding the quake. Gorbachev, who
visited the ruined cities of Armenia and was obviously shocked
by the scale of the disaster, was outraged when someone from a
small group of people in the street questioned him on the fate of
Gharabagh. He evidently thought that the Armenians should for-
get all their fallacious national problems in the face of such a
disaster a reaction, which, by the way, was considered to be
further evidence of his role in pushing the button. As for the
Armenians, the two events, the fight for Gharabagh and the
earthquake, were closely related, even if not through Gorba-
chevs pushing the button. The following two jokes illustrate
this well. The first joke was a pun on the juridical and physical
meanings of the word unification: the quake was said to be the
result of the desired unification of Gharabagh with Armenia
its just that the contact proved to be too strong. The second tells
the story of rescue workers pulling away concrete panels to save
a man. The man being rescued asks whether Gharabagh has been
given to Armenia or not, and when he learns that it was not, he
asks the rescuers to put the panels back.
When there is no sin deserving of punishment, neither the bi-
zarre button in the Kremlin, nor the permanent misfortunes fallen
to a peoples lot, should be a result of f a t e. Hence the phrase
the Armenians fate used by Armenians in different contexts
from serious interpretations of national history to everyday
sayings and jokes. The Armenians fate is closely associated
with the victim stereotype, especially after the Genocide of 1915.
In the Path of Violence we will see how Armenians tried to fight

against this fate of their nation in 1988, changing for a short time
its national stereotype, before the pogroms in Sumgait and the
earthquake returned them to their traditional fate.
Since the many cases described in the already cited book on
poverty in modern Armenia (H. Kharatyan /ed./ 2001) are the
direct or indirect result of the earthquake, which, as we saw, is
not perceived as a result of personal sin, these cases are also not
considered the responsibility of the impoverished person. Some-
times poverty in general is perceived as a new manifestation of
the Armenians fate. The theme of fate and lot became more
accentuated in those cases when the cause (or one of the causes)
of the impoverishment is literally the lot itself for instance, a
bad piece of land that he/she acquired at the raffled distribution
of properties during the post-Soviet process of privatization of
the land (H. Marutyans field materials in H. Kharatyan /ed./
2001: 114). The wave of different types of lotteries that swept
over Armenia at the turn of the century, may give a new sad
twist to the idea of the Armenians lot, especially as God seems
to play an insignificant role in this lottery.
43

I would like my readers to further follow this sad turn of the
Path of Dignity and Shame in a little lighter mood. Difficult
situations never hinder the sense of humor among Armenians.
On the contrary: if some period of time is characterized by a
scarcity of jokes, one may conclude that this period was too dull,
but hopefully prosperous and safe. Here we will see how hard
times as well as national character are reflected in the way peo-
ple greet each other.

The Forking Path of Greetings
In a sense, greetings are related to the institution of hospitality.
Thus, one learns from the Mahabharata that a king in ancient
India would ask his occasional guest how he and his family were
doing and would get a detailed answer, and only after half an
hour of such etiquette interrogation would he ask on the aim of
his visit. The further West we go and the closer to our times, the

43
Even the Armenian words aghk'at poor and harust wealthy are
related to the opposed semantic fields of little, weak, without base
and many, strong, based (see Acharian 1971: 137; 1977: 61). Cf. the
respective Russian words ubogii poor and bogatyi wealthy, which
even in their structure suppose the presence of God (bog).

162
more formal and disinterested greetings become. For, as a matter
of fact, a greeting is a formalized mini-dialogue, although mod-
ern Western people do not seem to be interested in getting an
answer to their formal questioning greeting.
44
The English go so
far as to answer their greeting-question How do you do? with
the same How do you do?
45
Hippies, whose revolt was caused
by just such depersonalization of modern society, improved
this situation by adding it to the depersonalized formula and
turning the mirrored exchange of meaningless greetings into an
informative short dialogue: How do you do it? Straight
way (or Gay way). The Armenian hippies, whom we met in
the Path of R'abiz, expressed their protest against the formality
of the greeting-question Vonts' es? (How are you?) by an-
swering it with a specifying question: Hima t'e vabshe? (Just
now or in general?) The use of the colloquial vabshe (from
Russian voobshche in general) gives this dialogue a satirical
or, perhaps, even a philosophical shade of meaning, inviting the
greeting person into a philosophical dialogue instead of the tradi-
tional exchange of meaningless formulas.
46
As a matter of fact,
the formalized traditional Armenian greeting-dialogue already
has a philosophical tendency of the type of Zen-Buddhist
koans. One example is the greeting question, Inch' ka-ch'ka?
literally What there is, [what] there is not? The koan mean-
ing of this greeting is reflected in the following joke. The Ameri-
cans (or the Japanese) were said to have constructed a machine
that could answer any possible question, and everybody was in-
vited to test it with his or her special question. The machine an-

44
Many years ago, I lost the opportunity to make a date with a girl
from the Orient, since I carelessly began our conversation by asking
how she was doing and had to listen to her detailed answer during the
rest of the short period of time we were alone.
45
In order to invigorate and dialogize this depersonalized exchange,
a person who is asked this question may accentuate you in his re-
turn reply, as the hero of the film My Fair Lady did.
46
The term vabshe is also used to express the maximal grade of the
absolute. Thus, during the energy crisis in Armenia one could see a
note at a gas-station saying Benzin ch'ka vabshe There is no petrol
vabshe stressing that the station really has not a drop of petrol. On the
other hand, this demonstrates that the standard statement Benzin ch'ka
may not reflect the absolute truth. I am indebted to Kevork Bardakjian
for this informative statement.

swered all the questions successfully until an Armenian came
with this traditional greeting question Inch' ka-ch'ka? After
thinking for a long time, the machine broke down in facing this
puzzle of logic or, perhaps, for being overloaded with the infor-
mation in answer. While the question has a simple koan an-
swer Jansaghut'yun which is an Armenianized Turkic ex-
pression meaning something like being-existing.
47
The story
continues. The machine was reconstructed to include this answer
as well, and the same Armenian comes again with the same
Inch' ka-ch'ka? greeting question. Jansaghut'yun, answers
the machine, but the Armenian questions further: Ba l inch'
ka? And what else is there? And the machine breaks down
once again. This is the usual ending of the story, and the story-
teller does not specify what should have been the right answer to
this second question. However, there are two versions to the an-
swer. The first is an exclamation Eh! accompanied with a phi-
losophical-questioning gesture both hands are raised a little, as
one would express in gesture the saying God knows. The sec-
ond is a typical trickster-type answer: Inch' imanas, minch'ev
ch'imanas? (literally How to know as long as you have not
known) meaning How to know as long as you have not learnt
anything
48
presenting another play with being not being
(ka-ch'ka).
49
I would say that the Armenian identity in general or,
figuratively speaking, the Armenian to be or not to be could be
placed between these two answers, the philosophical and the
trickster one.
50

Another example of the Armenians simultaneous affirma-
tion-negation could be the expression unem-ch'unem I have-I
dont have in expressions like unem-ch'unem, sa [what] I

47
I am grateful to Ashot Hambardzumyan for this and some other
non-translatable translations.
The anthropologist Stella Grigorian (1995) used this formula and,
indeed, the joke in her Ph.D. thesis 'Inch Ka Chka' and Other Para-
doxical Clues into Soviet Armenian Society.
48
I am indebted to Ara Gulyan for this second version.
49
Ka-ch'ka also expresses the meaning of it seems to be. Cf. also the
traditional beginning of the Armenian fairy-tales Linum , ch'i
linum literally There was, there was not characteristic also for
other Near Eastern cultures.
50
On the trickster characteristic of the Armenians in general, proposed
by A. Petrosyan (1995), we will speak more of in the Path of Dispersion.

164
have-[what] I dont have, is this meaning this is the only thing
I have. Thus, to express an absolutely full set, the Armenian
uses the empty set together with the full set this is better
seen in the expressions like unem-ch'unem, s tghas the only
thing I have, is this son of mine, which also introduces a value
nuance in the absolute full set of the speakers possessions. Al-
though the form uzem-ch'uzem [whether] I want [or] dont want
is of the same semantic sphere, it is a more ordinary form (for
other languages as well) and expresses a rational situation when
a person is forced to do something against his/her will, and not
an internally ambivalent situation of ka-ch'ka, which makes real-
ity virtual as a fairy-tale beginning with the same ambivalent
formula.
It is interesting that the irrational question inch' ka-ch'ka?
when asked in a formal greeting, has quite a rational answer
voch'inch' nothing in the sense of nothing special, as in
English one may answer Nothing to the question Whats up?
However, when used as a formal reply to the greeting-question
vonts' es? how are you? which is a widely used practice in pre-
sent-day Armenia, this greeting dialogue Vonts' es? Voch'inch'
gets a twist of the surreal ka-ch'ka, especially when this noth-
ing is specified by fine, or accompanied by thank you
(Voch'inch', lav em; Voch'inch', shnorhakal em). A similar ne-
gating answer is the Russian nichego (the genitive case of the
word nichto nothing), which could be an abridged form of
some longer and rational formula using this word.
51
It is difficult
to say whether the Armenian voch'inch' has been loaned from
Russian nichego or these two nothings appeared independently
in the two languages
52
; in any case, the Armenian vochinch

51
Cf. the opposite supposition of V. Hayrapetyan on the priority of the
word nichego in the unpublished addition d3212 (Nichego) to his book
on Russian hermeneutics see Airapetian 2001.
52
In the Malkhasiants' dictionary (1944 /3/: 563) the word voch'inch'
has meanings in the context of greeting, which are close to the ones
defined by V. Dal' for nichego in his famous dictionary of the living
Russian language published at the beginning of the 20
th
century (Dal'
1905 /2/: 1421-1422). Such meanings are absent in the definition of
voch'inch' in the Armenian dictionary of the first half of the 19
th
cen-
tury (Nor bar'girk' 1837: 516-517). However, this does not indicate that
in the non-literary Armenian of that time this word was not used in the
greeting context, since the aforementioned dictionary doesnt embrace

seems to fit well in the ambivalent logic of ka-ch'ka, especially
under the conditions of uncertainty and virtual reality of present-
day Armenia. It is characteristic that this meaningless answer
often takes the more rationalist diaspora Armenians aback
(whose Western Armenian, by the way, does not allow double
negation within a phrase), although they are of the same ambiva-
lent ka-ch'ka world.
During the crisis of the early 1990s, this meaningless noth-
ing attained a new meaning in the greeting mini-dialogue,
which was continued with a return reply from the first greeting
person:

Vonts' es? (How are you?)
Voch'inch'. (Nothing.)
Inch'u es ch'ap'azants'num? (Why do you exaggerate?)

In general, the crisis situation made people re-evaluate greetings
that had previously been used automatically. Although the pri-
mary factor of importance in greeting, as Raymond Firth (1973:
304) notes, is not wh a t is said but that s o me t h i n g is
said, in crisis situations people also begin to listen more keenly
to wh a t is said. We may call this phenomenon crisis cere-
monialism, borrowing the characterization, which Elsie Clews
Parsons (1916: 41) uses for a more general interpretation of
greeting and parting.
53
The following are several crisis answers
to the traditional Vonts' es? or Vonts' ek'? (How are you? in
singular or plural):

Ba yeghav? Ba vor yes l k'ez harts'nem? (How could you?
What if I ask you the same question?);
Hovharayin. (Literally fan-shaped, meaning the name of
the method of providing electricity gradually to sections of the
city over the course of the day during the energy crisis);
Ch'tesnvats. spes ban ch'eink' tesel. (Unbelievable. We

the popular sphere of functioning language, as the dictionary of Dal'
(cf. definition living language in its title) and parts of the Malkha-
siants' dictionary do.
53
Raymond Firth (1973: 301) follows her understanding of greeting
and parting conventions in general as a mild variety of Van Genneps
rites de passage in his chapter on Bodily Symbols of Greeting and
Parting (Firth 1973: 299-327).

166
have never seen such a thing. Literally punning the word
to see: in the sense of something not seen before used to
express an unbelievably perfect situation);
Asenk' lav enk', vor lav linenk' (Lets say fine so that we
will be fine. This evidently non-crisis answer became popu-
lar during the crisis, introducing an element of magic in greet-
ing, which was actually one of its most ancient functions in
general);
Lav enk', verjapes tak'ats'ank' (We are fine, got warm at
last a greeting reply in spring; variants are referring to the
spring that came at last or to the winter that has fortunately
passed).
54

During the winter, the most difficult time, people would
avoid asking Vonts' es? / Vonts' ek'? and instead would ask
Vonts' ek' dimanum? (How are you enduring?) or more con-
cretely, Luys talis en? (Do they give electricity?) or Var'aran
drel ek'? (Have you obtained a heater?). It is interesting that
the plural in vonts' ek', which would have been understood as a
form of politeness in a more usual situation, in the crisis greet-
ings is understood as How are you all doing or how is your
family? the aforementioned examples of crisis greeting re-
plies demonstrate this very well. That is, even in more careless
times, when Armenians use to greet each other formally, without
thinking deeply about the meaning of the greeting formula, the
family is always somewhere there. To survive means to survive
together with ones family. After the most difficult winter of
1993/94, when the people realized that the government couldnt
do anything effective for their survival, each family began to
look for its own way to make a stand. To follow our discussion
in the Path of the Nation-Family, we can say figuratively that
the family constituents of the Armenian nation once again took
the responsibility of national survival. In many respects this sur-
vival involved some forgotten methods of traditional modes of
life in heating, lighting, cooking, transportation, etc., which
comprise the body of a special branch of anthropology, the an-
thropology of survival,
55
some aspects of which we observed in

54
See S. Platz (2000: 129) for another example of a crisis response to
greetings: There is no light, there is no bread, there isnt anything.
55
Beginning in 2000, a group of anthropologists of the Institute of Ar-
chaeology & Ethnography (National Academy of Sciences of Armenia)

the several paths forking from the Path of Tradition. However,
the nation-state also tries to make a stand to overcome the crisis.
In doing so, the state also stepped into a path leading to some
historical forms of Armenian society. We will try to observe this
progress, or rather regress, in the next Path back to Prehistory.

which I head, began work on a project called Anthropology of a Crisis:
Ethnography of Survival in Post-communist Armenia. Since the crisis
does not seem to be coming to a visible end, we plan on prolonging the
project for a few more years. Several aspects of the return to traditional
modes of life, concerning crafts, are also discussed in Abrahamian and
Sweezy (eds.) 2001.

The Path back to Prehistory

EIGHT

THE PATH BACK TO PREHISTORY
Archaic Society in Modern Disguise

The Path of Communist Initiation
As is well known, the collapse of the Soviet empire took West-
ern sovietologists by surprise. The huge army of the anti-
communist front failed to foresee the long-dreamed of event.
1

But, as a matter of fact, I dont think they have to be blamed for
it, since the fall of the Soviet regime proved to be possible not
because of some deeply worked out program that Western ana-
lysts failed to reveal in time, but as a result of a political carnival
(to be discussed in the Path of Rebellion and Festival) master-
minded by figures typologically comparable with the mytho-
logical fool we will try to show this in the following Path of
Tyrants and Fools. However, Western sovietologists could be
criticized for another reason for paying excessive, if not exclu-
sive, attention to questions of an ideological and political nature,
while the particular social structure upon which the ideological
system of the totalitarian state was superimposed was often ig-
nored.
This seems to be a general methodological trap an inter-
preter of alien culture encounters when solely using written
sources, which at times reflect quite another reality. The situa-
tion is in a sense close to the one we briefly mentioned when

1
It seems that only George F. Kennan foresaw the present course of
events, and in astonishing detail, even half a century ago his pro-
phetic article published in April 1951 was recently translated into Rus-
sian (Kennan 2001) with comments by academician N. N. Bolkhoviti-
nov. I am grateful to academician Bolkhovitinov for pointing to this
remarkable article.

172
discussing the idea of the nation based on the writings of intel-
lectuals. Thus, where Western sovietologists would see (and ac-
tually saw) a somewhat strange race of the alleged Soviet future
the Soviet people invented by Soviet ideologists,
2
we will try
to see a no less strange people, which seem to typologically rep-
resent a tribal society of much more ancient times. In this path,
which forks toward prehistoric times, I will try to observe Soviet
society from a somewhat unusual point of view, and although the
approach offered here obviously cannot explain all of the distinc-
tive features of the former Soviet social system, it can, I think,
help one to understand the most deep-seated and persistent of
them, features that elude ones grasp when using other, albeit
more fundamental, approaches. More than that, comparisons of
this type may allow one to make fairly reliable prognoses in
situations where other types of assessment prove unproductive.
I shall focus primarily on Armenian society of the Soviet pe-
riod as one specific example of Soviet society and because we
are primarily looking for the Armenian paths of identity. In this
regard, it should be noted that whatever the similarities of the
Soviet system and communist ideology throughout the territory
of the former Soviet Union, in each republic and with each peo-
ple, the system and the ideology took its own specific form.
Even the explosions of national consciousness in various repub-
lics took the most varied forms, as we will see in the Path of Re-
bellion and Festival.
And so, we may ask, how would an investigator without
communist guidebooks have viewed Armenian society shortly
before the turbulent national and social developments of the late
1980s? In case this investigator was trained to study traditional
cultures and societies (and this is my case), above all, he or she
would have been struck by the hierarchical structure of this soci-
ety and by a certain system that enabled an individual to pass by
means of initiation from an undefined and amorphous position in
society to a position of full rights and privileges and more or less
guaranteed (if only in the ideal) social stability. In order to effect
this passage through initiation, the individual had to enter the
ranks of the Communist Party. And in fact, membership in the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union was, with very few excep-
tions, perceived as a necessary step toward social maturity. This

2
See the Path of Language, Ftn. 20.

The Path back to Prehistory 173
was particularly true in rural areas. For example, while doing
fieldwork in the early 1980s, I was eating dinner in the home of a
patriarchal peasant family, and was asked with utter seriousness
to join in a toast to the successful entry of the hosts son into the
party. This toast came as one of a series of traditional toasts
wishing him health, a happy marriage, and all good luck and suc-
cess. The toast contained no ideological content it was simply a
question of this traditional passage through initiation being
recognized by everyone seated at the table as a requirement for
achieving the higher position in life to which the young man may
claim. In this connection it is revealing that one of my Moscow
dissident friends, who happened to be visiting another part of
Armenia at around the same time, interpreted similar dinner-time
toasts as an indication of the Armenians devotion to the com-
munist ideal a striking example of how a literal text can ob-
scure the more important social subtext. In the latter case, it is
characteristic that the view of the dissident, one of the most ideo-
logical members of society, basically coincides with that of the
excessively ideological sovietologist.
The Armenian peoples purely pragmatic attitude toward the
party would seem partly to account for the fact that no serious
communist opposition developed in Armenia immediately after
the victory of the republics anti-communist forces in 1990.
Anti-communist sentiments were so popular at that time that al-
most all the deputies of the first post-Soviet Armenian parlia-
ment, including former communists, were forced to use some
anti-communist rhetoric in their electoral program to win the
desired seats. Only later, when the new ruling elite proved to be
incapable of facing the worsened situation, or, as many people
think, was itself the reason for this worsening, did the Armenian
communists become a more or less appreciable political force,
which could gather quite a lot of people at their meetings, al-
though those were mostly aged people who supported the com-
munists not for their ideology but for their relation to the times
of safety and relative prosperity.
3
But immediately after the fall

3
A joke of the crisis period relates the communists addressing the peo-
ple: Why didnt you tell us that this was what you wanted? We could
have easily cut the electricity, closed factories However that may
be, at the 2003 parliamentary elections the Armenian communists got
less than 2.5% of the vote.

174
of the Soviet regime the communists were rather unpopular in
Armenia. Indeed, the standard explanation for this phenomenon
was that the institution of the Communist Party had been used
solely as a guarantor of prosperity, a sort of feeding trough.
There is also the view quite justified, in my opinion that a
portion of the communists in Armenia, indeed precisely those
who in Russia became the bulk of the communist opposition,
went over to the camp of the Armenian Revolutionary Federa-
tion (Dashnakts'ut'yun), the traditional national party, which was
banned in Soviet times and oppressed during the rule of the first
President, Levon Ter-Petrossian. In its history, structure (democ-
ratic centralism) and in many of its attributes (the use of com-
rade as a form of address, to mention just one), this party is
reminiscent of the Communist Party.
It is a well-known fact that during the Soviet regime the
Communist Party functioned, in effect, as a social and hierarchi-
cal system superimposed on all other structures state, eco-
nomic, administrative, cultural, etc. and in many cases replaced
these structures. During the rallies of the late-1980s (to be dis-
cussed in the Path of Rebellion and Festival), the crowds of pro-
testors addressed the Central Committee of the Party its head-
quarters occupied today by the Parliament any time they had
issues within the realm of the state or legislative structure. The
situation could be well illustrated by the humorous punning call
Ts'eka, Ts'eka, yes ka! used by the marchers approaching the
Ts'eka (Ts'.K.' the abbreviation of the Russian Central Com-
mittee) building the call could be translated as Commie,
Commie, I am coming!
In the rural districts of Armenia, the hierarchical party struc-
ture, which was based, as has already been mentioned, on a sys-
tem of initiation, acquired, in its relationship to the top of the
hierarchy, aspects reminiscent of a more recent historical forma-
tion namely, feudalism.
4
The first secretary of the district com-
mittee was, in both a literal and figurative sense, the absolute
ruler of his small principality and was regarded as such by his
vassals. And precisely for this reason the movement toward
democracy did not proceed so vigorously in the districts as the
new urban revolutionary authorities would have liked, and dur-
ing the first democratic elections, villagers nominated their for-

4
Cf. on feudal socialism Voslenskii 1991: ch. 9.

mer communist princes as a matter of course. Given such re-
alities, one can understand how it happened that the national lib-
eration movement in Mountainous Gharabagh in 1988 was
headed by the first secretary of the party regional committee.
Just how deeply embedded the hierarchical party structure was in
peoples consciousness is illustrated by the assertion made to me
in the mid-1970s by a certain village adolescent who wanted to
brag about his distinguished relatives living abroad. I have two
uncles, he said, one lives in Beirut, and the other in Los Ange-
les. And what do they do there? I asked with interest. Ones
a first secretary, and the others a second secretary, he replied.
Secretary of what? What do you mean of what? Of the
party, of course, answered the boy meaning the Communist
party.
The regular party meetings during which the initiates prac-
ticed their cult in the most ritualized form and with the use of a
special language, transforming themselves beneath the iconic
portraits of the religions founders and great forefathers and in
the presence of other symbols of their faith all of this lends
itself to comparison with the ritual dramas of primitive society.
And just as the initiates of the ritual dramas of primitive society,
even while knowing that it is not actually the spirits of their to-
temic ancestors but they themselves who are performing the sa-
cred rites, still believe in these spirits, so it was with the commu-
nists: however skeptically they may have regarded their ritual-
ized meetings, in the end they were drawn into the efficiently
functioning system and began to actually believe in that which
they were acting out.

The Path of the Thunderer Gods
If we were to try to delineate the ideological totality of this par-
ticular society everything from the theoretical constructions of
the Marxist classics down to the most ordinary rumors and su-
perstitions we would see before us an odd, essentially religious
system, one that here too seems to correspond to the primitive
tribal system. Although some journalists and others have recently
begun to focus attention on certain aspects of this surprising phe-
nomenon, it is an issue requiring special study. Here we shall sim-
ply enumerate a few specific features that are of interest.
The idea of a structural similarity between communist doc-
trine and the ideology of primitive society was expressed long

176
ago. One difference between them, however, is that whereas
primitive humans put the Golden Age at the beginning of time,
the classic Marxists shifted it to the end, to the era of commu-
nism (Eliade 1949: 220). Is it perhaps possible that this original
inversion predetermined the essentially inverted view of the
world that has characterized the recent communist society? In
this connection, one need only consider Lenins famous carnival
image of a lady cook running the state or the logic contained in
the recent joke (mentioned in the Path of Renaming) defining the
USSR as a country with an unpredictable past.
The commonly accepted view has been that ever since 1917,
the communist regime has been systematically destroying reli-
gion in the USSR without offering anything to take its place.
And this is how people try to explain the general lack of spiritu-
ality in Soviet society. Such is not quite the case, however. In
place of the countrys old religion, a new, actually much more
archaic religion was offered one that was hidden in the very
structure of the new government, even though the latter declared
itself to be militantly atheistic.
5
Indeed, even the terms used to
delineate the communist view of the world reveal the clan and
tribal nature of Soviet society. Consider, for example, such
expressions as the leader of the people, the father of the peo-
ples, the cult of personality. A textual analysis of a single
lengthy collection titled Stalin in the Creative Works of the Ar-
menian People, published in Armenian in Yerevan in 1939 (Sta-
lin 1939), enabled the psychologist L. Jrnazian to bring to light
a sharply distinct group of three epithets that appeared most fre-
quently both singly and in combination with other epithets out
of a total of 1,988 definitions and epithets applied to Stalin and
distributed among 238 thematic categories. These three epithets,
great (151 examples), father (119), and sun (116) together
with other, less frequently appearing epithets such as leader
(69), powerful or strong (59), and bold, courageous or
fearless (35) help to create an image of the idolized pagan
leader of an earlier age.

5
Here I am not discussing the religious essence of the communist doc-
trine in general cf. obvious religious stereotypes of the messianic type
(with the proletariat in the role of messiah) and other, less obvious reli-
gious patterns (see Abrahamian 1993-94: 17-18) but some striking
similarities in the communist and archaic tribal views of the world.

The leader as sun often appears in close conjunction with
the Thunderer God. Consider, for example, these lines of the
Armenian folk poet and singer Ashkhuyzh (The Brisk One):
You are a source of light, a sun of thought, an opponent of the
darkness, / You, Stalin, are a shimmering rainbow that drives
away the gloomy storm clouds. But just as the sun warms, so
too it may bum, and just as the father protects, so too he may
punish: You always cast rightists and [pseudo-]leftists into the
abyss (Jrnazian 1988: 56-64). Lenin is also associated with the
sun in folk-poetry (see Melik-Ohanjanian 1936: 52). The sun-
god image persistently associated with the leader is very much in
keeping with the sun-like qualities attributed to the ruler in the
archaic, ritually oriented mythological system reconstructed by
A. Hocart (1927).
The essential nature of a society generally finds its most vivid
expression in the image of its leader. Everything in the society
that is diffuse and not readily apparent tends to be concentrated
in its leader, ruler, or preeminent individual we will see this in
more detail in the Path of Tyrants and Fools. An analysis of the
folkloric texts and songs of praise dedicated to Soviet leaders
(including the works of the official folk poets and singers) re-
veals ever-new facets of this image, which for all its variations
still traces its origins to the age of primitive humans.
6
A. Petro-
syan, for example, tried to show the structural parallels between
the mythological system of images used in the portrayal of
communist leaders and the traditional Armenian mytho-epic sys-
tem. Among others, he singled out the motifs of twins (Marx and
Engels; Lenin and Stalin) and dragon slayers (Lenin and Khru-
shchev).
7
In the 1970s, I jotted down the curious remarks of a
little girl of preschool age who thought that the names of all ob-
jects trees, rivers, etc. had been thought up by Lenin. Here
we are reminded of the archaic conceptions of the Demiurge or

6
I am grateful to Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer for noting in this context
that one Western analysis of Soviet folklore was done for a project
conducted during World War II under Margaret Mead (see Hoyt 1953:
234-242), to study Russian national character including the image of
the Leader (Abrahamian 1993-94: 26 /editors note no. d/).
7
See A. Petrosyan 1990. On Lenins image as dragon-slayer in Soviet
folklore see Melik-Ohanjanian 1936: 31, 35-36 (citing epics of the So-
viet Orient).

178
Great Ancestor who gives names to all the objects that he creates
or encounters along his way. Parenthetically, one might add that
given the new language (Orwells Newspeak) created by the
Bolsheviks after the Revolution, the little girls idea was not so
far-fetched.
The wave of anti-communism sweeping over the country to-
day has produced a new body of religious and mythological con-
ceptions. Diametrically opposed to the old ones, these new con-
ceptions have recast the images of the countrys leaders in a sa-
tanic key. But here too, for all its universality, the whole circle of
conceptions is typologically close to that of the archaic society.
In this connection, one might cite the birthmark on Gorbachevs
forehead (the mark of Satan) and many sinister astrological dis-
closures regarding the countrys fallen leaders.
Logically rounding out the picture of this odd society is the
systems main symbol, that of the founding father Lenin, the
eternally living corpse placed in the countrys absolute center, in
the Mausoleum. It is revealing that the population as a whole has
begun only very recently, since the years of perestroika, to adopt
a critical attitude toward this openly religious cult of an immortal
and omnipresent forefather; up till now this archaic method of
deifying the forefather had been taken for granted, as something
completely natural.
8
After all, it was only less than 20 years ago
that people would address their petitions and letters of complaint
to Lenin at the Mausoleum, Red Square, Moscow, as if appeal-
ing to the highest court. Noteworthy too is the fact that according
to their authors, such petitions always received a reply.
The diabolical nature of such living corpses was recently
confirmed by a mysterious incident that occurred in connec-
tion with Lenins Bulgarian counterpart Dimitrov, whose mum-
mified corpse, as rumor has it, completely disappeared after be-
ing cremated simply vaporized without leaving even a particle
of ash for the planned burial.
The toppling of leaders statues, a craze that gripped the
whole country during and after the collapse of the Soviet state,

8
To show the absurdness of this phenomenon, Fazil Iskander had to
appeal to a humorous pseudo-ethnographic situation in one of his sto-
ries about Sandro from Chegem (chapter 16), where his natural Ab-
khazian heroes perceive Lenins unburied status as an awful curse (for
English translation, see Iskander 1979).

was likewise often associated with peoples beliefs in the dia-
bolical nature of these leaders we will discuss in detail this
fight with the monuments in the Path Decorated with Statues.
Generalizing from the religious and mythological picture of
Soviet society presented above, including the Armenian society
of the Soviet times, one can conclude that its belief system
shared many traits in common with that of primitive society.

The Path of Fear
We now need to make one more logical step in our typological
comparison. Within the structure of primitive society the latter
being the point of reference for our observations there is one
other institution that is characteristic of the period of transition
from tribal to early class society. This is the secret society, an
institution that often terrorizes the population and serves for all
intents and purposes as an instrument of fear, helping to support
and maintain the existing system even though it is already in a
stage of transition (see, e.g. Istoriia pervobytnogo obshchestva
1988: 237-241). The Soviet counterpart to this institution was the
KGB (and its predecessors). It has to be stressed that the secret
police interests me here as an anthropological institution; it is not
my intention to expose it, to express my moral outrage, or to jus-
tify it, but simply to try to give a broad definition of its place in
the structure of primitive Soviet society. Similarly, an anthro-
pologist studying, for example, the secret society Duk-Duk of
Melanesia doesnt start out by stigmatizing its members and
fighting for the rights of the repressed aborigines although one
might add, that wouldnt preclude the possibility of the anthro-
pologist himself or herself falling victim to the secret society that
he or she is attempting to study, be this society an authentic eth-
nographic one or its civilized typological counterpart.
The KGB system permeated all of Soviet society (for the sake
of convenience I will use the term KGB to encompass all forms
of the secret police that have existed during the Soviet era) and
there was not a single sphere of Soviet life that did not feel its
secret presence. The KGB even knows which hen laid which
eggs and how many, argued one of the deputies to the Arme-
nian parliament in the early years of post-Soviet independence,
expressing his skepticism of the official assertion that the KGB
had had no advance knowledge of the political action currently
under discussion. And the common expression the walls have

180
ears no longer simply means that our surroundings have been
infiltrated by all sorts of sophisticated listening devices, but has
even taken on a certain mystical overtone, thanks in part to the
magic of words that bring to life everything that has received
verbal expression. The all-pervasive quality of this all-knowing
and threatening force is somewhat comparable to that of the
Melanesian and Polynesian mana, at least in its traditional and a
little exaggerated understanding in anthropological literature.
9

During the late- and post-Soviet violence based on ethnicity, I've
even heard people remark that by comparison with the current
rampant nationalism, the Stalin era was more just and genuinely
internationalist in outlook, since anyone could be arrested irre-
spective of his or her nationality.
10
Like magical abstract forces
in primitive societies, the KGB was thought to strike blindly
anybody could become its victim, from ordinary citizen to the
top figures. However, like in primitive societies, persons with
higher hierarchical status had more chances to become victims of
these abstract forces. Even more to the point, it was, as is well
known, the officers of the KGB itself and the ruling party elite
that were most vulnerable, and it was precisely among these
groups that this destructive force struck most frequently and with
greatest efficiency.
Let me reiterate that we are not concerned here with specific
situations or individuals, all the less so since once put into mo-
tion, the system takes on a life of its own and brings to the fore
those whom it needs. The organs of state security were responsi-
ble for the societys ideological purity and protected it from its
enemies, both real and imagined. And here, incidentally, we see
one more parallel with the primitive prototype: the hunting
down, successful unmasking, and subsequent execution of secret
wizards (saboteurs) and enemies of the community (of the peo-
ple). That is why the image of the incorruptibly honest KGB of-
ficial, the knight of the revolution, was necessary to ensure that
this devastating force was genuinely impartial and did not de-
pend on the personality of those who wielded it. In similar fash-
ion, a member of a secret union is seen as the blind implementer

9
See Petrukhin and Polinskaia 1994 for a critical analysis of anthropo-
logical approaches to this and similar abstract forces.
10
Those who say this indeed forget about Stalins practice of punishing
entire peoples and ethnic groups.

of the will of his supernatural patron.
The myth of KGB honesty does, by the way, seem to have
some basis in reality. An institution whose mission it was to en-
gender fear was itself so firmly maintained by fear that it man-
aged to escape or such is the common perception the corrup-
tion that permeated virtually every sphere of Soviet life during
the period of stagnation (although recently even this has become
subject to doubt). Thus, the KGB, it can be said, remained the
last bastion of Soviet society even during the period when the
society itself had for all intents and purposes ceased to exist. As
for the myth of KGB honesty, it is alive and well even today, as
can be seen in the appointment of the chairman of the Armenian
KGB to head the office of tax inspection in the early years of
independence, a position that under the circumstances of todays
total corruption certainly requires incorruptible honesty.
What has become of the institution of fear now that the sys-
tem that maintained itself by fear has collapsed? There were two
opposing views, which were clearly illustrated in peoples reac-
tions to the appointment of another head of the Armenian KGB
also during the first years of independence to the position of
adviser to the mayor of Yerevan, an activist in the nationalist
movement. This top KGB figure was from the period when the
nationalist movement was on the rise, a movement that the head
of the KGB clearly opposed at the time. I wrote down these field
notes during the critical years of the crisis, a time when the
shadow of the Soviet empire was still quite alive and was not yet
remembered with nostalgia. Some of my informants (the major-
ity) cited this appointment as proof of the fact that nothing has
changed and that now, finally, the new and old authorities have
merged the course of time showed that they were right. Others
saw nothing bad in this appointment. On the contrary, what it
proved in their minds was that the head of the KGB was merely
becoming a patriot and a well-informed one at that! now that
the system he was drawn from has disappeared. The change of
the name of the secret police institution from State Security
(abbreviation of the Russian GB) to National Security also
seemed to show such a turn from an abstract mana-type force to
a concrete nationally oriented one. But has it disappeared? still
others will ask. This question is of particular interest in the case
of Armenia, whose population today is almost 100 percent Ar-
menian. The transformation of an institution of fear into an insti-

182
tution of national security, was not, however, what concerned
those who raised this question. One such person, a middle-aged
man who had not completely freed himself of the old fear, as-
sumed that the KGB was simply biding its time, or was operating
secretly. And in his mind, the KGB was a system that functioned
at the all-union level exclusively; the Armenian KGB as such
simply didnt count. Such a view clearly demonstrates that in
order to have a genuine institution of fear, a country has to have
been penetrated by a supranational structure directed from the
cults center in this case, Moscow. This opinion also stood the
test of time the present National Security leaders of Armenia
proved to be just one of the political and economic power hold-
ers having, hopefully, nothing in common with the mystical in-
stitution of fear, the recent and ancient predecessors of the insti-
tution they presently head.
11

The Forking Path toward the Feudal Future
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general Path back to
Prehistory should be expected to fork toward more developed
stages in human history. Naturally, the general belief in the
newly independent states the former Republics of the USSR
was that they should turn off the incorrectly built communist
path back to the capitalist path. Based on this and other such be-
liefs, all the economic paths proposed to return to this left behind
path, caused a variety of shocking experiences, whether this
shock was premeditated by the wise path builders or was a by-
product of the nave revolutionary restructuring of the society
and economy. While Russian leaders and economists used a
premeditated shock therapy, presently criticized by many ana-
lysts (see, e.g. Hedlund 1999: Part 3), Armenian leaders also
added to this some more radical actions like immediate and un-
planned privatization of the land, which in many cases led to the
impoverishment of peasants, as we know already from the Path
of Tradition. By the way, the fact that the first prime-minister of
post-Soviet Armenia appointed a former ts'ekhavik (we men-
tioned this social group of Soviet time underground capitalists in
the Path of R'abiz) to the position of his major deputy already

11
Cf. the opposite situation in Russia: its President with a KGB past
successfully tries to re-establish an authoritarian regime by fighting
against the oligarchs.

shows his mythologized perception of capitalism, since the ts'e-
khaviks were, as a rule, a typical Soviet shadow economic struc-
ture, which was close to the capitalist system of production only
in outward appearance.
We will refrain from the temptation of speculating on the fur-
ther regression of the society further back to prehistory, from
early tribal organization to hunters and gatherers, although for a
short period of the crisis, as we saw in the Path of Tradition,
women shuttle-traders were typologically close to primitive gath-
erers and yielded their place in the early post-USSR market to the
men or the hunters. Such typological leaps back to prehistory
are usually unstable and characterize any society in a critical situa-
tion, and not its deeper roots with primitive society.
We will follow this Path by also paying attention mainly to
the structural peculiarities and typological similarities with well-
known historical and anthropological phenomena, rather than
doing ominous or wildly optimistic prophesying prognoses.
First, let us consider what structural characteristics Armenian
society took just after the primitive Soviet system came to an
end. No sooner had Armenian society shed its old, familiar insti-
tutions and no sooner had some of its members mainly the in-
telligentsia begun to panic as a result of the chaos and uncer-
tainty of suddenly gained independence than there appeared in
societys midst certain structures that were regarded with ex-
treme disfavor again, mainly by the intelligentsia. These were
the multitude of vendors stands that have sprouted like mush-
rooms throughout Yerevan and have already managed to inspire
a whole series of popular anecdotes and folklore. An analogous
situation developed throughout the former USSR, but in Arme-
nia it had been accompanied by another phenomenon connected
with the war in Mountainous Gharabagh and in the districts bor-
dering on Azerbaijan. This guerrilla war, which had already gone
on for several years (we will return to this sad topic in the Path
of Violence), produced what was, in effect, a whole class of
fedayi warriors or freedom fighters who, in the eyes of many,
stood in sharp contrast to the street vendors and profiteers,
who had no desire to volunteer for the war. Here, it seems, we
are dealing with a situation where a society, left to its own de-
vices, was beginning to organize itself into two groups, fulfilling
two of Dumezils three universal functions the third, that of
producer and merchant, and the second, that of warrior (see, e.g.

184
Dumezil 1939). The first function in Dumezils classification
related with the sphere of ideology, which usually is fulfilled by
the clergy, was only beginning to take shape in the aftermath of
an extremely significant struggle by certain self-styled spiritual
leaders for their ecological niche a struggle waged at the begin-
ning of the movement for national independence, when the offi-
cial church remained passive. In the threshold of the 21
st
century,
this first function still stays vacant, although the Church, as we
saw in the Path of Faith, seems to manifest some claims to this
traditional function of the clergy. Neither party succeeded in
gaining real authority in the realm of ideological and spiritual
leadership.
While such classifications may seem pointless at first glance,
having once discovered certain universal principles, one can try
to develop them rather than nipping them in the bud. Thus, for
example, one could try to reconcile the two newly developing
functions and make them mutually complementary rather than
antagonistic, as they were seriously threatening to become in the
early 1990s. The second, warrior function gradually lost its actu-
ality after the ceasefire on the Gharabagh front in 1994. There
was some anxiety that the fedayi guerilla warriors would create
new tensions in Armenian society after returning from the heroic
war, producing an Armenian version of the Vietnam syn-
drome. Such anxiety and fear again sprouted among the intelli-
gentsia, who also failed to occupy Dumezils first function de-
spite several attempts to organize corresponding parties or non-
political intellectual unities. These fears were not groundless,
since some of the fighters were marginals with somewhat crimi-
nal tendencies, not to mention the well-known psychological
influence of the war on ordinary people.
12
This is a usual picture
of any war, especially if it raises patriotic feelings like the
Gharabagh war did. However, this potentially dangerous layer
seemed to dissipate actively among the people of the third func-

12
I will not discuss the anthropology of the Gharabagh war here. Al-
though there already are some publications on this topic (see, e.g.
Dudwick 1995; 2000), this special theme has to be analyzed fundamen-
tally in the many contexts of the war, including such poles of the theme
as war-time humor and folklore and comparative violence of the
sides involved in the war the Path of Violence discusses violence and
identity changes mainly p r e c e d i n g the war.

tion, represented in Armenia mainly by traders, or found their
niche in the structure of the national regular army to the mis-
fortune of the conscripts.
13

Although the first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-
Petrossian, was an intellectual with a tendency to the first func-
tion cf. his knowledge of Syriac, the language of the early
translations of the Bible, and his participation in a new edition of
the Holy Book in the early 1990s (see Astvatsashunch' 1994:
Foreword), he never succeeded in this path, in spite of his im-
age as a wise king, which he seemed to believe in. More than
that, it is a general opinion that the Republics deplorable eco-
nomic and spiritual condition is a result of the destructive activi-
ties of his family-clan, which represented Dumezils third func-
tion, but in its negative aspect. Although the next President of
Armenia, Robert Kocharian, descended from the Soviet-time
first function group, albeit its lowest level (he was a full-time
Communist Party secretary at an enterprise in Gharabagh), he
was actually representing the second, the warriors function as
the head of the State Committee on Defense and as war-time
Prime Minister of Mountainous Gharabagh. This is a usual situa-
tion for a king in typical Dumezilian societies we will dis-
cuss other details of the royal code of Armenian leaders a little
later, in the Royal Path. As a matter of fact, he was appointed as
Prime Minister of Armenia by the former President, Levon Ter-
Petrossian, due to his reputation as a tough guy with re-
volver,
14
with the hope that he would introduce some order to
the chaotic economic situation in Armenia. This also shows his

13
The war in Gharabagh well illustrates the different attitudes toward
strategy and tactics, as well as the different moral standards of a regular
army and that of guerilla groups (the fedayis), this opposition already
known from the history of war of the first Republic of Armenia cf.
the consistent regular army psychology of Nzhdeh and the spontaneous
fedayi heroism of general Andranik (I am indebted to Armen Petrosyan
for this latter comparison).
14
This image (which remained stable despite many changes in the
populaces attitude toward the President) was supported by his re-
semblance to the American actor Robert de Niro, famous for his tough
guy roles. This resemblance was used several times in humorous TV
shows, especially during Robert Kocharians first appearance on Ar-
menias political stage, the President himself seemed to be pleased with
this comparison.

186
relation to the second function, since he had no experience in the
third function, which a Prime Minister would need to have. The
initiator of this appointment, which favored the second function
over the third was said to be Vazgen Sargsyan with a fedayi past,
Armenias Minister of Defense at the time, who later himself
took the position of Prime Minister, which he started to run with
the authoritarian zeal characteristic of the warriors function,
until his assassination during the terrorist capture of the Arme-
nian Parliament on October 27, 1999.
However, much more telling for our typological analysis of
Armenias path after independence is not the normal Dumezil-
ian second function of its President, but his Gharabaghian roots.
Mountainous Gharabagh, as a result of 70 years of ethnic seclu-
sion within an other-ethnic environment one of the reasons for
its fight for unification with Armenia, had preserved many
structural and typological characteristics of a feudal society. So
that by the beginning of the conflict, Mountainous Gharabagh
was typologically very close to its feudal prototype of the 18
th

century: as the 18
th
-century Gharabaghian Armenians were fight-
ing against Turkic and Muslim invaders under the leadership of
the meliks, the local feudal lords, the late-20
th
-century Ghara-
baghians were fighting against the Muslim Turks (as Azerbai-
janis are traditionally called by Armenians, especially by Ghara-
baghians) under the leadership of Soviet meliks, representa-
tives of the communist and Soviet local supreme power. We will
see some further typological similarities between Gharabaghian
society of the late-1980s and its medieval predecessor in the
Paths of Prudence and Rebelliousness. Here I will stress the
point that the primitive or rather feudal Soviet society dis-
cussed in this Path back to Prehistory was much more character-
istic for Gharabagh than for Armenia. So the invitation of Robert
Kocharian from Gharabagh to Armenia was in a sense an invita-
tion to the feudal system through one of its feudal lords. This
does not mean, of course, that feudalism was absolutely im-
ported from Gharabagh to Armenian soil. Despite creating a kind
of a civil society in the square during the rallies of the late 1980s
(see the Path of Rebellion and Festival), Armenias society was
in reality also well prepared for the changes toward feudalism.
One of the creators of this virtual civil society, Levon Ter-
Petrossian with a historical-philological background, introduced
a new administrative structure in Armenia, when he became its

first President, changing the 37 regions of the Soviet time into 11
marzes, symbolically recreating the feudal structure of medieval
Armenia.
15
As a tribute to modern times, Yerevan was equated in
a sense to a separate marz despite its nearly three thousand
year long history, it nevertheless is a modern phenomenon in
Armenian feudalism. No wonder Vano Siradeghian, also one
of the creators of the festive civil society in the square in the
late-1980s and Armenias Interior Minister in the early-1990s, a
person with rich experience in top administrative power,
16
pre-
ferred to leave his Interior Minister position for the position of
the mayor of Yerevan after the feudal reforms, evidently feel-
ing the change of wind in the historical pace of Armenia.
This feudal trend can be detected not only in Armenia or
other peripheral former Soviet republics (the best example being
Turkmenistan), but also in regions of the Russian Federation.
President Putin is believed to have barely halted similar proc-
esses of feudalization in Russia. Many people believe that
Russia finally got its modern tough guy, the long expected
ruler with an iron arm.
17
Although, he himself, and many of
his assistants, are the heroes of the institution discussed in the
Path of Fear. However, this could mean that they are the only
figures that can still be trusted in the corrupted new world we
discussed an analogous situation in Armenia in the same Path.
Or they just happened to be the people whom the new President
knew from his own environment, as the first President of Arme-
nia brought to power the members of his family and former col-
leagues, specialists in Oriental studies.
To sum up: I have tried to show how a primitive society that
was partially submerged within an officially proclaimed ad-

15
These new administrative divisions were named for their medieval
predecessors, although they did not necessarily inherit their historical
boundaries and/or chronological order (cf. the Path of Renaming). I am
grateful to H. Marutyan for a constructive discussion of this issue.
16
Being charged with the abuse of power and other, more severe,
crimes, he is presently hiding from justice.
17
The diabolical KGB background of the Russian President was
mysteriously revealed with the strange resemblance of Putin to the
(albeit kind-hearted) elf Dobby, an evil wizards servant in the second
film about Harry Potters adventures. This resemblance was much dis-
cussed with a scandalous relish in the mass media and on the Internet in
January of 2003.

188
vanced social system, has managed to coexist perfectly well with
the social system that had been foisted upon it. Now that this
social system has been discarded, an attempt is being made to
impose upon the society a new, capitalist social system once
again, a system from the advanced stages of human history. In an
article published in the first half of the 1990s, I concluded an
analysis of the situation just after the collapse of the USSR, by
saying that society groped stubbornly and painfully forward, try-
ing to make the major transition from a tribal to an early class
system (Abrahamian 1993-94: 26). Now I can conclude this Path
more optimistically: Armenian society gropes its way forward,
already stepping on the Path toward the Feudal Future.

The Path of Tyrants and Fools

NINE

THE PATH OF TYRANTS AND FOOLS
Every Nation Deserves Its Ruler

The Paired Father-and-Son Path
According to a trite opinion, every society deserves its ruler. Or,
if we take away the moralistic aspect of this statement, it will
express the idea that every society is reflected in the person of its
leader. Sometimes a leader may reflect not the present state of a
society but its historical or even pseudo-historical past.
1
Any-
how, the popular correspondence between the leader and society
is based on the archetypal image of the First Man, who is called
to symbolically embody a society. Whatever a society under-
goes, it is much more distinctly and dramatically accentuated in
the figure of its First Man, be he a chief of a small tribal group, a
king of a great kingdom, or a party leader of a communist state.
It might be only he, who undergoes cardinal changes symboli-
cally and at times also in actuality during the main ritual dramas
and/or critical periods in the life of the society. That is why he
becomes one of the primary symbols through which the ritual
transition from Cosmos to Chaos and back to Cosmos becomes
most visible a theme that has been examined since J. J. Frazer
with much confusion between the ritual, archetypal and histori-
cal aspects of the figure of the First Man.
In hierarchical societies, the scenario of such ritual dramas
has a universal structure: the First Man, the highest in the social
hierarchy, who is often represented by the figure of a king (sym-
bolically the Father), is dethroned ritually (and sometimes liter-

1
See Borodatova, Abrahamian 1992 for an analysis of Yeltsins image
in the context of Russian royal history and mythology.

192
ally) and swaps positions with the lowest in the social hierarchy,
often the kings jester (symbolically the Son), in order to regain
the throne toward the end of the ritual for himself or his succes-
sor born during the ritual. The mentioned archetypal pattern is a
highly stable one in human culture, manifesting itself in the most
diverse realms from archaic theatricalized rituals to popular
uprisings and revolutions. A conspicuous example of such hier-
archic transformations is, according to M. Bakhtin (1968), a me-
dieval European carnival. Sometimes, passage through the jester-
fool status is a necessary condition for acquisition of secret
knowledge. Just such a transformation was practiced by Hamlet,
in order to divine the secret of his fathers death, although those
who play the role prefer to create the nobler image of the mad-
man, and not the carnival fool.
The King Jester (Father Son) pair of this ritual archetype
seems to present even a more universal pattern. It is to some de-
gree responsible for the inseparability of the medieval king and
his jester, of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the nature of
dual mythological images in general. This archetypal pair might
even be capable of controlling the historic process or at least
may introduce corrections to it, in a sense carnivalizing history,
as we will see in the case of Soviet history.
2
Armenian society
was a part of the USSR and replicated its structure for some 70
years, although, as we have seen, this period is often erased
from the history of Armenia. During all those years, Armenians
shared the same leaders. So, to better understand the changes in
supreme power and in its popular mythological perception after
the fall of the Soviet empire, we will outline in short the new life
of the ancient paired figure that ruled over the Soviet peoples
including Armenians.
Generally speaking, the Son-Fool might not be present as a
separate figure complementing the King but as the latters split
personality hidden under the somber masque of the king and
waiting for an opportunity to expose him during feasts and festi-
vals. Russian history gives many examples of this dualistic ar-
chetype. Thus, Russian czars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the
Great frequently held mock ceremonies. They did this not only

2
Cf. Abrahamian 1990d; 1991a on the carnivalization of history. Cf.
M. Fishers and S. Grigorians article of 1993 using carnivalization of
history in its title.

The Path of Tyrants and Fools 193
because this was a traditional way to assert their political func-
tions, but also because the carnival spirit of the masquerade and
disguise was entirely familiar to the czars and their entourage
(Uspensky 1982: 210; Panchenko and Uspensky 1983: 57).
However, such mini-festivals were confined to a narrow circle of
the czars entourage, who were at best the objects of the czars
whims and practical jokes. But such carnivals usually did not
last long, and the Father-King would again appear in his awe-
some aspect. In the history of the USSR, however, there were
periods when the epoch of the Father-King lasted quite long,
without the cleansing and invigorating invasion of the carnival
chaos of the Son-Fool.

Successive Paths of the Father and the Son
Such an epoch was the dismal period of the rule of Joseph Stalin,
whose image was distinctly associated with the mythological
wise King and Father let us remember his traditional epithet,
Father of the Nations [of the USSR]. Like his fore-runner
czars, whom he followed in many respects, Stalin also had a
touch of the carnival about him, which was also confined to the
narrow bounds of his faithful comrades-in-arms, who in the best
of cases became the objects of kingly cruel jokes and pranks.
However, a large-scale and real carnival was ushered in only
after the death of the Tyrant-Father, and this became possible
only with the arrival of the mischievous Son, a role which fell to
Nikita Khrushchev. As I tried to show elsewhere (Abrahamian
1990a; 1990d), there are amazing correlations of Khrushchevs
image with the mythological Fool, which is not a surprise, since
only the mythological jester, the Son-Fool can overturn the
mythological Father. So the epoch of the Father-Tyrant was re-
placed by the epoch of the Son-Fool. The latter epoch, like the
former one, was unfolding with a single hero, this time a carnival
jester, who could not exist on his own without the Father for
long. By the logic of the carnival, the Jester-King should again
be replaced by a Father-King, the Tyrant. However, the foolish
Son was replaced not by the genuine Father but a substitute; not
the real King, but a False King, an impostor came to take his
place. In the same articles I tried to show why Brezhnev, the
successor of Khrushchev, was a caricature of the Father.
I was carrying out this analysis during the time of the False
Father, wondering with concern what would befall the country

194
next for a real Father always comes after a False Father! Per-
haps the Father returned with Yuri Andropov let us recall the
first mass mini-repressions for violating work discipline al-
though the brief period of his rule did not attain the status of a
historical epoch, was not accompanied by stories about him, and
did not receive a corresponding mythological evaluation. It
seemed as though the steady Father-Son succession had suffered
a defeat. The next ruler, Chernenko, left even less of a trace in
history.
Succession of pure periods of the Father and of the Son, and
not their combination in one person or within one common pe-
riod, is, evidently, a mark (or a by-product) of the linear devel-
opment of history as opposed to the circular development with
its carnival-type cyclic festivals. A similar succession of differ-
ent periods with specific personages and images can be seen in
the change of the epoch of the pensive and naughty hippies
with the epoch of the thoughtless and turbulent punks. These
two pseudo-carnival figures, which were born in city squares and
streets deprived of periodic carnivals, resemble respectively the
red-haired and the white clowns.
3
Each of these clowns can
entertain the spectators for a while, but they are called to be to-
gether, in order to simultaneously mark both poles of the buffoon
version of the Father-Tyrant and Son-Fool pair.

Back to the Paired Path?
The indefinite and short governance of Andropov and Chernenko
was followed by the era of perestroika, which we will discuss in
the Path of Rebellion and Festival. For now we need to analyze
the mythological image of its initiator and hero Gorbachev, es-
pecially since he played a crucial role in the changes to the Ar-
menian identity in the late 1980s. In the context of earlier obser-
vations of the carnivalization of history, one can say that Gorba-
chev, unlike his predecessors, faced a certain ambiguity: he was
free to choose for himself either the way of the Father or the way
of the Son. This wider freedom of choice was a result of the un-
certainty in the nature of the preceding period let us remember
that the two preceding mini-epochs never manifested themselves
clearly enough. In any case, the Fathers and the Sons epochs

3
On different aspects of the red-haired and white clowns see Fellini
1984: 125-147.

seemed to cease to follow each other, and we were witnessing
the setting in of a pattern where, as was the case in ancient times,
the ruler combined in his person both the Father and the Son, the
King and the Jester.
This dualism is even apparent in Gorbachevs external fea-
tures. On the one hand, he was simple and common and easily
mingled with people. Then too, he was not devoid of carnival zest,
which makes him akin to Khrushchev. Even though externally he
was not as colorful in a carnival sense, still, Khrushchevs son
noted, not without reason, during his televised interview on March
26, 1989 on the Vzgliad talk show, that Gorbachev also resem-
bled Khrushchev in his appearance. On the other hand, Gorba-
chevs simplicity and unobtrusiveness were combined with an
obvious sign of distinction the birthmark on his forehead, similar
to the divine mark on the Junior Son in fairy tales, by which he is
recognized as a future king. Such duality was also evident in the
fact that the birthmark was carefully touched up in photographs
and parade placards, whereas in cartoons it was used to good ef-
fect. Certain situations also created a similar duality, sometimes in
the direction of the Father, sometimes in the direction of the Son.
Thus, the session of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR on July 18, 1988, where it was anticipated that the fate of
the Mountainous Gharabagh Autonomous Oblast would be de-
cided, was originally scheduled for July 5 a day well known to
the Armenians by reason of the notorious 1921 session of the
Caucasian Bureau of the RCP(b) (Russian Communist Party of the
Bolsheviks), when the fate of Gharabagh was originally decided.
4

Yet this previous session was held under the harsh dictatorship of
Stalin, and the people saw in the new session alarming features of
a fateful repetition, a return of the Father. At the same time, the
changing of the date created a slight hope in the possibility of es-
caping the vicious circle, although further events showed that
these hopes were in vain.
This was the first time in Armenia when the optimistic figure
of the Son was distinctly overshadowed by the macabre figure of
the Father. A little later, many people in the USSR also saw a

4
The Caucasian Bureau of 1921 at first decided Mountainous Ghara-
bagh to be a part of Armenia, but later, under Stalins pressure, re-
decided in favor of Azerbaijan (see, e.g. Galoyan and Khudaverdian
1988: 30-35).

196
danger of the Fathers return in Gorbachevs forced presidential
elections at the extraordinary 3rd Congress of Peoples Deputies;
quite a few speakers pointed out the possibility for Gorbachev to
turn into a dictator after being elected this shows that the Fa-
thers frightful shadow was always somewhere nearby. The Fa-
thers shadow revealed itself once again at a demonstration in
Moscow on January 20, 1991, which was protesting against the
Kremlins harsh military suppression of the secessionist move-
ment in Lithuania. This time the Father even appeared visibly
on a placard, where Gorbachev was given Stalins moustache.
At the same time, many indications of a reckless and foolish
Son Merrymaker can be seen in the structure of Gorbachevs
policy of democratization and glasnost, which, as we will see in
the Path of Rebellion and Festival, carried many signs of a carni-
val and a popular festival.
There was an opinion that Gorbachev had to carry out the
economic reforms from above, using his authoritarian power of
the ruler-reformer. The first Congress of Peoples Deputies, ac-
cording to this opinion, had to be convened for one reason only
to hand over all power to Gorbachev in order to let him begin his
reforms.
5
This idea was realized at the third Congress, when the
country gained its first President, who was later endowed with
extraordinary powers. However, it was too late, the Fool con-
stituent of our ambivalent figure had had enough time to destroy
the economic system of the country before the Father constituent
could have an opportunity to reconstruct it through his reforms.
As a matter of fact, the aforementioned just opinion is related to
quite another personage resembling a fairy tale wise ruler. While
history (or the insidious scheme that haunts us) gave quite an-
other type of a hero to the country.
Gorbachevs famous triad (glasnost, democratization, pere-
stroika), evidently, was not the result of a profound analysis,
which preceded the reforms. The first steps of perestroika were
closely tied to the mythological patterns of the Soviet past .
Thus, the slogan promoting acceleration was a logical con-
tinuation of a highly mythologized Stakhanovite movement,
whose anniversary celebrations coincided with the beginning of
the Gorbachev era. However, this slogan was quickly committed

5
See the already mentioned discussion on whether Russia needs an
iron arm in the Path of Renaming (Ftn. 29).

to oblivion following the explosion at the ill-starred Chernobyl
power plant which had been built with acceleration, as Soviet
propaganda used to note before the catastrophe. Another appeal
to intensification was actually of the same mythological
nature, since it promised miraculous prosperity by merely chant-
ing the magical word intensification, without any serious
steps toward providing a base for it. The appeal to robotization
another Gorbachev slogan was also of the same mythological
sphere. Now the robots were given all the responsibility of bring-
ing the country miraculously to prosperity. The mythological
context of this appeal can also be seen in Gorbachevs special
emphasis on big robots, evidently expecting to have a quicker
effect when using a bigger device and this in a country catas-
trophically lacking even simple PCs.
Thus the famous triad cropped up following a series of erratic
and agonized attempts to find a gimmick capable of extracting
the country from its crisis. After some frantic mythological
searches for a solution, Gorbachev declared a kind of festival,
something like ritual chaos from which the reformed (recon-
structed) Cosmos was supposed to miraculously emerge. The
festival was declared in all spheres, including the economy. But
a festival in the economy means the destruction of the latter. Af-
ter such a festival, it is impossible to return to the old model of
the economy, lest the fundament for the new Cosmos is laid in
good time.
6

The Father-Son acquired one more clearly mythological fea-
ture in December 1988, when Gorbachev arrived in earthquake-
devastated Leninakan (presently Gyumri) and announced that the
city would be rebuilt within two years. It reminds one of a fairy
tale where the Junior Son undertakes the building of a city over-
night, hoping to be aided by some miraculous agents. In this
case, the role of miraculous helpers was assigned to the fraternal
people of other Union Republics. Of course, this could be re-
garded simply as a miscalculation on the part of the Son, more so
that the swift completion of the job has been hampered by the
crafty designs of one of the mythical helpers: a blockade im-

6
An example of such an economic carnival in Armenia is the razing
to the ground of the copper-smelting works in Alaverdi initiated by the
local green movement instead of renovating the machinery that had
become obsolete and polluting.

198
posed by neighboring Azerbaijan. But local authorities accepted
the fabulous construction plan of the Father as a heavenly
revelation (as this happened many times in the epoch of the Fa-
ther-Tyrant). Architects were immediately found who ruined
centuries-old farmland to build new pre-fab blocks of flats. This
latest example shows how the mythological nature of the Father,
turning into the Son for a moment, can set into action a complex
and destructive machinery, which could ruin regions, perhaps
even the whole country.
And, finally, a bright characteristic of a fairy tale Fool is the
presence of a wise wife who comes to help him at critical mo-
ments. This is all her fault! an elderly woman-informant told
me, meaning Raisa Gorbacheva, who she considered as the one
standing behind the entire devilish stratagem of the anti-
Armenian campaign, which the President, being poor in mind,
could hardly design himself. During the first Congresses of Peo-
ples Deputies, which were breathlessly watched all over the
country, people even said that Gorbachev was listening to his
wifes advice through ear-phones otherwise why should he use
ear-phones at the sessions held in Russian. During the early days
of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, the spouse of our hero was
figuring very actively in quite another kind of folk tale as a de-
fender of the Armenians defied by her husband (by shooting him
with a revolver to various versions of hitting) or, on the con-
trary, as an evil-wisher forcing him to pursue an anti-Armenian
policy (again by resorting to the use of a weapon)
7
.
This mythologized figure of the countrys leader also gave
birth to extremely interesting secondary figures. Thus, in Arme-
nia, during the stormy political carnival of 1988, the local First
Man (the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Com-
munist party of Armenia) was Suren Harutyunian, a man who
very much resembled Gorbachev in his appearance - at the be-
ginning of his term many people even mistook him for Gorba-
chev in the photographs shot at the Moscow Congress. In addi-
tion, he used to sometimes imitate Gorbachevs facial expres-
sions. As a result, the local First Man was a kind of a replica of
the countrys First Man and quit the stage when the carnival

7
I am not referring here to the ill-disposed and even hostile attitude
toward the First Lady by many of her female subjects all over the
USSR, who disliked her for her diverse and expensive attire.

came to its end.
In the summer of 1990, some political circles in Armenia
considered Suren Harutyunian, this communist leader of the
carnival period, to be a prospective figure in the new Parlia-
ment and were planning to put forward his candidature, expect-
ing him to form a constructive opposition there. However, this
never happened, since such a political prognosis was unjustified
considering the structural peculiarities of this figure. Thus, when
he was the First Man, he would easily switch from Armenian to
Russian within a single speech. He changed his progressive atti-
tude (ascribed to him when he allowed the Supreme Soviet
session of June 1988) to a reactionary one (when he arrested the
members of the Gharabagh Committee) and back to the pro-
gressive (when he made the right speeches in Moscow) with
the same ease. He even underwent an unprecedented sex
change with people referring to him with the associated female
name Sirush to reflect his feminine policy. This female name
(and its full form Siranush) was unofficially under a kind of a
ban during the First Mans female phase for example, it
couldnt be used in designing funeral wreaths without special
authorization, in order to avoid the rumored political actions
against the transsexual King. One such action became quite
well known during these days: a group of protesters brought a
wreath with a female substitute name to the building of the Cen-
tral Committee of the Communist Party on March 8, 1989 and
fixed it on the fence as an offer to the First Man/Lady on the oc-
casion of International Womens Day. Other symbolic attributes
of the changed sex, such as articles of female underwear, were
also said to appear on the same fence. He was nicknamed
mork'ur auntie and immediately became the heroine of numer-
ous jokes and anecdotes. However, he happily returned to his
original gender the same moment he made a masculine speech
in Moscow. This sexual transition was uncommonly quick and
painless, although a short intermediary phase, it is true, was nev-
ertheless needed for the back-play thus, jokes discussed his
preliminary transitions from being an aunt from the mothers line
(mothers sister mork'ur) to becoming an aunt from the fathers
line (fathers sister hork'ur) and moving from auntie to uncle
(mork'ur k'er'iats'av).
8
In other words, this figure seemed to be

8
Armenian kinship terms differentiate between mothers and fathers

200
born of the carnival itself and was following the carnival inver-
sions, and with the end of the carnival he was doomed to disap-
pear as a political figure. This prognosis proved to be true.
For Gorbachev, who was the initiator of the carnival, the
situation was different one could expect that here the Father
and the Son might continue their competition. In an earlier arti-
cle discussing this ambiguous figure, I wrote: I would like to
believe that the combining of the Father and the Son today in one
image is a good sign, indicating the return of society to a state of
wholeness, and that the tyranny of the Father will check the reck-
less courage of the Son and vice versa (Abrahamian 1990d: 48).
These hopes, however, were never realized, since the next set
of foolish deeds of the foolish constituent of this two-fold figure
led to a failed coup dtat in August 1991, after which the kingly
constituent was abolished together with his kingdom the
USSR. With the disappearance of this ambiguous (n)either King
(n)or Fool figure, the succeeding Father-Tyrant and Son-Fool
series seems to come to an end. However, the Fool continued to
manifest himself in the figure of Gorbachevs successor Yeltsin,
who soon became the Russian czar.
The analysis of the mythology of Yeltsins figure requires
more space than we have here.
9
However, to follow the principle
of comparison of the four peoples (as in the four models of the
Path of Ancestors), we will stop for a while on a characteristic of
this modern Russian czar, which correlates with the Father-
Son paired figure of its predecessors. Yeltsin the king, as well
as the First Man in general, is perceived as a giant (which corre-
sponds happily with his physical constitution), this notion being,
perhaps, a reminiscence of the ancient figure of the chief warrior.
In Russian tradition, the idea of the king as a giant is supported
by the figure of the most popular Russian czar, Peter the Great,
who was a giant in reality. Other leaders were rather symbolic
giants. For instance, Stalin, the principal Father figure in the
discussed Father-Son pairs, was a giant despite his short
stature. His gigantism was also a product of the visualized part of

lines.
9
See Borodatova and Abrahamian 1992: 53-56 for an analysis of the
royal code of Yeltsin including correlations with the figure of the
most famous Russian impostor-czar Yemelian Pugachev, the leader of
the 18
th
-century large-scale peasant riots.

the cult of personality: he appeared in giant posters and portraits,
where he was mainly alone, and artists used special perspectives
to show him in the company of tall fellow-revolutionaries.
10

Many other characteristics approximate Yeltsin to the mytho-
logical bogatyr' hero, which might be thought to be the triumph
of the Father-King and the end of the Son-Fool. But it is not,
since, as a Russian proverb says, Strength is the brains grave
(Dal' 1957: 431). And the giant Yeltsin, as if supporting this ar-
chaic correlation, strangely gains the features of another, also
well-known type of folklore fool. In addition this foolish figure
is sometimes attributed with a temporary or fake disability, bold-
ness or ugliness and leads (or pretends to lead) a foolish life, but
the moment the country is in danger, he immediately turns into a
bogatyr' hero. After destroying the enemy or performing some
other heroic action, he steps back into his previous foolish image
until the next invasion or danger.
In the same way, after performing heroic deeds during the
coup and rendering harmless the dragonish enemy, Yeltsin
regained his foolish image by saying foolish words
11
and doing
foolish deeds.
12
But in the moment of danger, in this case the
danger of not being re-elected, he immediately turned back into a
bogatyr' hero, amazing the public with his dashing dancing and
other heroic deeds. This miraculous rising from a foolish (sick)
to wise (healthy) state seemed to take such a regular form, that
one might have advised Yeltsins companions-in-arms to organ-
ize a little fake coup dtat each time Yeltsins health was
shaken, if only one could be sure with fake coups in Russia.

10
The short stature of Lenin has another mythological context and is
discussed elsewhere (see Abrahamian 1999a).
11
For example, during his first presidential trip to the Volga River ba-
sin, Yeltsin made such thoughtless statements concerning the native
Germans that the Minister of Foreign Affairs had to go to Germany and
make some unconvincing explanatory interpretations of his words.
12
For example, his drunken conducting of the military orchestra that
came to greet him during his visit to Germany.

The Royal Path

TEN

THE ROYAL PATH
The Return of the King

The Original Path of the King-God
King-and-Fool variations seem to be well represented in Russian
(and Soviet) culture only; in other former Soviet republics the
royal code seems to reveal itself without its foolish constituent.
For example, in the Central Asian republics, where the pre-
Soviet feudal system easily took the shape of the Soviet bureau-
cratic system
1
with communist high officials simply occupying
the vacant positions of the former feudal lords, the post-Soviet
transformations, despite their modern rhetoric, as a rule, brought
back the implicitly present authoritarian feudal social structure.
Here the former communist leaders gained their oriental-style
despotic power naturally, without passing through the painful
intermediary period of ideological re-evaluation and rebirth, as
Yeltsin had to move through from communism to capitalism.
The best example of such a transformation is Turkmenistans
president Niyazov, who smoothly passed from a communist
leader to a Near East-style sheikh-president Turkmen-Bashi
(Head-of-the-Turkmen).
A more complicated path was passed through by the president
of Azerbaijan Heidar Aliev, however, with the same authoritar-
ian result. In Georgia, whose history included kings, the royal
code revealed itself in other ways. The long history of dynastic
tradition ended here only in the early 19th century with the an-
nexation of Georgia by the Russian empire, so that the memory
of national kings was vivid enough to give the royal theme quite

1
Sometimes the Soviet system revealed a structure even more archaic
than the feudal see the Path back to Prehistory.

206
an explicit expression. The idea of restoring the last dynasty after
gaining independence was thus discussed here as a natural way
of regaining the national history interrupted by Russian and So-
viet rule. Two dynastic descendants were found in Spain and
Italy, but they were said to be not too enthusiastic about the idea
of taking the burden of modern Georgia on their royal shoulders.
Unlike the Russian case with its archaic royal symbols and insti-
tution of imposture, which strongly overshadowed the weak
movement for monarchy restoration,
2
Georgian kings were quite
real and legitimate. Although Georgia chose the way of a par-
liamentary rather than monarchic republic, a rumor claimed that
the late authoritarian president Gamsakhurdias wife neverthe-
less wanted him to become a king, while the president himself
was said to prefer the position of the catholicos, the chief priest
of the Georgian church.
3

The latter two trends, however anecdotic, reflect an archaic
and universal dual structure of supreme power, which combines
the mundane and religious spheres and which is thought to be
preceded by an even more archaic situation, when the King was
accepted as a God himself. A. Hocart (1927) traces this divine
figure back to the King as Sun. The divine King seems to divide
into two figures, one responsible for worldly matters (warrior-
king), the other preserving the divine Kings features in addition
to the functions of a chief priest. Some ethnographic cases seem
to illustrate such a division.
4
However, the worldly King also
never loses his divine features from the Pharaohs to President
Yeltsin.
5

Interestingly, the archaic King-Sun perception was recreated
during communist regimes, which is not a great surprise consid-

2
In regard to the modern monarchic movement, it is characteristic for
Russia that several people claimed to be the surviving grandson of czar
Nickolai II. Cf. the title Legends on escaped princes is a sign of a
Time of Troubles of the article by G. Bovt in Segodnia (1998, May
7, p.3).
3
I am indebted to Ghia Nodia for this information.
4
Cf. the division of power in the Tonga islands between the worldly
king gou and the sacred chief tui-tonga in the 19
th
century,.This
situation being preceded in medieval times by the absolute sovereignty
of the tui-tonga (Gifford 1929).
5
There is no power (rule), which is not from God said Russias
Patriarch Aleksii at Yeltsins inauguration on August 9, 1996.

The Royal Path 207
ering the already mentioned typological closeness of Soviet soci-
ety to archaic (primitive) society. Thus in the Soviet Union, Sta-
lin was consistently referred to with sun epithets
6
and in North
Korea the communist leader Kim Ir Sens image as the rising sun
(one of his allegories) was created by large numbers of perform-
ers during mass celebrations in stadiums.
As the divine Sun-God divides into the two bearers of
supreme power, the Soviet Sun-God tends to divide into two
figures representing respectively the ideological (communist)
and executive power. Although the mundane ruler was
actually a puppet figure,
7
the real power being focused in the
figure of the communist leader, this power distribution was
nevertheless a rather painful process, especially with Stalins
successors. In primitive society as well, one may guess, the
divine King was not too enthusiastic about sharing his power
with somebody else. Thus Khrushchev united the two powers in
his person (the mundane power being represented in this case by
the prime-ministers position) from 1958 1964. Brezhnev
combined his position as the secretary general of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR with the
position of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
from 1977 1982. Andropov did the same from 1983 1984,
Chernenko from 1984 1985. Gorbachev was very reluctant to
divide the twofold supreme power he inherited, but was forced to
choose one of the pair after the democratic changes he declared
through perestroika. He chose the position of the secretary
general, that is, he preferred to remain the chief priest of the
communist ideology, which played the role of religion in the
atheistic Soviet society.

The Path of the President-Catholicos
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the place of communist
religion was re-occupied by more traditional religions, supreme
power now being shared by presidents and chief priests of the
post-Soviet republics. In Armenia, which lost its last institution
of kingship six centuries ago, the great kings of Greater Armenia

6
See the Path of the Thunderer Gods for more details.
7
Cf. the absolute puppet figure of Mikhail Kalinin (1875 1946),
who as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR shared the supreme power with Stalin for many years.

208
mainly became an object of historical nostalgia and national
pride, unlike Georgia with its more recent and vivid royal tradi-
tions. That is the reason why the royal code was present in Ar-
menia more implicitly.
8
As a result of the long absence of the
institution of kingship, the supreme power was represented here
for many centuries by the church alone, namely by the catholi-
cos, the head of the Armenian Church. Since the 12
th
century, the
title of the catholicos changed from Kat'oghikos Hayots' Metsats'
catholicos of Greater Armenia to the present title Kat'oghikos
Amenayn Hayots' catholicos of all Armenians, well reflecting
the loss of statehood and the main starting point of the dispersion
of Armenians all over the world (Bozoyan 1997: 78, 81), which
we will discuss in more detail in the Path of Dispersion. Before
this the catholicos shared the supreme power over the Armenians
living in Armenia with the king.
This duality actually was introduced early in the fourth cen-
tury with the conversion of the Armenians to Christianity, which
gave the king a spiritual (ideological) counterpart in the figure of
the first catholicos, whose many pagan predecessors never cre-
ated such a dual unity with the king. This union of supreme
powers, at times happy, at times not so happy, with a respec-
tively bad king or a bad catholocos, but always constituting
a p a i r, was regained only in 1995 with the election of the late
Catholicos Garegin I. The previous Catholicos, Vazgen I, being a
Soviet era catholicos, as a matter of fact, was not a real spiritual
leader of the Armenians, as the last communist leader, Karen
Demirchian, was not a real king of Armenia. Of course, all the
First Men including communist leaders, as we will see a little
later, were inevitably attributed with certain royal features in one
way or another. But what I mean here is that the supreme power
wasnt concentrated in these two Soviet-era quasi-rulers and
hence couldnt be reflected in its archaic twofold manner.

8
In 1992 a certain person visited Armenia from Hungary claiming that
he was a descendant of the Bagratide dynasty (a famous dynasty in the
history of Armenia and Georgia) and heir apparent of the Armenian
throne. However, Armenians didnt show any appreciable enthusiasm
in gaining a legitimate king, and the heir in waiting was soon con-
signed to oblivion. That is, the situation here was the exact opposite of
the Georgian case, where the heirs and not the people were reluctant to
regain the institution of kingship.

The Royal Path 209
The election of Garegin I was very strongly supported by the
president of that time Levon Ter-Petrossian, with this support
being widely discussed during and after the electoral campaign.
One of the candidates, bishop Parkev of Artsakh, commented
that it was quite a normal strategy of a king, adding that all the
kings of Armenia always sought to influence the election of the
catholicos. The real reason of the presidents support became
obvious from the analysis of his interviews and speeches, where
he stressed several times that the existing split of the Armenian
church was something shameful for Armenians the president
meant the co-existence of the two catholicosi (and consequently
the two flocks), one in jmiatsin in Armenia, the other in Ante-
lias in Lebanon. The latter is a legacy of the last Armenian king-
dom of Cilicia of the 11-14
th
centuries, and after the Sovietiza-
tion of Armenia began to represent the political antagonism of
the Dashnak nationalist party of the diaspora toward the com-
munist catholicosi of Soviet Armenia. Garegin happened to be
the catholicos at Antelias and hence seemed to personify the split
itself at least in the eyes of the president. Following the presi-
dents logic, by electing Garegin catholicos at Echmiatzin, the
split should disappear and Armenians of Armenia and diaspora
should reunite. Such a strategy looks like a psychotherapeutic
trick, rather than a means for solidarity, since a new catholicos
was elected in Antelias and the split became even more severe as
a result of the presidents active anti-Dashnak policy.
However, for our discussion, the most interesting point in the
presidents strong desire to have Garegin as catholicos is its rela-
tion to the royal code. Garegin, by becoming catholicos of a l l
Armenians not only by his official title, but also as a result of
liquidating the split between the two parts of the population,
should automatically make the president himself the president
(= king) over a l l the Armenians spread throughout the world.
Thus the (perhaps) unconscious desire of the president to rule
over the entire Armenian nation implicitly took the ancient two-
fold king / priest form. Explicitly this twofold supreme power
was expressed by the friendly hug and kiss on the cheek the
president gave the newly-elected catholicos, something allowed
among e q u a l s, while a president was expected to kiss a ca-
tholicos only on the hand. Knowing well the royal etiquette,
Levon Ter-Petrossian later, during the official greeting cere-
mony, kissed the catholicos on his right hand, correcting his

210
emotional slip of the kiss, and this ritually correct act (and not
the semiotically important, but politically incorrect slip) was
repeated many times on TV. The present President Robert Ko-
charian who followed Levon Ter-Petrossian on the throne, also
hugged and kissed the catholicos as an equal, even on both
cheeks this time it was Catholicos Garegin I who was con-
gratulating the newly-elected president during his inauguration.
However, this time we dont have any semiotic mark of the an-
cient twofold supreme power, as in the case with his predecessor.
Levon Ter-Petrossian, a historian-philologist, realized his slip
in etiquette and immediately corrected it that is how it became
a meaningful sign for our analysis while Robert Kocharian, a
former communist functionary with a technical background,
simply didnt know and didnt need to follow the royal eti-
quette.
9

This does not mean that the new president is not involved in
the royal code at all: the electoral campaign of 1998, for exam-
ple, was obviously accompanied by various royal themes. The
favorite story Robert Kocharian used to tell his potential elector-
ate was an ambiguous anecdote about a k i n g who was cured
of constipation by laughing heartily at the doctor who had pre-
scribed an enema to cure him. In response, the king turns the
table on the doctor by ordering this same treatment for the doctor
himself in order to insure its effectiveness.
Actually Robert Kocharian represented another characteristic
of the royal code during the campaign the idea of a king as an
outsider. We already know (from the Path of Ancestors and the
Path of Komitas) that this idea is a particular case of a more broad
idea of the First Man as another. In this case, the idea was pre-
sented in its negative aspect, expressing a negative attitude toward
a candidate to the Armenian throne who did not originate from
Armenia Robert Kocharian came from Gharabagh. This attitude
was presented in a wide range of versions: from the figure of a
king of a neighboring kingdom striving to conquer our king-
dom
10
to a half-Armenian
11
and non-Armenian
12
to even an extra-

9
On the political aspect of the supreme (presidential) power in post-
communist Armenia, see Astourian 2000-2001.
10
A popular theme in jokes, also a leitmotif in his rivals speeches.
11
A rumor about his alleged Azerbaijani father, which originated as a
result of the omission of his middle name in the electoral booklet. This

The Royal Path 211
terrestrial figure
13
of the alien candidate. Interestingly, the his-
torical fact of the alienness of ancient Armenian royal dynasties
(Arshakids of Persian and Bagratides of Jewish origin), as we
know from the Path of Ancestors, was never a problem in the his-
tory of Armenian culture.
As for Levon Ter-Petrossian, people in rural regions were ex-
plicitly treating the president as royalty even while disliking him.
For example, during the 1996 unpopular presidential electoral
campaign, an elderly peasant appealed to the president with the
words: Good health to the king, a tractor for our farm. Ter-
Petrossians move to create a medieval-type administrative struc-
ture in Armenia by replacing 37 center-dependent regions with
11 relatively independent provinces could also be interpreted in
terms of the royal code. By recreating this feudal structure, the
president was inevitably approaching the position of a king who
had to lose his power under the conditions of the decentralized
structure of his kingdom. Actually this was the model of his
dethroning by the militant feudal prince of the most inde-
pendent province the newly regained Gharabagh.
The former communist leader of Armenia, Karen
Demirchian, who was the principal opponent of Robert Ko-
charian during the 1998 presidential campaign, was character-
ized as having much more obvious royal features, than the future
president was. This was not a great surprise, since he was
greeted by the rural population as the king, a symbol of the lost
good days, who miraculously returned to his people after a ten
year absence.
14
The official mass media, which was openly sup-
porting Robert Kocharian during the campaign, liked to speak
ironically of the peasants sacrificing sheep at Demirchians feet
and kissing the edges of his coat. These acts of adoration were
justly commented on in the press as a nostalgia of the starving
people for the prosperous times of communist rule, and not as
the peoples support for the old ideas of communism. However,

rumor was so widely discussed that Kocharian was forced to declare his
fathers Armenian name on a TV talk show.
12
A Turk (ethnonym given by Armenians both to ethnic Turks and
Azerbaijanis) a label used for disliked political figures.
13
A single definition I wrote down during the campaign.
14
The communist czar was dethroned in 1988 as a result of stormy
rallies to be discussed in the Path of Rebellion and Festival.

212
at the same time these acts were obviously related to the worship
of a king. Thus, according to one informant, a middle-aged peas-
ant, sheep were also slaughtered in honor of Robert Kocharian,
but only as an act of respect toward a high-ranking guest (by that
time the future president occupied the position of Armenias
prime-minister) and also following the utilitarian aim of provid-
ing meat for the guests entertainment. The logic of slaughtering
sheep during Demirchians visits was quite different. The king
was passing by your house, said an informant, and how could
you lose the opportunity of sacrificing a sheep at the threshold to
invite prosperity into the house.
15
The king returned to power
in 1999 Demirchian was elected the speaker of the new par-
liament. However, this much anticipated return lasted only a
short time Karen Demirchian was assassinated during the ter-
rorist attack at the Armenian Parliament on November 27,
1999.
16

The last manifestation of the royal code in Armenia took
place during the presidential electoral campaign of 2003. The
assassinated king returned in the image of his son, the presiden-
tial candidate who not only fit the mythological archetype of a
prince coming to right and revenge his father, but also resembled
the adored king in his appearance, manners and especially his
voice. One can suspect that although he headed the opposition,
his great popularity was a result of this resemblance and in-
volvement into a mythological scheme rather than the result of
political rhetoric. So that Armenia in principle could have (ac-
cording to the opposition, actually had) a president elected
mainly as a king.

The Forking Path of the Phallic King
One might have the impression that the royal code (path) mani-
fests itself only in the primitive Soviet and post-Soviet socie-
ties. However, it may reveal itself even in the most westernized
and civilized countries. I dont mean the explicit institutions of

15
I am grateful to anthropologist Hr'ip'sime Pikich'ian for this informa-
tion.
16
In a small book published after his death, which was a compilation of
his contemporaries appraisals of his personality, Karen Demirchian is
explicitly compared with great Armenian kings five times see
Demirchyan 2000: 42, 46, 74, 153, 174.

The Royal Path 213
kingship in some European countries, which are a good means of
channeling royal sentiments and trends, if there are such in a so-
ciety. A recent case of a modern civil society, where royal trends
were manifested in a disguised form, is, paradoxically, modern
American society, even though Americans always look at
funny old Europe with its toy royal institutions with a some-
what condescending attitude.
The royal code suddenly revealed itself here during the recent
scandal around the sexual life of President Clinton. Sexual scan-
dals around high-rank persons are an old tradition in the USA, as
elsewhere. However, it was the first time when the presidents
penis, rather than his sexual behavior, was pan-nationally dis-
cussed. One can assert this from the context of the wide and
over-saturated treatment of this topic by the mass media. Inter-
estingly, it was the freedom of speech, that is, one of the greatest
gains of democracy and one of the pillars of civil society, that
gave Americans an opportunity and a right to discuss in detail
one of the most archaic and greatest taboos the First Mans
phallus.
17
Thus people learned of its size from the words of the
presidents former sweetheart Jennifer Flowers, on its alleged
deformations from the testimonies of Paula Jones, the woman
who accused the president of sexual harassment, or on its sexual
potency from the same Paula Jones report about the position
of the presidents penis, when he allegedly pulled down his pants
in order to invite her for oral sex.
This last point is not just a scabrous detail for scandal-seeking
readers: the sexual potency of the First Man was always the
number one question in archaic societies, it was the guarantee of
the fertility of the soil. Independent counsel Kenneth Starrs re-
port with its detailed description and analysis of President Clin-
tons many orgasms, euphemistically called sexual encounters,
with Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern, seemed
to reassure the American people of the sexual potency of their
President. One may suppose that this was one of the implicit rea-
sons why the majority of Americans didnt disapprove of him,

17
Here I use a more general idea of anthropologist Igor Krupnik (per-
sonal communication) on the mass medias freedom of speech as a le-
gal permit for the average American to openly discuss questions, es-
pecially sexual ones, which they would hardly do in other circum-
stances.

214
despite the fact of his lying under oath, when he denied his inti-
mate relations with Monica Lewinsky. In less civilized Russia
the sexual behavior of the American president was discussed
quite explicitly, people were wishing their own First Man, the
quickly decrepit growing President Yeltsin, would manifest even
a small part of such sexual activity. There are also other circum-
stances and structural similarities (which I plan to discuss else-
where) that allow one to suppose that this whole farce-like scan-
dal was but an excuse to approach the true aim the worship
of the kingly phallus. In this sense modern American society
stands not too far from an ancient society with its explicit and
often dramatic stories, like the story of Osiris, about the kingly
and/or divine phallus.
Interestingly, this implicit archaic phallic worship is accom-
panied in America with a no less archaic, but this time explicit
demand for the First Man to follow the primordial model of the
family and sexual behavior of the great ancestors. And since
the Puritan family of the first settlers was the most ancient (and
hence sacred) model of the family in the relatively young history
of the United States, the president was forced to follow this
mythological model, while modern American society in general
is openly and actively neglecting this puritanical ideal.
As we can see, the royal code may reveal itself in the most
unexpected situations and in the most bizarre forms. Society may
claim its highest communist or capitalist degree of development,
it might be authoritarian or democratic, but the king, the First
Man is also still there. He appears in various disguises: that of a
tyrannical Father, his foolish Son or even an ancient phallic hero,
although his opponents and worshippers are scarcely aware of it.

The Path of Rebellion and Festival

ELEVEN

THE PATH OF REBELLION
AND FESTIVAL
The Gharabagh Rallies in Anthropological
Perspective

The Many Hidden Paths of the Political Festival
We have already mentioned the stormy rallies of 1988 on many
occasions and in various contexts. Now we will discuss them as
a phenomenon by itself. It has to be said from the beginning that
such events involving the masses usually dont pass without af-
fecting a nations identity. We will discuss the changes from the
stereotype of a victim to that of the extremist, then back to vic-
tim and again toward militant aggressor a little later, in the
Path of Violence. But the changes in identity are not only fo-
cused on timidity and militancy. Since the rallies, as I will try to
show, affected practically all the structural units of the society,
one may expect them to affect national identity as well, which is
a product of these social structures.
Although many people in Yerevan today, after the devalua-
tion of the ideas of democracy in general (which is also the case
in Russia) and the images of the original spontaneous democrats
in particular (the latter, perhaps, serving a cause for the former),
would say that they were skeptical from the very first days of the
rallies and attended meetings in the Theater square just for the
sake of curiosity, this is not a true picture of the turbulent year of
1988, especially of the last ten days of February 1988, when the
Armenians stepped onto the Path of Rebellion and Festival.
Some would say that those days were something special and that
we, the Armenians, have lost those precious moments of solidar-
ity, while others would add that the people were deceived by the

218
then adored leaders, who later managed to draw Armenia into
such a miserable state. I will not discuss the pros and cons of
these opinions here,
1
but will say that their existence in this form
already proves the main thesis of this Path that structurally and
typologically the rallies were a kind of a f e s t i v a l.
Even the attitude toward regaining Mountainous Gharabagh
as a result of these rallies might be re-evaluated by some people
in Armenia, or, which is a more typical situation, the Gharabagh
issue might be discussed in only one of the many perspectives of
the rallies, that of an Armenian Reconquista and fedayi ideals
not to mention the redistribution of roles in this regaining, es-
pecially when the heroes of those days, the original ones and
those who appeared later on the stage, the already dead and those
who survived, are being actively intermixed in the present-day
process of constructing the contemporary history of Armenia.
More than one and a half decades have passed since the
stormy upheavals in Gharabagh and Armenia. Now, when the
Soviet state, of which Gharabagh and Armenia were constitu-
ents, does not exist any more, the experts in post-Soviet studies
(who failed to foresee the collapse of the USSR while being so-
vietologists), usually consider the rallies in Armenia of 1988 just
one of a series of upheavals that took place all over the USSR
during the last period of its existence. Very few analysts today
see the unique situation that the Armenian rallies of the late
1980s had presented for the possible fate of Armenia and the
Soviet Union in general.
2
Scholars and politicians now seem to

1
I am describing different, mainly anthropological aspects of the rallies
in my unpublished book People in the Square, the situation following
the rallies in the chapter Rebels after Rebellion. This work is actually
a continuation of my earlier book on archaic festivals (Abramian 1983),
the 1988 rallies opening new perspectives for the general theory of fes-
tivals (see Abrahamian and Shagoyan 2002 for some preliminary re-
sults).
2
There were some prognosticating analyses already at the beginning of
the upheavals, as a rule, in the form of letters directed to the wise re-
former, which were never considered as serious by policy-makers at
least judging from the course of events. For example, a deep analysis of
the initial state of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which turned out
to be really prophetic, was presented by a group of researchers (signed
by G. Mirskii) of the Institute of World Economics and International
Relations already on March 19, 1988, to their former colleague and at

The Path of Rebellion and Festival 219
adopt a kind of a fatalistic approach to the events, which they
failed to prognosticate in due time. They say that the result
would have been the same whatever event or upheaval would
have taken place at that time. I am not going to assert here that
the history of post-Soviet space would have been quite different,
if only some concrete event would or would not have happened.
But I think that historians and political scientists should analyze
what kinds of possibilities were hidden in the events that were a
p r e c e d e n t for Soviet history. The Gharabagh movement was
actually such a precedent.
The movement was a result of the democratization, glasnost,
perestroika triad declared by Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. We
already know from the Path of Tyrants and Fools that this was
not a set of wise economic and social reforms, but the hectic
deeds of a political figure revealing many typological similarities
with the mythological fool. Actually it was a declaration of a
festival in all spheres of Soviet life including economics. And its
initiator was taken aback when instead of reasonable and moder-
ate reforms in the sphere of economics he got a bunch of bloody
conflicts on national and ethnic grounds, whether they were
long-hidden or newly-created. We will discuss a little later, in
the Path of Violence, how he chose ethnic violence in a situa-
tion when it was still possible to stem it.
The first mass meetings of February 1988 in Yerevan were in
a sense a ball of yarn in which all the future trends, both realized
and unrealized, were already present. Each thread waited to be
pulled out of this ball depending on the conditions of the mo-
ment. Here one could find nationalism in its various grades and
forms, the ecological movement, shadow economics, the crimi-
nal world, communist and anti-communist ideologies, embryos
of economic and military forms of struggle, and civil and au-
thoritarian societies. I tried to show elsewhere (see Abrahamian
2001b), how each of these threads managed or failed to be pulled
out or how it was cut or hopelessly knotted in the process of be-
ing withdrawn. Such analysis is actually a synergetic approach to
the Yerevan rallies, a kind of a chaosological study of the peo-

that time a top party figure A.Ya. Yakovlev, who was known as the
architect or rather intellectual supervisor of Gorbachevs pere-
stroika. Such letters were circulating during the first, epistemological
phase of the conflict (cf. Dabaghyan 2001).

220
ple in the square (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Vasil'kova
1999), which is the topic of another study I mentioned in Foot-
note no.1. Here I will discuss only two threads, representing
respectively the national and the social poles of the Gharabagh
movement.
The main thread of the ball or, one may say, the main color of
the yarn was the Gharabagh issue, which was added to each
thread in one proportion or another. Actually, it was the Ghara-
bagh issue that initiated the whole process. It has to be noted that
the Gharabagh movement was in fact presented by two major
streams or wings, one reflecting the movement in Gharabagh, the
other in Armenia. During the first stage of the movement,
which was from February to May 1988, both streams shared
many common features and looked like one general movement.
However, even beginning with the first stormy demonstrations in
February, these two streams showed fundamental differences,
which were preserved up to recent times, until the former Presi-
dent of the Mountainous Gharabagh Republic, Robert Ko-
charian, became the President of Armenia. But political scientists
usually consider the Gharabagh movement as a single phenome-
non, and politicians even mistake the many problems Armenias
government often had with the Gharabagh leaders for a kind of
conspiracy of diplomatic maneuvering rather than being the re-
sult of this essential difference.
3

This difference was based on the different models of societies
and social struggle in Gharabagh and Armenia. In Gharabagh,
the movement resembled the national-liberation struggle the
Armenians of Gharabagh had been leading against Turkic Mus-
lim invaders since late medieval times and typologically re-
flected a feudal model of the society, as we know already from
the Forking Path Toward the Feudal Future. Gorbachevs policy
of democratization, glasnost and perestroika was actually used
in Gharabagh as an excuse for a national-liberation struggle.
While in Armenia, on the contrary, the Gharabagh issue was
used as a base for further social changes to achieve the democra-
tization, glasnost and perestroika declared by Gorbachev. The

3
The former president of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrossian noted this in
his September 1997 interview (Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 1997, Sep-
tember 27), not suspecting at that time that this difference might even
bring his political career to its end in few months.

movement here considered the communist and Soviet leaders as
conservative representatives of the old regime and of Moscows
pro-Azerbaijani policy. One can say, that Armenias wing of the
movement was first off fighting against local feudal lords,
while the Gharabagh wing was headed by just such lords.
The Gharabaghian nationalist model transformed into a social
one in Yerevan in May 1988, and the two representatives of the
Gharabaghian wing, Igor Muradyan and Gagik Safaryan, who
were not surprisingly of Gharabaghian descent, were expelled
from the Yerevan based Gharabagh Committee,
4
revealing in a
sense the non-Gharabaghian nature of the Gharabagh move-
ment in Armenia. Of course, it remained a Gharabagh move-
ment and the Gharabagh issue was being used constantly,
5
rang-
ing from the main to secondary to background themes in the po-
litical agenda of the movement depending on the current situa-
tion. That is, the structure and aims of the Gharabagh movement
in Armenia were constantly changing, while in Gharabagh, the
aforementioned feudal model in fact never changed. I mean the
model only, since the situation there underwent dramatic trans-
formations from peaceful demonstrations to bloody war to a not
recognized yet de facto independence. The feudal authoritarian
structure was even hardened here as a result of the war, which,
naturally, has never been a favorable time for democracy. The
only democracy in this situation, if any, could be the so-called
war democracy
6
.
As a rule, the leading group can reveal the hidden structure of
the society and of the political movement this group is heading.

4
The cause was Igor Muradyans attempt to organize a meeting in sup-
port of Karen Demirchian, the communist leader of Armenia, whose
dismissal was being planned by the Kremlin at that time.
5
A dramatic semiotic sign of the impossibility of completely getting rid
of the Gharabagh issue together with the Gharabaghian representatives
in the Gharabagh Committee was the fact that Igor Muradyan was
arrested and later released from jail together with the members of the
Committee. This also shows that Moscow never saw a difference be-
tween the Gharabagh and Armenia wings of the movement.
6
In the Marxist theory of social evolution this term designates the transi-
tional state from a society without classes to an early class society, this
transitional state being marked by a primitive democracy within the mili-
tary units used by the new men of high rank in their fight for power. Thus
we have further evidence for our Path back To Prehistory.

222
It can even forecast some future social changes the society is
going to face. Thus in Gharabagh, the banned Kr'unk
7
Com-
mittee was substituted by the Directors Council, whose name
alone shows that we have here a society run by directors. No
wonder that when the Kremlin decided to behead the dangerous
nationalist movement in Gharabagh, it arrested Arkadii Manu-
charov, the leader of these two successive organizations, by
charging him with corruption a typical crime for any director
in the Soviet economic system and hierarchy, which, in its turn,
strangely provided a good base for the Soviet feudal system
discussed in the Path back To Prehistory. Even the aforemen-
tioned fact that Robert Kocharian, the present-day President of
Armenia and former President of the Mountainous Gharabagh
Republic, had some Soviet Gharabaghian feudal background,
could be (and proved to be) a sign in such a semiotic forecast,
foretelling the possible return of Armenias society to some feu-
dal values it tried to overcome at the beginning of the Gharabagh
movement.
The structure of the Gharabagh Committee was also very
informative in this respect. In contrast to the Gharabaghian lead-
ers, the Yerevan leaders were, one can say, non-aristocratic intel-
lectuals opposed to the communist regime. Originally there were
only two communists among its eleven members and even they
left the party one soon being expelled from its ranks and the
other resigning of his own will. Since the members of the Ghara-
bagh Committee had no ties whatsoever to the practical world,
they were accused of longing for power. As in the Russian
October Revolution it was the Jews, who played a large role
(evidently, as a result of their being less connected with the
land), in the Gharabagh movement it was the mathematicians
and physicists who took a more active part, perhaps, also as the
ones free of ties to the earthly soil. Indeed, in the last makeup
of the Gharabagh Committee, five of the eleven members repre-
sented these abstract professions, which gave the Polish journal-
ist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski (1991) grounds to character-
ize the events in Armenia as a revolution of the mathemati-
cians.
Although in 1988 these trends were not explicit yet, each

7
Crane in Armenian, a traditional symbol of homesickness, here the
homesickness for the native-land of Armenia in foreign Azerbaijan.

member strangely represented one or another future trend in the
development of Armenian society, from the fedayi struggle
(Samson Ghazarian) and market economy (Hambardzum Gal-
stian) to corruption and criminal structures (Vano Siradeghian).
The future president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, in a
sense represented the constitutional way of development of the
republic one can say this on the basis of the content analysis of
his speeches during the meetings of 1988-90. Later, heading the
Parliament of the Armenian SSR, he insisted that Armenias se-
cession from the USSR be via the constitutional path. Today,
when all the former Soviet republics have acquired independence
some of them as a result of a long and dramatic fight, others as
a sudden gift from the blue political analysts usually neglect
this circumstance, perhaps, considering it an unimportant fact
after the collapse of the USSR. But I consider it to be a very im-
portant aspect of the Armenian revolution, if we want to learn
not just of the present and not too encouraging situation in Ar-
menia, but of the inner logic of the movement and, perhaps, of
its lost or not realized potential, which might reveal some essen-
tial aspects of Armenian national identity and history as well.
The constitutional path chosen by Armenias leader and the Ar-
menian people
8
was in fact a continuation of the constitutional
non-violent movement in Armenia of the late 1980s, which fas-
cinated Russian democrats (including academician Andrei Sa-
kharov) just because this feature was considered to be a prece-
dent in the violent and always anti-constitutional history of the
USSR. However, this constitutional secession was never realized
due to the failed coup dtat of August 1991 in Moscow, after
which Yeltsin artificially accelerated the end of the USSR, being

8
According to the last version of the constitution of the Soviet Union, a
constituent Soviet republic could secede, if a referendum on secession
voted yes (as the populace of Armenia did in 1990) and a second vote
confirmed the same decision of the populace five years later, with these
years supposedly being used to organize all the details in relation to the
future divorce. There was another and less popular project at that
time of achieving immediate independence via a non-constitutional
secession advocated by Paruyr Hayrikian, the former dissident and the
leader of the Self-Determination Party. Such ideas of achieving imme-
diate independence can be compared with the here and now aspect of
many archaic rituals.

224
too eager to legitimize his symbolic image as a Russian king dis-
cussed in the Path of Tyrants and Fools. By the way, this imme-
diate achievement of independence made many Armenians doubt
the constitutional path in general, which the movement and espe-
cially Levon Ter-Petrossian were advocating. In any case, the
latters faith in the constitutional way of development was so
great, that he was even eager to have his authoritarian presiden-
tial power fixed in the new constitution of Armenia and ap-
proved by a referendum in 1995, which foreign monitors mildly
classified as free but not fair.
9

The second component of the mingled ball of yarn was the
civil society albeit a very unusual and virtual one, which was
born and shaped step by step before my eyes, right in the streets
and squares of Yerevan (see Abrahamian 2001b). Now we will
follow the next Path, which will discuss the anthropological back-
ground of the festive square, since this strange civil society was of
festive origin and can be understood only in the festival context of
the political events marking the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The Path of the Carnival Civil Society
In 1983, I published a book, where I attempted to reconstruct the
most archaic festival the Ur-festival of humankind, using
mainly Australian Aboriginal material (see Abramian 1983). In
February 1988, it was as though I suddenly found myself in the
thick of that very same proto-festival, which I once attempted to
reconstruct. But this feeling came only on the third day of the
rallies. During the first couple of days, these meetings had a
more political coloring and would hardly attract a social anthro-
pologists attention in the aforementioned perspective, even
though the roots of the movement lay in an ethnic sphere.
As we learned in the previous Path, the Gharabagh movement
had two wings, those of Gharabagh and of Armenia (Yerevan),
and several phases. The movement in Yerevan began on Febru-
ary 19, 1988, when several thousand people gathered in the
Theater Square to support the Armenians of Gharabagh who had
come out in a different square, in Step'anakert, with the demand

9
This faith in a constitution, that is, in the written word, might be a
reflection of the former presidents secular profession textology of
Syriac written sources. That is, we seem to have further evidence in the
symbolic correlations discussed in the Path of Language.

to be united to Armenia. We shall not inquire here how the
movement itself began or which historical and political events
preceded it.
10
In this Path, we are more interested in how the
thread of a civil society was pulled from the mingled yarn of
the festive chaos in the square.
The first demonstrations were mainly composed of students
and representatives of the intelligentsia, but very soon the situa-
tion changed abruptly and the meetings involved all social
groups. On February 22, the initial political and elite manifes-
tations turned into a mass rally. In the evening, when approxi-
mately half a million people gathered before the building of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia, de-
manding the calling of an extraordinary session of the Supreme
Soviet (in order to consider the petition of the Gharabaghians), a
large number of workers had already joined the procession. From
the 25
th
to the 27
th
, people from the countryside arrived in the
city and joined the demonstrations, giving a universal character
to the meetings. Let me repeat that here we shall not look into
which specific events resulted in the demonstrations for national-

10
We have already discussed the historical background, or rather the
background created by historians, of the Gharabagh issue in the Path of
Naming. There is already a huge literature on the Gharabagh issue and
movement, from historical works and journalist insights to political
analyses, often one-sided and controversial, the critical analysis of
which would require a special chapter. There is also a huge body of
documents, in the form of manuscripts, samizdat (from Russian, mean-
ing self-published, that is non-officially printed copies) or already
published articles and books (see, e.g., The Karabagh File 1988). From
the anthropological perspective, the Gharabagh movement was exam-
ined in my still unpublished manuscript, mentioned in Footnote no.1 of
the previous Path, as well as in another yet unpublished manuscript, by
my American colleague Nora Dudwick, who, like me, made her field
study of the Yerevan rallies from the first days, which she summarized
in her Ph.D. thesis (Dudwick 1994) and a series of articles. Different
anthropological aspects of the movement were also examined by other
authors see, e.g., the analysis of posters and banners of the movement
in Platz 1996: ch. 3; Marutyan 1999; 2000; 2003; Marutyan and Abra-
hamian 1997. Perhaps, the best monographic description and analysis
of the Gharabagh movement is the book by Mark Malkasian (1996) a
rare example of an accurate description and interpretation of events,
although they were examined not on the basis of stationary field re-
search.

226
political demands turning into mass meetings, which in turn led
to an unprecedented outburst of national self-consciousness.
11

What is important to us is that, in the final analysis, a special
situation was created, during which the people were joined in a
kind of united body, much like that of the medieval European
carnival keenly characterized in a famous study of Mikhail Ba-
khtin (1968). This immense body, which probably amounted to a
million people at the peak of the demonstrations (and this is in a
city with a population of a million), was not created mechani-
cally. It had a united spirit, a common thought and finally a
common sense of national self-consciousness. According to the
statements of many participants, they had a wonderful feeling of
being present everywhere, in every place occupied by that huge
body of people.
I followed Bakhtins analysis of the carnival
12
when recon-
structing the proto-festival (Ur-festival) at the dawn of human-
kind (see Abramian 1983) and in analyzing its recent counterpart
at a Yerevan square (see Abrahamian 1990a-d; 1993). One prin-
cipal trait of the archaic festival is the inversion, blurring and in
general, the elimination of the main structural oppositions of so-
ciety. During the medieval European carnival, the highest and
the lowest, the king and the jester would exchange places and
social positions. And during a primitive festival in societies with
dual organization, the two halves would change places together
with a set of oppositions such as right/left, high/low and mascu-
line/feminine. These inversions weaken the oppositions and even

11
Interestingly, at times the communist authorities in Moscow were the
ones provoking the increase in the number of the participants. Thus, in
response to their declaration on a central TV program that only a
group of people (gruppa liudei) had gone out to the streets of Yerevan
for demonstrations, the offended people went out into the streets in
much greater numbers the next day. A banner in Russian read, People
(narod) is not a group! illustrating well their feelings the word narod
means people in the sense of a nation, while gruppa liudei designates
a group of individuals.
12
Bakhtins famous work on Rabelais and the European carnival cul-
ture, anticipating the modern Western interest in carnival reversals (see,
e.g. Babcock 1978), was created as early as 1940, but was published for
the first time only in 1965 (Bakhtin 1965; see Bakkhtin 1968 for Engl.
transl.).

result in their disappearance during a chaotic festival.
13
In accordance with this principle, during our festival in the
Theater Square important polarizations in Yerevan society dis-
appeared, in particular the divisions between townsman/villager,
man/woman, adult/youth, and Armenian language/Russian lan-
guage. The opposition of town and village is one of the most im-
portant for Yerevan, because its existence is the result of a very
strong urbanization process (see, e.g. Naselenie Yerevana 1986).
On those February days, villagers were greeted by local citizens
with great enthusiasm; each new column of villagers entering the
square breathed fresh energy into the huge body of people. One
evening, after it was proposed during the meeting that lodging
for the night be provided to villagers who came from remote dis-
tricts, a large group of local citizens who had gathered on the
spot (among whom was the author) invited the villagers by
chanting: You are welcome, dear guests! Although the number
of unsheltered guests was extremely small apparently, those
arriving from the districts found their relatives and former fellow
villagers in the infrastructure of the city. This, by the way, was a
unique experiment, that reveals the social structure of the city
without the use of complex and dubious sociological opinion
polls. It is noteworthy that most of those who desired to have
guests from the countryside were typical long-term city-dwellers.
The second opposition (men/women) disappeared due to the fact
that any young man could freely address any woman, but before
the events, this could have been regarded as a violation of ethical
norms. For instance, a small demonstration of young women was
given heart by a youth: Girls, dont be afraid! he cried to them,
referring to the soldiers who had appeared near the women.
Normally, a young man would not have tried to talk to them, or
he would do so with only a certain asocial aim in mind. A joke
from the same year underlines these essential changes in the

13
It has to be noted that the binary oppositions I use here are not just
self-sufficient structuralist constructs, but divisions consistently accen-
tuated during festivals (both traditional and political) and well per-
ceived by their participants. That is why they can serve as tangible and
convenient indicators for festive transformations. In this sense, a too
eager post-structuralist criticism of binarism in relation to festival stud-
ies (cf. Sokolovski 2002) could deprive the festival of its vital charac-
teristics and reality.

228
men/women opposition. A mother reprimands her son for not
marrying. She says: Cant you find a good girl to marry? The
son replies: Where can I find one? Dont you know that by now
we are all brothers and sisters? One may note that during a fes-
tival in Central Australia, the Warramunga men in a similar way
violated the traditional norms regarding the accepted ways of
addressing women (Spencer and Gillen 1904: 378-80; Abramian
1983: 40).
We already described the complete disappearance of the po-
larization of bilingualism in the Path of Language, in the short
path that forked from it in the direction of the present Path of
Rebellion and Festival.
Even such a structurally less important opposition as
healthy/disabled was done away with. One could see the blind
and the deaf coming to the square in groups together with their
interpreters. On one occasion a handicapped man, who had lost
both of his legs, arrived from a remote district in a primitive cart
(a copy of the medieval predecessor of the modern wheelchair)
and asked to make a speech. And out of respect for him the peo-
ple in the square squatted to be on the same level with him. It
was as though they had got rid of their legs to dissolve the oppo-
sition between them.
Even secondary oppositions of a modern city, for example, that
of drivers/pedestrians suddenly lost its usual marked tension.
14
In
short, a specific chaotic festival structure was created: the orderly
cosmos of everyday life turned into a kind of festive chaos.
The connection of the events in the Theater Square with the
archaic proto-festival is not limited to these structural similari-
ties. There should exist a number of parallel codes to prove the
typological comparison we are asserting (see Abrahamian 1993).

14
During the Moscow political festival of 1991, this opposition was
also temporarily smoothed (see Borodatova and Abrahamian 1992: 51-
52). Unlike the United States and other Western countries, this opposi-
tion is still quite tangible in the post-Soviet space including Armenia,
demonstrating a kind of competition for the streets, which reflects the
still existing antagonism between the rich drivers (car-owners) and
poor pedestrians (who are doomed to go on foot). If one should see
someone on an American street standing and waiting for the cars to
pass, in order to cross a street without stoplights, one would conclude
that this person is definitely from the former Soviet Union.

One of these codes is the etymological one. The Armenian word
for glasnost is hrapararakaynut'yun, derived from hraparak
meaning a square. And, perhaps, it is not by chance that the
people performed the archaic festival in the s q u a r e, and not
somewhere else. Let us remember that a square in the center of a
town has always been the place for mass festivals. The fact that
the people refused to transfer their meetings to the outskirts of
Yerevan, as the authorities had suggested, says something about
the centripetal force reflected in the planning of many cities of
the world. Led by this principle, Alexander T'amanian, the archi-
tect of the general layout of Yerevan, designated a square in the
center of the city. Evidently, it was not by chance that the peo-
ples festival took place just where, according to an earlier pro-
posal, the architect intended to erect the House of the People,
where the people-onlookers were to watch the festival demon-
strations of the people-performers. In other words, according
to T'amanian, the opposition performers/spectators was to disap-
pear at this very place, where it eventually disappeared during
the days of our festival. This is also one of the main features of
the archaic festival.
The connection between the Armenian words hraparak
(square) and hrapurakaynut'un (glasnost) is so close that one
could look at the first and so judge the second. Thus one could
find out much about glasnost in the country simply by watching
the events in the Theater Square. A certain spatial code, then, a
specific language of description, accompanied the political one.
Strangely enough, the uneven progress of glasnost seemed to
really be reflected in the events in the square, as I attempted to
show elsewhere (Abrahamian 1990b: 74-75; 1993: 107).
The etymological code provides a further test of our compari-
son. Thus the stem glas also shows the festive character of the
political events referred to by the Russian word glasnost. Glas is
the Old Slavonic for voice; this voice imbedded in the word
glasnost is like the sound component of the word in the Rus-
sian expression freedom of word, the equivalent of the English
freedom of speech, which Gorbachevs concept of glasnost-
openness attempted to express in its own carnival manner. So
that the word, which always waits for a reply, being voiced by
the glas component, now seems to imply a listener more persis-
tently. Voice-glas in the square-hraparak was already not a
voice in the wilderness, it demanded a dialogue, became a

230
question which presupposed an answer. In this sense the Russian
(and Armenian) freedom of word was not the democratic
ideal of Hyde Park style unanswered freedom of speech. As I
already mentioned, according to the Armenian variant of the
word, the response was expected to be heard in the square. And
our festival came to support such a prognosis; the participants
of the meetings and processions created a number of word games
having ritual question-and-answer characteristics. For example, a
leader of the demonstration would shout out: Whose is Ghara-
bagh? to which the crowd would respond in chorus: Ours.
This was repeated three times (with various endings constructed
as puns). Sometimes these question-and-answer repetitions were
used to conclude some other newly-created ritual. It wasnt by
chance that the song that turned out to be the most popular dur-
ing those days was an old song about fedayis (banned in Soviet
times), Who are they? a song with a typical question-and-
answer structure. In this song, every question of the refrain was
answered by a many-thousand Hey! The demonstrations also
acquired the question-and-answer construction, though their aim,
as the word suggests, is to d e mo n s t r a t e something. But the
Yerevan demonstrations very often demanded an immediate an-
swer to their demands and/or questions, thus giving them a direct
dialogic trend, in the Bakhtinian sense. Curiously enough, the
authorities, against whom the demonstrations were directed,
sometimes became involved in the dialogue by giving an answer,
thereby reinforcing the ancient question-and-answer archetype.
And, what is important for our comparison, the question-and-
answer form is characteristic of the most ancient rituals, espe-
cially those dealing with a borderline situation (e.g. the New
Year ritual), when the world fallen into Chaos is to gain a new
Cosmos.
Thus both the Russian glasnost and its Armenian variant
meaning a square, each in its own way shows a deep connec-
tion between the phenomenon denoted and the festival. The se-
mantic code adds yet another festive coloring to the situation
discussed. The word democratization, a twin concept to glas-
nost, implies a process, a movement of essential mass character.
Democratization is often opposed to the concept of democracy
(in the way that glasnost is opposed to the liberty of the
word/speech), also without noticing the archaic features that
inspired the spirit of the proto-festival in the events I am trying

to represent.
There is another essential feature of the February meetings
which reveals their connection with the festival. This is the deep
feeling of solidarity, unity and mutual love that is unlikely to be
forgotten by those who experienced this emotional state. This
unique feeling alone makes the participants remember the Febru-
ary meetings with nostalgia and pride, in contrast to the present
situation of dissociation and mutual distrust. Generally speaking,
a mass display of solidarity was a rather rare thing in the USSR
perhaps, the last large-scale manifestation of this phenomenon
took place during World War II. Perhaps, that was the reason
why the mutual consideration, strict discipline and the distribu-
tion of food, free of charge, during the February meetings were
qualified by the Moscow authorities, and Gorbachev personally,
as the work of sinister forces. This idea was discussed in a noto-
rious article, Emotions and Reason, published in Pravda (21
March 1988). From that day on, the emotions/reason opposition
became a key-phrase, something like a ritual incantation for any
official interpreter of the Gharabagh movement be it a provin-
cial reporter or the future President of the USSR. With its help
that is, by calling for the suppression of emotions attempts
were made to solve all the problems that were raised.
It is quite true that, generally, emotions play an important role
in the structure of the festival. It is precisely emotional tension
that makes the proto-festival proceed according to its specific
rules. Contrary to the destructive actions of a furious mob which
are also a result of emotions, the proto-festival (and its descen-
dant represented by events in the Theater Square in February)
gives birth to principally p o s i t i v e emotions. As the Nya-
kyusa of Africa point out, a rite will be ineffective, even fatal for
society, if its participants keep anger in their hearts (Wilson
1957: 8). Besides, during such mass meetings the emotional fac-
tor does not stand alone and does not govern other factors. It
does not subdue reason; rather, it creates a new consciousness
directed inwards, to the roots of the community. The archaic fes-
tival provides by means of such solidarity an effective mecha-
nism allowing its participants to communicate with their sacred
history. And everyone who was involved in the events I am dis-
cussing here remembers the sudden awakening of ethnic self-
consciousness and the keen awareness of history the content
analysis of the speeches can provide numerous evidence to this

232
orientation toward national history.
Another feature of the archaic festival its theatricality is al-
ready evident from the name of the square where our festival
occurred the Theater Square where the Opera is located. This
was the name of the Square present already in the Yerevan lay-
outs of the former years, but it only became popular during the
period of the festival. Later on people referred to it as Inde-
pendence Square or Freedom Square, leaving the festival
Theater name for the period of the festival. I have discussed
elsewhere in some detail the theatrical features of the Yerevan
mass meetings and the first Parliament sessions (see Abrahamian
1990a). Here I only want to mention a few noteworthy points.
The late architect T'amanian, it is said, was quite sure that in the
remote past there stood a temple of Song and Love on the very
same spot where he erected his Opera House; in any case, such a
legend was preserved in the architects family.
15
Even if the the-
atrical past of the Theater Square does not go back that far, dur-
ing the nine months discussed here it was a kind of stage, where
real dramas were performed. The scenic qualities of the square
and the universal license that is characteristic of the theater were
very apparent to photographers, for example, since they would
not be allowed to photograph a particular political action outside
of the square, while the same people within the precincts of the
square not only did not object to being photographed, but even
endeavored to attract the photographers attention. All the hun-
ger strikes, the clothing of some of the hunger strikers, the in-
terior and exterior configuration of the place where the fasts oc-
curred, were organized on a theatrical principle. Being in the
form of a tent, the scene of the hunger strikes seemed to make
this improvised stage even more reminiscent of typical out-
growths of the square the carnival booths. During one of the
May meetings a mock trial of the authorities on the stage of
the Theater Square was planned, and on July 7 and 8 this same
stage bore witness to a genuine drama, when the funeral of a

15
Cf. corroboration of T'amanians belief in the testimony of the fa-
mous painter Martiros Sarian (in Khach'atrian 1975: 271, note 76). As
we mentioned in the Path of Faith, the Church of Gethsemane of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries stood at the site of the present square
(see Ghafadarian 1975: 45-46). There are no precise reports of a more
ancient past for this site.

student shot during the picketing of the airport came to a theatrical
conclusion here (alas, it was not the only funeral to take place in
the square), with an honor guard ritual performed by the demon-
strators at the site of the slain youths photograph on the following
day. At first glance, the tragedy and grief that the square witnessed
have nothing to do with festivals. By the way, those who oppose
my characterization of the demonstrations within this festival con-
text, emphasize precisely this aspect. Nevertheless, the tragic as-
pect is one which brings the Theater Square phenomenon close to
the proto-festival. The fact remains that the archaic festival, as a
rule, unites within its limits, laughter and weeping, joy and sad-
ness, birth and death be it a real death (for example, the final part
of funeral ceremonies among Australian aborigines) or a symbolic
one, performed during initiation rites.
We have already mentioned the spatial code a special lan-
guage an anthropologist could use to check the process of his/her
reconstructions. Thus the circular shape of the Theater Square
adds new nuances to our festival. This shape demarcates a space
where communication becomes easy and spontaneous. It is as if
the circle creates a shapeless, movable structure inside its area.
The chaotic character of the traditional peoples festivals is, in a
way, nurtured by the circular shape of the central square of a
town.
The magical force of the circle may appear in the most varied
of effects, both natural and artificial, created by culture
whether it be the spatial organization of the simplest associations
of animals or the complex social organism of human society.
People move in a circle during archaic rituals, and so does the
hand of a modern magician; archaic cromlechs are arranged in a
circle, as are many masterpieces of contemporary architecture,
such as T'amanians Opera and Ballet Building in the Theater
Square. The latent power of the magical circle is also revealed in
connection with the popular movement under discussion. For
example, I have noted an interesting mystical scheme, according
to which the unity and cohesion of a nation correlates with a
temple with a circular floor plan, while the loss of solidarity and
dispersal of the nation in the world correlates with the destruc-
tion of such buildings. Thus, in the seventh century, the circular
temple of Zvart'nots' was built on the eve of the Arab invasions,
and in the tenth century, after the destruction of the temple, a
large mass of Armenians abandoned their birthplace. By the

234
same token, the construction of Gagkashen (Church of St. Greg-
ory), a replica of Zvart'nots', in Ani early in the 11
th
century be-
came a symbol of the cohesion and flourishing of the people,
while after the destruction of this round temple and the downfall
of Ani in 13
th
14
th
centuries the nation was again dispersed
throughout the world. When the discoverer of this mysterious
connection learned that the stones from the ruin of the Zvart'nots'
temple were arranged in a round foundation circle for the pur-
pose of possible further restoration, he predicted even before the
Gharabagh movement that the Armenian people would again
become united in the near future.
16
Interestingly, during the ral-
lies, another informant told me that she and a friend of hers saw,
how clouds came together to form a heavenly temple surpris-
ingly resembling Zvart'nots'. The aforementioned scheme, in-
spired by the Tower of Babel archetype (the Armenians too were
supposed to understand each other), worked surprisingly well
in connection with the dramatic events at Zvart'nots' airport on
July 4, 1988: consider the name of the airport, its circular layout,
its blockade by picketers, and the destruction and battering of
the wall surrounding the airport by armed forces descending
from the sky (the punitive operation was carried out by special
troops which arrived by planes). Unlike the watchful forces
guarding the temple of Zvart'nots' (Zvart'nots' means [A place
of] Watchful Powers), these forces were endowed only with
punitive and destructive capabilities.
Thus, a lot of invisible threads lead us from the present-day
square to the archaic festival. This specific leap toward the
proto-festival was characteristic of the Armenian situation only.
Of course, some proto-festival features were present in all na-
tional movements in the former USSR, but one hardly would
find the complete set of these features elsewhere. Strangely
enough, the name and features of the place where the first burst
of national consciousness occurs, as I tried to show elsewhere
(Abrahamian 1993: 111-112), often becomes a key to future
processes in the society.
The peak of this archaic festival was marked by a quite con-

16
This scheme could serve as an additional mystical counterpart to the
reasons why the present Cathedral in Yerevan should have been based
on the circular plan of the Zvart'nots' temple, as we discussed in the
Path of Faith in its forking Path toward the Temple.

stitutional, but an absolutely carnival-like session of the local
Supreme Soviet, which was summoned in the Opera House of
our festive square on November 24, 1988.
17
One can say, that on
this day the thread of civil society, after successfully passing
through many tangled knots, was finally pulled out in full from
the initial ball of yarn mentioned in the previous path. However,
it was a kind of carnival civil society, and, as everything pro-
duced by a festival, this important product was also doomed to
vanish. A real civil society has to be constructed in a profes-
sional Parliament brick after brick, as a result of everyday rou-
tine work, and not in the square, as a result of a festivals short-
lived feeling of justice and solidarity.

The Two Forking Paths Running from the Square
Thus, as we see, the situation that was created exhibits a whole
range of attributes resembling the condition of the chaotic proto-
festival. In actuality, a peculiar ritual drama was played out be-
fore us, plunging the former cosmos into ritual chaos. But, like
any drama, it could not last forever. The chaos created during the
festival was pregnant with a new cosmos, and the anthropologist
could divine this anticipated new condition, using the form and
peculiarities of the ritual drama as a key.
According to N. Ross Crumrine (1970), there are two types of
societies depending on the way in which the main ritual drama is
performed. In the first type, the ritual drama demolishes struc-
tural oppositions but afterwards restores them sometimes in an
even more rigid form. In the second type of society, the ritual
drama implies a structural transformation with lasting conse-
quences for the social and cultural sphere. In the first case, the
ritual drama, in fact, provides society with a mechanism for
withstanding transformations of any kind. In the second, by con-
trast, it provokes society to change its structure. Therefore, by
observing how a society gets out of the chaotic festival-state, one
can establish the type it is drawn toward and, beyond that, an-
ticipate its future development.
Crumrine, for example, assigns the Swazi of South Africa
with their rituals of rebellion studied by Hilda Kuper (1947;

17
See Abrahamian 2001b for the initial February steps of this ephem-
eral civil society and its carnival November culmination marked with a
hunt for the deputies.

236
1964) to the first type. In the course of this ritual drama, the king
of the Swazi is deprived of his royal regalia and power, and the
society falls into a state of chaos. This is considered to be an ex-
tremely dangerous time, but fortunately the ceremony ends with
the restoration of the traditional hierarchical society. To this
same type, V. V. Ivanov (1973: 52) assigns the unofficial popu-
lar culture of the Middle Ages with their periodic carnivals rein-
forcing the pre-carnival society. The transition from chaos to
cosmos is the foundation of numerous ritual systems, especially
those dealing with boundary-line situations and moving from one
condition to another. Such a scheme may be used to form not
only the ritual drama of the first type of society, for which such a
scheme is most characteristic, but also the ritual drama of the
second type of society.
Occasionally the transition from chaos to cosmos is so deeply
embedded in the human subconscious that the two types may
smoothly merge into each other, or the ritual and realistic aspects
of the drama may be so interwoven that it is difficult to distin-
guish them. For example, nearly all popular uprisings contain
features of the mentioned Swazi ritual, and if they end in failure,
the cosmic order that follows this chaotic condition confirms
and strengthens the former social structure much more firmly
and distinctly. On the other hand, if the chaos is reinforced, the
second scheme is immediately put into effect. It is no accident
that the October Revolution unfolded with an intense festival
ritualization, and certain activists wanted to build the new prole-
tarian culture only after the total (chaotic) destruction of the
old.
18
Since our chaotic festival in the square had many character-
istics in common with the medieval carnival and at the same
time with a revolution (see Abrahamian 1990b: 81), it would be
more useful to observe the structural changes of the society after
the festival rather than make intuitive optimistic or pessimistic
prophesies regarding Armenias future the favorite topic of
many journalists and politicians during the movement and also
long after it. Keeping all of this in mind, let us turn once again to
our Theater Square, where the festive chaos was near its end, and
try to catch the moment of reemergence of the cosmos since its

18
For the mechanisms of such cosmos to chaos and back to cosmos
transitions see Abrahamian and Shagoyan 2002.

structural peculiarities could outline a more reliable picture of
the future society.
First, let us see what the etymological code tells us. We have
already discussed the two constituents of Gorbachevs triad, the
concepts of democratization and glasnost. Now is the time to
introduce the third concept of the triad the famous perestroika.
The Armenian word for it is verakar'uts'um, which literally
means reconstruction, the prefix vera- not directly conveying a
change (like the prefix rein restoration); that is, the new con-
struction is actually supposed to be the same, without a principal
change. While in Russian the prefix pere- in perestroika does
mean something new, that is, it contains a possibility of change.
As we saw above, both Armenian and Russian languages reveal
(with complementing semantic nuances) a chaotic festival hid-
den in the first two concepts of the triad. And just as cosmos ap-
pears in ritual chaos, so the third member of the triad appears,
bringing with it the idea of c o n s t r u c t i o n. But unlike the
first two constituents, the third is uncertain and ambiguous (also
judging from the semantic hints of the two languages), as in fact
was the situation itself to which the concept referred.
In any case, let us observe how concretely our chaos in the
square was transformed into cosmos. It should be said that it is
hard to fix a specific day for this transition. Features of a future
cosmic order were already glimpsed within the chaos, but a more
vivid indication can be obtained by considering the space code
once again. I have already mentioned that the people refused to
move to the outskirts when Theater Square was banned as a
meeting place and blocked off by the military. Deprived of their
archaic, pagan center, the people chose a new center a spiri-
tual one. This was the Matenadaran the place where ancient
Armenian manuscripts are kept (we will return to the Matenada-
ran, representing a specific type of museum, in the Path of
Memory). It was, perhaps, mere chance that the mass of people
formed an elongated rectangle, as a result of the layout of the
Matenadaran building, but interestingly the form supported and
supplemented the general scheme. (We have already had ample
reason to be convinced that even random circumstances,
19
in a

19
Another coincidence was that one of the leaders of the rallies, the
future first President of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrossian, worked in the
Matenadaran as its scientific secretary at that time and, as some people

238
remarkable way, brought forth special systems that comple-
mented this general scheme or model.) Now the amorphous and
free meetings in the round square were transformed into some-
thing rectangular of the Gothic type. And at the same moment
the festival features were reduced to a minimum meetings lost
their theatrical mood and communicative spirit. As the circle was
transformed into a rectangle, the meetings immediately lost their
festival features.
As already mentioned, during our chaotic festival, changes
had taken place in the system of basic oppositions in the society,
therefore one would expect real changes to take place exactly in
this sphere when the festival chaos was still governing (in the
way the embryos of new structures can be envisioned in a ther-
modynamic chaos) and especially when the festival was ap-
proaching its end. And indeed, nearly all the damaged or van-
ished oppositions came back to life again in an even more pro-
nounced form than before. Although each opposition had its spe-
cific time of relaxation. Thus the polarity of bilingualism, now
contrasting Armenian and Russian schools, was revived only
after political independence was achieved. The opposition be-
tween generations was already expressed in the summer of 1988
in the activities of the radical wing of the movement, which
was mainly represented by the younger generation. The
men/women opposition returned nearly at the same time with
the womens (mostly emotional and aggressive) contingent of
the movement (e.g. the short-lived womens Gharabagh Com-
mittee or sporadic groups of women activists). The opposition
between town and village came back more slowly. During the
constituent conference of the All Armenian National Movement
in November 1989 one could already notice some signs of its
revival, but beginning with the military self-defense activities on
the border with Azerbaijan in January 1990, this opposition came
back with a brave warrior/timid civilian nuance, which correlates
with the two trends in Armenian nature, those of rebelliousness
and prudence, to be discussed in detail in the Path of Dispersion.
So we can see that the system had the tendency to return to its
previous, pre-festival state, but with a more dynamic inner struc-
ture. That is, our ritual drama seemed to gravitate toward the
first, traditional type in Crumrines classification. Let us remem-

said, led the crowd to this familiar place.

ber that I was making these observations while I was doing field
work in the festive square itself. In my notebooks, I recorded
several cases, where the participants of the rallies attempted to
export some of the features characteristic of a civil society from
the square, where a festive version of this society was created, to
their work places, although all such attempts eventually failed
mainly because of the resistance of their more conservative and
elder colleagues who only recently were welcoming similar so-
cial changes proposed in the square. However, the mechanisms
of such an expansion
20
were very similar to the structural trans-
formations in the Mayo Indian society (lower Mayo River Val-
ley, Sonora, Mexico) after ritual dramas, which transformations
gave N. Ross Crumrine (1970) grounds to introduce the second,
changing type of society. Following his method and having in
mind mainly the above-mentioned cases of possible structural
festive expansions, I predicted in earlier articles (Abrahamian
1990b: 83; 1993: 114) that we could anticipate some changes
toward a civil society in our society. The course of events
showed that my prognosis was too optimistic. But this particular
failure does not mean a general weakness of the method pro-
posed. Let me repeat once again that during chaotic processes,
like the one that took place in our festive square in 1988, the
elements of a future cosmos are very fragile and depend very
strongly on external conditions. This may make our method of
interpretative predictions
21
a useful means for understanding the
chaosology of unstable social processes, especially borderline
unstable situations like the one that took place in the Yerevan
Theater Square.
The oscillation of our system between the two types tradi-
tional and transforming was revealed very clearly by one more
important code the royal code. As we know already from the
Path of Tyrants and Fools and the Royal Path, the king, as an
image of the First Man, is the personality who, in the most tangi-
ble and sometimes tragic way, carries all the festival transforma-
tions within himself. In this sense it is worth noting that the
mythological image of President Gorbachev, the initiator of our

20
Cf. a similar case study by Nora Dudwick of a confrontation between
activists and Communist Party leaders at an enterprise in Yerevan, which
she entitled Expanding the Agenda (Dudwick 1994: ch. 6.C.4).
21
For more on this method see Abrahamian 1993: 100-102, 115.

240
festival, also came to support the scheme of the oscillating sys-
tem mentioned above. It was expressed in the essential ambiva-
lence of Gorbachev in relation to his attitude toward Mountain-
ous Gharabagh and Armenia, which was evident according to my
informants even in 1988. This ambivalence coincided with the
ambivalent nature of President Gorbachevs perestroika as we
have already seen with help of the etymological code.
The oscillation of the system between the two types was con-
nected with yet another mysterious phenomenon, which we al-
ready discussed in the third forking path, the Path of Tyrants and
Fools by the end of the festival, significant dates for political
decisions at first coincided with and later slightly differed from
similar crucial dates in the history of Armenia and Gharabagh.
Meanwhile the image of the decision-maker and initiator of the
festival was oscillating between foolish Son and tyrannical
Father. This also produced some new hope of duality, or a possi-
ble competition between the two types so that the social system
seemed to have some real chances of breaking the vicious circle
of eternal repetitions.
One may get the impression that the structural forecasts pre-
sented here were made after the fact, when the course of events
was already known: that the system, for example, would ulti-
mately tend toward the first type. But as early as October 1988 I
made these same predictions at a seminar at the Moscow Insti-
tute of Ethnography, when the competition between the two
types was still sharply evident.
However, it would not be correct to say that everything
came back again, as some of my disappointed informants
might. While many products of the festival, such as solidarity
or the damage done to the main social oppositions disappeared
as the festival came to its end,
22
some of its other products

22
Even here we can find some surviving products of the festival.
Thus, according to the opinion of an informant with extensive experi-
ence working with students, the festive reversal in the sphere of ages
never came back to the original patriarchal respect toward the elder.
Another aspect of the same opposition can be seen in the revolution-
ary rejuvenation of the leadership with the inclusion of young people
immediately after the festival. Presently, when more than one and a
half decades have already passed and the former young rebels have
aged, as well as new and old aged politicians have stepped onto the

nevertheless stepped from the festive square into everyday life.
The one most remarkable thing was that people learned about
their civil rights, step by step, right in the square through and
due to the rallies that were taking place there.
One of the paradoxes of the Soviet system was that the Soviet
constitutions, including Stalins constitution of the somber
1930s, had many features of a constitution of a civil society, but
these features were never carried out in reality. In 1988, people
in Yerevans squares and streets began their education in democ-
racy by becoming aware of this fact, and in several months they
could already use the constitution masterfully enough to legally
win quite a number of electoral campaigns, which was also
something new in Soviet reality. The communist authorities
seemed to be so shocked by the peoples rapidly increasing legis-
lative experience, that they failed to create some effective illegal
preventive structures to resist their activity in olden times they
used to just appoint deputies rather than elect them. In the au-
tumn of 1988, the presence of two Gharabagh movement activ-
ists who had been the first democratically elected deputies to the
parliament, acted as a catalyst within the still Soviet parliament,
and created a new product a primitive democratic institution,
which was also a precedent in Soviet reality. And this orientation
toward working within the structure of a parliament is an obvi-
ous sign of societys development toward a civil society. One
may assert this, even if the elections of a future independent Ar-
menia proved to be free but not fair, as foreign monitors used
to define them on the basis of the few violations they managed to
catch, while failing to notice many others. I am not going to dis-
cuss the various violations here, ranging from crude to sophisti-
cated, that have marked the elections of the last several years.
The important point for our discussion is the fact that in order to
seize power, the new politicians have had to invent some cun-
ning tricks to cheat the democratic institution of the parliament--
they cannot just ignore it, as their communist predecessors had
done. Skeptics might say that in any case the results are not de-
mocratic enough, but I think that the inner potential of the de-
mocratic structure is more important than its not very democratic
temporary misuse.
The success of the first electoral campaign in the fall of 1988

political stage, this festive product has gradually disappeared.

242
was a result of the effective work of certain structures also cre-
ated by the festive square. Analysts seem to fail to notice them,
or at least they forgot about them as the movement stepped into
politically more developed stages. These structures were the so-
called constitutional groups, which spread like mushrooms in the
square and in the adjacent streets, as if the sacred center trans-
mitted some of its fertilizing properties to the surrounding soil as
well. This is not just a metaphor these groups were using small
tables, and their spreading was visually similar to mushrooms
spreading. At these mushroom tables sat the newly established
experts in constitutional rights. Any citizen could receive written
and oral information about the elections, deputies, registration
rules, electoral and polling districts, suffrages, and many other
useful details a citizen needs to know about his or her constitu-
tional rights. The members of these groups were at the same time
the first agitators of the campaigns. Without their scrupulous and
routine work the movement would hardly have won the first and
following elections. From this perspective these information ta-
bles were really the germs of a civil society.
23
However many festive characteristics this civil society born
in the square seemed to obtain, the communist authorities of
Armenia rejected it, declaring the session that took place in the
square on November 24, 1988 illegal, and choosing instead op-
pression and violence deputies were still sitting in the impro-
vised session-hall, when a state of emergency was declared in
Yerevan. After independence, which was in a sense an offspring
of this festival session in the square, one of the first parliament
sessions of the new republic re-asserted the resolutions of its fes-
tival progenitor, thus taking upon itself the difficult task of con-
structing step by step a real, and not festive, civil society in Ar-
menia, although this difficult path, as we have learned earlier,
forked instead into a Path toward the Feudal Future hopefully,
not a very long one.
It was not by accident, that the birth of the civil society in the
Yerevan square coincided with the first outbursts of national vio-

23
Interestingly, the new and primitive market economy at first also
appeared in the shape of vendors tables, which also spread in the
streets of Yerevan like mushrooms. Thus the table played the role of a
minimal structural invariant, which was used both in the languages of
social and economic transformations in Armenia.

lence against local Azerbaijanis in several regions of Armenia
the state violence in the center coincided with the popular na-
tional violence in the periphery. The chaotic mingled ball of
yarn, as we know, contained all possible threads including
those of peace and war, and civil and totalitarian societies as
well. But the choice was not only within this society. That is why
I made a note in the beginning of this Path regarding the poten-
tial possibilities Armenian society (as well as the former Soviet
society in general) had depended on the current situation and
external forces. Thus, already by the end of September 1988,
after the first stage of the Gharabagh movement and the Sumgait
pogroms, Gorbachev had two choices for the development of his
country: in the direction of a civil society or in the direction of
national violence. He chose the second path.

The Path of Violence

TWELVE

THE PATH OF VIOLENCE
The Gharabagh Conflict: A Fight for
Symmetry and Asymmetry

Aggressiveness and its manifestation, violence, are a legacy
which humankind inherited from its pre-human forerunners and
elaborated considerably as a cultural institution. The aggres-
siveness of animals, the violence toward other species, especially
in the case of predators, is an essential condition of their sur-
vival. Violence toward ones own species is also essential, since
it lies at the base of any kind of hierarchy which organizes any
social group. But while the violence of the first type is a pure
violence, for example, a lion preys upon its victim, the violence
of the second type, as a rule, ends symbolically, especially if the
combatants are of the same age, for example, a defeated monkey
takes the pose of copulation. Humankind is often said to be the
only species that regularly directs its violence toward its own
kind, though the opponent, the other, is often thought to repre-
sent the non-human, i.e. a kind of other species. The anthropol-
ogy of war shows wide oscillations between the two aforemen-
tioned types of violence. Thus, when preparing an ambush or
making a surprise attack on the enemy, a group of Australian
aboriginal warriors, for example, may kill everyone in the enemy
camp, while the situation is quite different when two groups of
warriors meet in a battle during an open war. In this case the bat-
tle lasts until there are a few casualties; elderly women who ob-
serve the fight, rush into the battlefield and stop the excited men
from further slaughter using their heavy digging sticks (see
Narody Avstralii i Okeanii 1956: 192-194). Interestingly, during
the first war in Chechnia (1994-1996), the soldiers mothers or-

248
ganized a march to the battlefields to stop the prolonged blood-
shed, though they were less successful than their Australian sis-
ters.
The Australian case and similar examples are in fact the pre-
cursors of modern international agreements concerning the hu-
mane rules of war making. The fact that such rules exist is not
only evidence of the ever present aggressiveness of human beings
which needs to be restrained, but is also evidence of the various
ways this aggressiveness is realized in different groups, from the
most archaic tribes to modern nations. This does not mean, of
course, that different nations have their specific genetic violence,
but that they have different cultures of violence due to a range
of historical and anthropological circumstances. As Brian Singer
(1989: 267) suggests, one has to examine the different forms of
violence as instituted in different societies, since in each case they
tell us something about that society, as expressive of that society,
and of its self-understanding. Such a sociology of violence might
provide, as Singer rightly supposes, a hermeneutics of violence
through which the larger social text can be interpreted. I would
add that this larger social text becomes more elaborate and inter-
pretative during interethnic clashes, when two different cultures
of violence oppose each other.

The Path of Structural Violence
The former Soviet Union united nations and ethnic groups whose
diverse cultures also included diverse cultures of violence, but
in a totalitarian state the latter could not be manifested explicitly,
since institutionalized or structural violence (to use G. Gusei-
novs term see Krupnik 1998: 280), was a prerogative of the
state. All the nations were equalized in this sense, being the ob-
jects of a unified, centralized state violence. Even the Cossacks,
who traditionally championed state violence in czarist Russia,
became victims of the new Soviet state violence. As we have
already mentioned, people noted during the burst of ethnic
clashes at the end of the Soviet regime in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, that the traditional Soviet violence of the Stalin pe-
riod was more democratic, since it did not distinguish between
nations. The punishing force seemed thus omnipresent and indif-
ferent to its victims, striking the repressive organs that champi-
oned this force even more frequently, as we know already from
the Path of Fear.

The Path of Violence 249
During the perestroika period the Soviet Union was trying to
carry out a transition from totalitarian state to civil society, and
the centralized state violence also had to undergo transforma-
tions. Perestroika was, as we saw in the Path of Rebellion and
Festival, a kind of carnival that declared freedom in many
spheres which were previously under strict control, and, para-
doxically, in the sphere of violence as well.
1
The implicit and
restricted aggression toward aliens, the other, who in each Soviet
republic were personified by a concrete ethnic group with which
some old or new animosity was connected, now took the explicit
forms of national violence. While state violence was striking
radially from the Center,
2
this newly released violence ap-
peared in the periphery, on the boundary between neighboring
segments, and to keep the whole social organism in order the
state (the center) was forced to answer to these peripheral distur-
bances with violence, which now looks like a protective response
by the organism rather than a voluntary action (cf. Kocharian
1991). Here I am not referring to those peripheral disturbances
that were directed toward the Center itself (or were interpreted
by the Center as such) and were violently responded to by the
latter. The two types of violence, radial and peripheral, often
overlapped or changed places in future interpretations. However,
even if there were simultaneously two types of disturbances
one interethnic and another threatening the Center, the latter
always responded first (and sometimes only) to the threatening
disturbances. For example, when the festive civil society (dis-
cussed in the Path of Rebellion and Festival) was built in the
Yerevan square on November 24, 1988, the totalitarian Center
responded by introducing a state of emergency in Yerevan the
very same night but did not do so in the peripheral regions of
Armenia, where interethnic tensions were just reported on No-
vember 22 and that soon led to outbursts of violence toward lo-
cal Azerbaijanis. Similarly, the Center sent military troops to

1
Igor Krupnik (1998: 279-281) describes this and similar situations of
released violence in terms of returned violence: the violence launched
into a system cant disappear immediately and its different manifesta-
tions would be expressed for a long time in many spheres of social life.
2
Center was the widely used synonym for the central authorities,
which was often substituted by the term the Kremlin, a more concrete
center in the totalitarian topography.

250
Baku in January 1990 only in response to the attempt of an
armed seizure of power, and not in response to the anti-
Armenian pogroms, which took place a little earlier.
During the late 1980s there was a growing belief that ethnic
clashes in the republics were encouraged and even secretly organ-
ized by the Center, so that the use of totalitarian centralized state
violence would be supported by the international community. As
with the majority of conspiracy hypotheses, this belief over-
emphasizes and mythologizes the devilish abilities of the Center,
neglecting its more realistic lack of competency in policy making,
including the sphere of state violence. However, the way in which
Russia carried out the first war in Chechnia, by creating and then
supporting the collaborator government opposed to the rebels,
shows that the mechanisms of the manipulations of violence used
by the USSR during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan still
remain within the arsenal of Russian policy making.

The Path of Constructed Violence
As we have already mentioned, perestroika opened the way for
national violence in the Soviet republics, which were formed on
the national principle. The sudden burst of hatred and violence
toward the other (ethnic minorities) gave rise to the popular idea,
expressed repeatedly in the press, that these feelings were always
present, but hidden because of the repressive totalitarian state,
which played the role of a prison for its constituent nations. I am
not going to defend or justify the Soviet totalitarian regime here,
but I would like to repeat what we said in the Path back to Pre-
history: when describing Soviet society, Western sovietologists
of the Soviet period and later the brave critics of perestroika and
the post-Soviet periods, often refer to some imagined and phan-
tom societies failing to see the real people and society.
The same can be said, I think, about ethnic hatred and aggres-
sion. However stable the historical memory and the image of an
enemy may be, the latter is often much more flexible in reality
than one may expect. For example, the image of the Persian op-
pressor as a generalized enemy of the Armenians, on which gen-
erations of Armenians were educated,
3
was replaced by the Turk-

3
The first novel written in modern Armenian by Khach'atur Abovian,
The Wounds of Armenia (1858), was focused around the fight of the
Armenians against the Persian oppressors.

ish violator by the end of the 19
th
century and especially after the
genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. During the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict of the late 1980s early 1990s
over Mountainous Gharabagh, this image was substituted by the
Azerbaijanis; this substitution being simplified because Armeni-
ans traditionally call them the Turks.
4
During the nationalistic
rallies of the late 1980s in Yerevan, a mosque in the center of the
city was saved from demolition and acts of vandalism mainly
because it was Persian and not Turkish/Azerbaijani.
During the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, when Turkey
blocked its roads to Armenia in support of Azerbaijan, Armeni-
ans nevertheless continued to go to Turkey via Georgia for trade.
The generalized image of the Turkish enemy never stopped these
new merchants from their trade expeditions or the Armenian
populace from buying Turkish goods brought by these trades-
men. In the late 1990s, I recorded a telling example illustrating
this attitude. An elderly woman blamed a young vendor for sell-
ing Turkish eggs. The eggs were laid by hens, answered the
young man, not by the Turks. Even the animosity toward
Azerbaijanis during the Armenian-Azerbaijani war was not abso-
lute: there were many traders from Iran trading successfully in
Yerevan, although Armenians knew very well that these trades-
men were predominantly Iranian Azerbaijanis.
These examples reveal the more complex spectrum of atti-
tudes toward the image of the traditional enemy and do not sug-
gest that the traditional stereotypes no longer exist. They do ex-
ist, of course, depending on the sub-ethnic group and/or political
convictions. For example, for one of the principal attacks during
the Gharabagh war, volunteers from Armenia were preferred

4
This national attitude of the Armenians, which was often perceived by
the Azerbaijanis as offensive during Soviet times, was later proved
by the post-Soviet Turkophile policy of Azerbaijans president El-
chibei. It has to be remembered that only after 1937 did the present-day
Azerbaijanis gain their name Azerbaijani in Soviet passports under
the point nationality meaning ethnic origin. (In the literature of the
19
th
early 20
th
centuries they were named after local tribal names, more
often as Caucasian Tatars or simply as Muslims; in the 1926 population
census as a Turkic speaking people.) In post-Soviet passports, this
ethnic marker now tends to express nationality in the Western sense,
i.e. citizen of Azerbaijan.

252
over those coming from a neighboring Armenian village in
Gharabagh because of the formers more abstract and stereotypi-
cal attitude toward the Turks-Azerbaijanis as compared with the
latters more concrete and tolerant attitude toward their former
neighbors.
5
One has to also remember that many Armenians sur-
vived the pogroms in Sumgait and Baku thanks to their Azerbai-
jani neighbors. I give these examples only to show that animos-
ity and tolerance can interchange more flexibly in real life than
in theory. More than that, often (if not always) they seem to be
constructed and imagined rather than primordial repeating or
reflecting the nature of the societies involved in the conflict.
In the same way, and even more paradoxically, the aggression
and the resulting acts of violence can erupt suddenly in the most
unexpected or the least expected situations which have nothing
or very little to do with the animosity traced back to the histori-
cal past of the groups involved in violence. For example, I wit-
nessed an interesting situation in 1990 at Moscows international
airport. A group of foreigners from different countries stood pa-
tiently in a long queue to go through customs. Suddenly a Soviet
citizen broke ranks and went through customs ignoring the peo-
ple waiting their turn. This served as a kind of a trigger: sud-
denly all the people began to compete with one another in a play-
ful aggressiveness to get through customs. The disorder was
much more violent than one might observe in many traditional
Soviet queues throughout the country, especially because the
playful foreigners did not share the culture of queue violence.
This last example also illustrates that aggression, unlike national
identity, is really a sleeping phenomenon. It only needs per-
mission to be released from the depths of the animal nature of
human beings. Aggression itself is primordial, and not its ad-
dressee. The moment aggression is permitted to be released, it
immediately finds a traditional addressee. By declaring a gen-
eral festival of perestroika, Gorbachev actually also declared a
festival of interethnic violence. Getting ahead of this Paths
story, I would even suggest that by allowing the anti-Armenian
pogroms in Sumgait, a town in Azerbaijan near Baku, in late
February of 1988 (not punishing its organizers properly),
6
Gor-

5
For the traditional mechanisms of interethnic relations in everyday
life in Mountainous Gharabagh see Mkrtchyan 1988: ch. 4.
6
The pogrom-makers were tried for individual acts of hooliganism and

bachev allowed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
7

But however flexible the mechanisms of violent outbursts
may be, later in this Path we will see that even the most unex-
pected outbursts can be predicted if we better know the culture
of violence inherent to one or another society.

The "Green Path of Violence
During the Soviet regime, only a few political activities were
allowed. The ecological movement was one of these activities.
The authorities evidently did not see them as posing any great
danger to their regime. That is the reason why in many cases the
democratic, and more frequently nationalistic movements began
as or took the shape of ecological movements.
The ecological movement not only disguised the banned na-
tionalist manifestations but also concealed prohibited interethnic
violence. In Estonia, for example, the ecological movement fought
against the phosphorus mines that were polluting and damaging
Estonian land. Actually it was a revolt against the Soviet Center
which was responsible for the mining, but, as a consequence, it
was also a fight against the Russian-speaking population of Esto-
nia and especially against the ethnic Russians who were mainly
involved in the mines and whose number was increasing parallel
with the expansion of mining. It is difficult to say whether it was
disguised national violence from the beginning, or whether the
anti-Russian violence was a by-product, a natural development of
the ecological movement. In any case, the ecological movement
became a kind of allowed anti-Russian aggressive movement in
Estonia. However, one may suspect that this was not just an unex-
pected development, because once Estonia became independent it
began to conduct an openly nationalist policy, particularly against
its Russian minority.
While Estonia provides one of the clearest illustrations of
how the ecology and national violence might be linked, the
Georgian case is much less explicit. The ecological movement in
Georgia was mainly fighting against the project (also initiated by
Moscow) of building a tunnel through the Caucasian mountains

not for participating as an organized group in anti-Armenian (national-
ity-oriented) actions.
7
On the Sumgait pogroms as the trigger of an avalanche of nationality-
oriented violence in the USSR cf. Krupnik 1998: 269.

254
which would shorten travel between the Transcaucasus and Rus-
sia the trains were forced to go round the mountain range from
the left or from the right along the coasts. The ecological move-
ment was active in the mid-1980s and was not linked directly
with the national movement of the late-1980s. Judging from its
materials and activities, it was a purely ecological movement
pursuing no political aims. However, there was in existence an
anti-Georgian and Ossetic view which claimed that the Georgi-
ans were disguising, under the fight against the tunnel project,
their unwillingness to create easy communication between the
two parts of the Ossetic people divided by the high mountain
range. Thus by resisting the project, the Georgians were fighting,
according to this view, against the South Ossets of Georgia who
would like to join with North Ossetia of Russia to form a united
and independent Ossetia. (I was aware of this view long before
South Ossetia declared its independence and an ethnic war be-
tween Georgians and Ossets supported by the Russians began in
1991.)
However speculative this view might be, it nevertheless dem-
onstrates that ecological movements can become rather flexible
and convenient mechanisms for realizing disguised national vio-
lence. It is no mere chance that in 1989 the Georgians used ex-
clusively ecological rhetoric to obstruct a plan to build a railroad
through the territory of Georgia that would connect Armenia
with the Black seaports. A little later, in 1991, Georgias authori-
tarian president Gamsakhurdia did not need this kind of rhetoric
any more when rejecting the project. He simply said that Georgia
is not a yard with a through-passage.
8

In Azerbaijan, the large-scale nationalist mass rallies of
November 1988 began as ecological meetings protesting against
the Armenians who were said to be destroying valuable tree
species in order to build a potentially polluting aluminum
producing factory in T'op'khana, a small plateau in Mountainous
Gharabagh. The Armenians were actually planning to build a
small enterprise which would process the aluminum tin imported
from Armenia. In other words, it was planned as a processing
and hence potentially non-polluting enterprise. Moreover, not a
single tree grows in the T'op'khana plateau (cf. Babajanyan
1988). Nevertheless, ecological (in this case pseudo-ecological)

8
In an interview given to an Armenian journalist.

rallies were needed to channel anti-Armenian aggression. This
symbolic channeling soon took explicit form during the anti-
Armenian pogroms in Kirovabad and several attacks on the Ar-
menian quarters in Baku.
Although the national movement in Armenia during the late-
1980s did not develop from the ecological movement,
9
the latter
was nevertheless always present during the mass rallies. This
ecological wing was even used effectively during the election
campaign of 1990 which brought the anti-communist national
movement to power. But it is interesting, that while in Azerbai-
jan the ecological rallies were in fact channeling aggression to-
ward the other, that is, out si de their own society, in Armenia
the same kind of rallies were directing their aggression i nward,
toward people within their own society. As a result, some impor-
tant industries were not only closed temporarily (e.g., the
Nairit chloroprene rubber plant or the nuclear power station),
but others were demolished so thoroughly (e.g., the copper-
smelting works in Allaverdi) that they could not be rebuilt, thus
depriving Armenia of a significant source of income.

The Nine Months Long Path of Asymmetry
The different directions aggression took in the two nations, ex-
ternally focused and internally focused,
10
involved other spheres
besides the ecology. Thus in Armenia, during the nine months
between late February and late November 1988 stormy rallies
provoked by the Mountainous Gharabagh crisis, led to Armenian
aggression being generally directed within Armenian society
itself. The large-scale strikes during those days are a good exam-
ple of such inner-directed aggression. These strikes were in fact
the first strikes in the Soviet Union or at least the first large-scale
and widely discussed ones. They had little connection with their
Western parallels and were mainly discussed in the rhetoric of
self-damage. These strikes were such an unusual phenomenon of
Soviet life that later, when listing the strikes which took place in
the USSR during perestroika, these strikes were not even men-

9
In Armenia, the ecological meetings actually played the role of a her-
ald (and not a catalyst, as P.Goble thinks see Panel in Nationalism in
USSR: 468). At these meetings people learned that another meeting
dedicated to national issues was going to be held the next day.
10
Cf. other types of differentiated violence listed in Riches 1986: viii.

256
tioned in sociological analyses, though the major part of the
population of Armenia was actually involved in these internally-
directed aggressive actions. In any case, the strikes were de-
clared in Armenia to be nation-wide. Hunger-strikes, something
even more self-damaging, also took place regularly during the
rallies.
Those on strike formed the majority of Armenian society.
Apart from this majority, Armenian society, like any other soci-
ety, has two other sections, those located below and above the
majority. They are formed respectively by the outlaws and the
rulers. Criminals, during this period, especially during the Feb-
ruary rallies, seemed to also act in accordance with the general
direction of aggression, since, by abstaining from robberies they
actually directed their aggression toward their own criminal sub-
group. Those were, perhaps, the only days in the history of Yer-
evan, when the crime rate was extremely low (almost approach-
ing zero). A popular joke reflecting reality said that the criminals
were also on strike. In the summer of 1988 several Armenian
criminals indeed went on hunger strikes in their jails, joining the
protesters who were hunger-striking in the Theater Square of
Yerevan.
As for the ruling elite, a popular saying during that time
claimed that the communist rulers, and the communists in gen-
eral, had no nation and so should be discounted when national
issues were considered.
11
The spiritual leader of the Armenians,
the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was also in
this elite ruling sub-group, despite his allegedly weak nationalis-
tic attitude. After the July 1988 strike, when the picketers in the
Yerevan airport were severely beaten by Soviet troops and a stu-
dent was shot to death, Catholicos Vazgen I announced on TV
and radio: I again urge you with prayer. Unless you heed me, I,
your spiritual father, shall curse (here he paused, and all the lis-
teners including myself stood in awe of his anticipated damna-
tion L. A.) my fate and be silent forever and ever (Guroian
1992: 43). Thus in all three social strata the aggression was di-

11
Beginning in 1993-1994, the years of the energy crisis, and during
the following years of disappointment with the post-communist rulers,
as we have already mentioned in the Path back to Prehistory, the com-
munist past was recalled with nostalgia as the happy time of stability
and relative prosperity of the nation.

rected within the society itself .
In Azerbaijan, on the contrary, the aggressiveness was di-
rected, as in the case of the ecological movement, toward aliens,
i.e. people outside their own society. The three aforementioned
strata showed the same trend. Criminals were reported to be ac-
tive participants of the pogroms; they were usually mentioned
first by Azerbaijani authors referring to the Sumgait anti-
Armenian pogroms, although even these authors had to admit the
participation of ordinary people in the pogroms (cf. Aliev 1988:
96). Of course, not all Azerbaijanis participated in these mass
outbursts of national violence (as we already mentioned, many
Armenians survived only owing to their Azerbaijani neighbors
who hid them from the enraged mobs). However, the fact that
only few Azerbaijanis publicly condemned the pogroms indi-
cates that the direction of aggression among most people was
directed outside rather than inside the community. Anyone who
had witnessed the Baku Communist and Soviet councils during
those days would certainly classify them as also dealing with an
externally-directed aggression, if only expressed verbally.
12

The different orientations of aggression in the two nations
evidently reflects different types of aggressive manifestations
and consequently different cultures of violence in the two socie-
ties. This difference is a topic of special interest and requires
further analysis which should also include comparing attitudes
toward violence in the respective national epics,
13
folklore and
ethnography. In any case, this difference clearly marked the first
phase of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the Mountain-
ous Gharabagh issue, which lasted from late February to late
November of 1988. One may describe this initial phase as a fight
for symmetry and asymmetry.
Asymmetry was established when, as a response to the peace-
ful demonstrations in Step'anakert (the capital of Mountainous
Gharabagh) and Yerevan, a militant raid on Gharabagh was or-
ganized from Aghdam (a neighboring Azerbaijani town) and
large-scale anti-Armenian pogroms took place in Sumgait. By
refraining from a return attack and preferring constitutional
forms of protest and political struggle to national violence, the

12
On the verbal ingredient of violence see Tishkov 2000: 17.
13
On the correlation of the modern Chechen war heroes and Cauca-
sian Nart epic heroes see Abrahamian 1999c: 73.

258
Armenian side was trying to emphasize and deepen the asymme-
try between the two nations engaged in conflict. In speeches dur-
ing the rallies both in Step'anakert and Yerevan, considerations
of a possible militant return attack were rejected as an act char-
acteristic of barbarians, thus opposing the civilized Armeni-
ans to the barbarous Azerbaijanis. Armenians tried to find evi-
dence for such an opposition in the different cultural back-
grounds, settled and nomadic, of the two nations.
14
Even Lenin
was called to testify to this asymmetry in favor of the Armeni-
ans through an article, where he blamed the czarist government
for provoking in Baku in 1905 the pogroms against Armenians
who he characterized as the most conscious element among the
Caucasian proletariat, while the Tatars (i.e. Azerbaijanis), who
enacted the pogroms, were characterized as a population which
mostly differed from Armenians in their social status and relig-
ion (Lenin 1922: 482-483).
15
The Armenians fight for asymmetry was supported by Rus-
sian democrats, especially by the academician Andrei Sakharov,
for it was thought to be the precedent for a peaceful legitimate
fight against the Soviet regime (the national movement in Arme-
nia very shortly transformed into a social one, as we know from
the Path of Rebellion and Festival). This latter cause of the asym-
metry seemed to remain obscure for most Azerbaijanis, who usu-
ally misinterpret it as an injustice toward Azerbaijanis. One can
find such an attitude even in academic works advocating the

14
As a matter of fact, the different cultural backgrounds of Armenians
and Azerbaijanis was the cause of the different attitudes toward the
representatives of the two nations in the Russian empire when it ex-
panded to the south early in the 19
th
century to cover the territories of
present-day Azerbaijan and Armenia. Armenians served in the army
and got higher positions in the civil institutions of the empire. Regard-
less of historical and cultural contexts, this privileged position of the
Armenians could be understood as simply a better attitude of the Rus-
sians toward the Armenians than toward the Muslims cf. Svieto-
chowski 1990: 36.
15
Actually this short article seems to be Lenins only support of the
Armenians; moreover, it is usually attributed to V. Vorovski, Lenin is
said to have only edited this text. Armenians used to say that Lenin
reacted with a strongly-worded article even if a dog was run over in the
street, but kept silent when one and half million Armenians were killed
in the Ottoman empire.

Azerbaijani point of view. Take for example the following passage
by Tadeusz Svietochowski (1990: 43): As the Mountainous
Gharabagh dispute was generating echoes in faraway places, a
new dimension of the issue began to emerge in the Azerbaijanis
eyes. They saw that even though the Armenian side initiated the
current confrontation, most of the outside world showed an anti-
Azerbaijani disposition. So was the man symbolizing the best of
Russia, Andrei Sakharov, who became a crusader for the unifica-
tion of Mountainous Gharabagh with Armenia.
At the same time, a fight for symmetry took place which
aimed at equalizing the nations in conflict. The Azerbaijanis
strove for this symmetry in order to challenge the Armenians
persistent charge that they were a violent and barbarous nation.
A popular theme of speeches and rumors in Armenia during the
asymmetry period was the imagined or real Azerbaijani provo-
cations which sought to provoke a violent response from the
Armenians. But the principal opponent of the Armenians in this
symbolic fight was thought to be (and actually was) the Cen-
ter, and in particular Gorbachev himself. Gorbachev challenged
the asymmetry in the beginning of the conflict in his first public
appeal to both nations, by equating Azerbaijanis and Armenians.
Later, after the Sumgait pogroms, Gorbachevs consistent at-
tempts to equalize the opposing sides involved some pseudo-
historical and pseudo-anthropological statements about the
common origin and traditions of the two peoples, in spite of the
definite ethno-cultural asymmetry, of which Armenians and
Azerbaijanis were quite aware. This consistent fight for symme-
try was at last won by Gorbachev, who was trying to smooth
over the conflict, to conceal it, so as not to concede the precedent
of national self-determination in the multi-national state. But by
doing so he granted, as we have already mentioned, another
precedent of legitimate national violence. And very soon
Sumgait gave rise to other cases of national violence (in Uzbeki-
stan against Meskhetian Turks, later in Kyrgyzstan against
native Uzbeks, and elsewhere), each successive episode more
violent and destructive.
The other result of Gorbachevs victory was the transfor-
mation of victims into victimizers. The Armenians, the bearers
of the traditional victim stereotype (especially after the genocide
in Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of this century), after being
persistently equalized with their persecutors, lost the privilege of

260
asymmetry in the conflict situation by committing national vio-
lence toward the native Azerbaijanis of Armenia in late Novem-
ber of 1988, after nine months of asymmetry. Non-violent mani-
festations continued even after this dramatic transition line, but
the violent precedent, I think, marks the end of the asymmetry
period. For the same reason, occasional non-violent manifesta-
tions that were taking place in Azerbaijan during the period of
asymmetry, didnt make this period symmetrical because of the
violent precedent in Sumgait and the violent actions in Kirova-
bad (now Ganja), Baku and elsewhere that followed.
It took nine months to change the direction of aggression in
Armenia. During this period militant traditions and images of
national heroes, the fedayi of the late-19th century and Genocide
times were revived. These heroes were strictly taboo in Soviet
Armenia mainly because their activity was related to the Dash-
nakts'ut'yun, a nationalist radical party which was the principal
opponent of the Armenian communists. Thus Soviet Armenians
had been deprived of their militant heroes, while the traditional
image of the victim-nation was actively cultivated. In the Arme-
nian diaspora both images, that of victims and of heroes, were
actively present, with these militant heroes obviously feeding the
ideology of Armenian terrorism.
16
The lack of aggression
among the Armenians was often discussed during the Yerevan
rallies of the nine months of the non-aggressive period. Ap-
peals could be heard and some models were provided to change
the passive nature of Armenians into a more militant one. Even
Christianity was blamed for transferring its passiveness to Ar-
menians and people argued for a return to the native pagan relig-
ion which was thought to be more militant, as we already know
from the Path of Faith.
In Gharabagh this transformation of national stereotypes of
aggression and passivity took place more rapidly, for the Ghara-
baghians were very soon involved in a fight for symmetry. This
time it was a fight for symmetry in arms the Gharabaghians
had been disarmed when they opposed the well-armed Azerbai-
jani special militia troops at the beginning of the undeclared war.
Thus, before being involved in a real war, both sides had to
transform their national stereotypes, both external and internal.

16
See Tllian 1992 for an analysis of Armenian terrorism and
Gpranian-Melkonian and Melkonian 1992 for its documented history.

Stereotypes of the opposite group, as a matter of fact, were not
transformed: they had only to be supported and deepened as a
result of long-term tensions. However, own group stereotypes
needed much more thorough reconstructions and transforma-
tions. Thus Armenians had to get rid of the image of being vic-
tims, which they had acquired after experiencing genocide in the
Ottoman empire. But this was a rather difficult task since this
traditional image seemed to pursue Armenians persistently. In
1988 Armenians, for a very short time, enjoyed the label of
extremists given to them by the central authorities and mass
media. As a matter of fact, the label of extremist was used to
describe the organizers of the mass rallies. Yet since almost the
entire nation participated in the rallies, each Armenian took this
label as a personal insult while at the same time, at a deeper level
of consciousness, it was also taken as a kind of compliment and
praise. Jokes during this period demonstrate this very clearly.
People would use any opportunity to change in jest the term
Armenian into Extremist; friends would jokingly address
each other: Hi, extremist, how are you doing? After the article
labeling Armenians extremists was published, a speaker ad-
dressed his audience, a big crowd, with the words: Dear extrem-
ist ladies and gentlemen! and another speaker, a popular com-
poser, said, in reference to the extremist behavior of his compa-
triots, that Armenians had now demonstrated that the Russian
poet Pushkin was wrong in characterizing them as cowards and
slaves.
17
Armenians thus behaved as if released from the image

17
Pushkins words You are a coward, you are a slave, you are an Ar-
menian from his poem Tazit are widely misinterpreted as the great
poets attitude toward Armenians, while those are the words of his
hero, an elderly mountaineer, who blames his young son for his com-
passion toward the enemy. In 2000, a short film was released by film-
director G. Melkonyan based on this poem and other Armenian themes
in Pushkins work. The film states that the original version of the line
you are an Armenian was actually you are a Christian, thus stress-
ing the external stereotype of the Armenians as the true Christians and
supporting the same internal stereotype of the Armenian-Christian
we mentioned in the Path of Faith. One can find a good illustration of
the peaceful image of Armenians as compared with the more militant
image of Abkhazians and Georgians in Fazil Iskanders first short story
in his book on Sandro of Chegem (Iskander 1979). The October 2001
intrusion of a Chechen-Georgian paramilitary detachment into Ab-

262
of traditional victims. However, very soon, after some ten days,
this image came back to haunt them during the large-scale po-
groms in Sumgait. It is true, the Armenians tried to use this new
evidence of their victim stereotype in a rather militant way in
the discussed fight for asymmetry to prove the aggressive na-
ture of the Azerbaijanis and to assert the non-stop genocide of
the Armenian people.
18
Nevertheless, in December 1988 the vic-
tim image of the Armenians was further and thoroughly con-
firmed by a disastrous earthquake. (Later, during and after the
successful war over Mountainous Gharabagh in the early 1990s,
the victim stereotype was once again transformed into the mili-
tant one as aggressors in the eyes of the Azerbaijanis and as
liberators of ancient national territories in the eyes of the Arme-
nians.)
The Azerbaijanis also needed a change of stereotype toward
an image of an offended and oppressed people, the victims of the
aggressive Armenians. In fact, this stereotype was confirmed
later, in 1993, when Armenian troops occupied Azerbaijani terri-
tories which bordered on Gharabagh. It is characteristic that the
list of victims which the Azerbaijanis used extensively, espe-
cially before the huge figures of war victims actually began to
appear, always began with two young Azerbaijanis shot dead in
Askeran, Gharabagh, during February 1988. They were partici-
pants in the first violent revenge raid from Aghdam to
Step'anakert aimed at stopping the rumored killings of Azerbai-
janis; the raid group was stopped in their march to the capital of
the oblast by the inhabitants and local law enforcement of the
first Armenian village in Gharabagh they had to pass through.
Being victims in a broad philosophical sense, those who died
there hardly fit the image of innocent victims. Following the
same logic, Nazi soldiers killed in the battle of Stalingrad would
be classified as German victims killed by Russians. It has to be
noted that the Azerbaijani campaign for the victim stereotype
began much earlier than the real victims of the conflict thou-
sands of future refugees did in fact appear. As a matter of fact,

khazia resulting in the death of 16 Armenians could serve as a modern
dramatic confirmation of this image. In accordance with the fate of the
Armenians, one of the villages attacked happened to be Armenian.
18
This was seen especially well in the placards and banners of the pro-
testers (see H. Marutyan 1994; 2003).

the Sumgait pogroms were triggered by unconfirmed rumors
regarding the slaughter of Azerbaijanis in Armenia and Ghara-
bagh,
19
with a number of pseudo-refugees from Armenia testi-
fying to the maltreatment of Azerbaijanis. In May 1988, during
anti-Armenian pogroms in Kazakh (Ghazakh), a town in a region
of Azerbaijan bordering with Armenia, a woman heated the ex-
cited mob by baring her chest in order to show a missing breast,
that she claimed was the result of atrocities committed by Arme-
nians in the Masis region of Armenia, although her scar was a
typical trace of a surgical operation.
20
There were also a kind of
imaginary refugees Azerbaijanis from rural regions who fled
Armenia during the first days of the peaceful rallies in Yerevan,
evidently, as a result of misinformation and anxious rumors
about the rallies. Many Armenians interpreted these groundless
departures of the native Azerbaijanis as evidence that the Sum-
gait pogroms were organized beforehand. According to this
opinion, the Azerbaijanis were informed about the planned po-
groms and therefore fled Armenia to avoid the revenge of the
Armenians following the pogroms. With the end of the nine
months of asymmetry, the imaginary and false refugees became
real refugees.
It is interesting, that the Armenian stereotype of a victim was
very rapidly forced out after the final and most brutal pogroms
and deportations of the Armenian population of Baku in January
1990. In Armenia, the reaction to the pogroms in Azerbaijan was
the formation of self-defense detachments armed with stolen
weapons. This new militant movement was strongly influenced
by national memories and symbols of the fedayi movement and
inherited its name and traditions.
As was already mentioned, Armenians needed nine months to
change the orientation of their aggression from being focused
inward to focusing outside their own society. The victory of
symmetry over asymmetry actually equalized the two peoples in
conflict in their aggression and violent manifestations, now tend-
ing to symmetrize any precedent of asymmetry, although the
struggle for symmetry involved such grave acts as the cutting off

19
The information about the mentioned two killed Azerbaijani aven-
gers, reported by the Deputy General Procurator of the USSR, actually
became the signal for the pogroms in Sumgait.
20
According to an eyewitness who wishes to remain anonymous.

264
of ears and heads to human sacrifices.
However, the nine months of asymmetry provides a conven-
ient time for speculations about the reasons of this asymmetry.
As we have mentioned before, Christianity in such speculations
was sometimes considered to be responsible for the lack of Ar-
menian militancy during the initial phase of the conflict. Islam,
on the contrary, was thought to contain some direct signs of pre-
scribed violence toward non-Muslims. The militant past of the
Christian faith, for example the excessive cruelties of the Inquisi-
tion toward the natives of Meso-America, was never discussed
when comparing the respective aggression of Muslims and
Christians.

The Path of Symbolic Violence
It is interesting that the religious aspect of the conflict was dis-
cussed mainly when people were trying to understand the differ-
ences in aggression displayed by the two ethnic groups involved
in the conflict or when semiotically marking the alienness of the
opposing group. For example, during the rallies in Yerevan, Is-
lamic symbols were widely used in posters as a semantic marker
(e.g. depicting the Kremlin with a crescent in the place of the red
star, or Gorbachev reading the Koran in search of a solution to
the Gharabagh issue, thereby indicating Moscows supposed Az-
erbaijani orientation). During the anti-Armenian pogroms in
Sumgait, the sign of the cross was sometimes used by the perpe-
trators to mark the raped and tortured victims.
21
The sign of the
cross was also used by the Armenian troops during some of the
military operations in Gharabagh to distinguish the Armenians
and their tanks two white stripes were fixed cross-wise on the
back of uniforms and a white cross was painted over the former
Soviet symbols of the military equipment, thus making Arme-
nian troops appear like modern crusaders.

21
I only know of one example, where a religious symbol was the direct
addressee and not a semiotic marker. Your cross is shit was written
under a crude depiction of the cross on a sheet of paper addressing the
Armenians of Shushi before they fled this town in Mountainous Ghara-
bagh late in September 1988. Shushi, which was once an impregnable
fortress because of its high and controlling position, was used by the
Azerbaijanis during the conflict to shell Step'anakert and neighboring
Armenian villages. It was seized by the Armenians on May 8, 1992.

The participants of the conflict, as a matter of fact, never con-
sidered it a religious conflict. It was labeled as a religious war
mainly (if not only) by foreign journalists, who used this defini-
tion as a convenient and effective means for articulating their
reports from the conflict zone. Here we have an example of the
way in which an ethnic conflict can develop into a religious
war.
22
The Gharabagh case did not reach this stage, although
there were some possibilities for such a transformation, e.g. there
were some failed attempts to form detachments of volunteers in
the Central Asian republics during the early years of the war to
protect Islamic ideals in Mountainous Gharabagh a direct con-
sequence of mass media misinformation. These possibilities in
fact remained real later as well: the Afghan mujaheddin who
fought in 1993 on the Azerbaijani side, one may guess, were not
simply mercenaries like, for example, the Ukrainian soldiers,
who also fought on the Azerbaijani side.
In the sphere of violent manifestations the opposition be-
tween the symbolic and the literal, the word and the deed, the
fictitious and the real are perhaps more pronounced than in other
spheres of human activities. The first constituent of these opposi-
tions very often tends to transform into the second. We already
spoke about the transformation of imaginary Azerbaijani refu-
gees of February 1988 into real ones in November. Also, very
often many rumors were confirmed strangely enough by future
events. For example, some terrifying details of the Sumgait po-
groms which later turned out to be only rumors came true in the
following Fergana and Osh pogroms. Different cultures may also
differ by the way they manipulate the aforementioned opposi-
tions when channeling their aggression. One culture may appeal
primarily to the word, the other to the deed. Two symbolic acts
undertaken by the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis near the end
of 1989 are an interesting illustration of this. On December 4 the
Armenian Supreme Soviet, together with the corresponding or-
gan of the Mountainous Gharabagh district, declared the reunifi-
cation of the district with the Armenian SSR. This was a purely
symbolic action, since both Armenia and Mountainous Ghara-
bagh were part of and subordinate to the Soviet Union, whose
Supreme Soviet very soon declared the adopted resolution to be

22
This theme in particular was discussed at a conference on the Cha-
risma of Power and Holy Wars (Moscow, August 1992).

266
invalid. In response to the Armenian challenge, the Azerbaijanis
performed their own symbolic act on December 31, which was
much less abstract and much more aggressive. They demolished
the frontier barriers and posts along the entire border between the
Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan and Iran, de-
claring in a practical way the unification of the two Azerbaijans,
the Azerbaijanian SSR and the Iranian Azerbaijan. While the
Armenians realized unification with their Gharabaghian brothers
and sisters on the level of wo r d, the Azerbaijanis united with
their Iranian brothers and sisters in reality, on the level of
d e e d: the Soviet militia was busy hunting out the Iranian citi-
zens across the territory of the Azerbaijanian SSR long after the
frontier fortifications were reconstructed in mid-January of 1990.
As a matter of fact, imitation played a much greater role in
the conflict than one may think. The Azerbaijani national move-
ment in general was a response to the Gharabagh movement in
Armenia and Mountainous Gharabagh, with the large-scale ral-
lies of November 1988 in Baku being in a sense a reflection of
the February rallies in Yerevan. One may even suspect that the
final form of Azerbaijani national identity was shaped due to this
response to the Armenian challenge. Interestingly, the initial
phase of this nation-making process also seems to be a reaction
to Armenian activities. As T. Svietochowski (1990: 37) writes,
[t]he political awakening of the Azerbaijanis with the rise of
political parties, programs, and ideologies took place in 1905,
largely as a response to the Armenian challenge.
23
The railroad
blockade of Armenia by Azerbaijan, which led the US Congress
to pass Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act (1992) limiting
US aid to Azerbaijan, was actually the Azerbaijani response to
the Armenian blockade of the railroad section leading to the
Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan; this blockade
being in its turn the response of the Armenians to the Azerbai-
janis blockade of the rebel Mountainous Gharabagh district.
These different types of aggressive manifestations evidently
reflect the different cultures of violence. Perhaps, the preva-
lence of the impulsive deed over the word was the reason why in
Sumgait the allowed three days were enough for anti-

23
One can notice a sad regularity: both awakenings of the Azerbaijanis,
in 1905 and 1988, followed large-scale anti-Armenian pogroms.

Armenian feelings to develop rapidly into large-scale pogroms,
24

while in Armenia nine months were needed to articulate and re-
alize anti-Azerbaijani violence. In Armenia, as we already men-
tioned, the Sumgait pogroms were generally perceived as a new
and thoroughly organized genocide of Armenians. While this
theory, like any conspiracy theory, is rather exaggerated and
one-sided, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the pogroms
were really organized.
25
Organization seems to be a feature only
of the initial phase, however. The large-scale violence that oc-
curred later was shaped by some hidden mechanism of self-
organization.
Almost immediately the violence became widespread and in-
cluded some favorite plots. In Sumgait, for example, it became
the custom to strip the women naked and force them to dance
amidst the hooting mob before raping and killing them (Sumgait
1990: inset after p. 32). During the already mentioned mini-
pogroms that took place in Kasakh in May 1988 (they were
scanty because only a few Armenian families remained in the
town by that time), a similar scenario was exported by a group of
experts: two young Armenian women, a teenager and her elder
sister in the last months of pregnancy, were stripped naked and
persecuted by the mob along a street, until some elderly Azerbai-
janis rescued them, throwing blankets over them and giving them
refuge in their house.
26
Strangely, the naked dance torture has a
historical precedent it proved to be the favorite entertainment

24
When Gorbachev referred to the three days of the Sumgait pogroms
he persistently claimed that Soviet troops arrived three hours too late to
defend the Armenian population. In reality the Soviet troops were pre-
sent in Sumgait during the pogroms but were commanded to stop them
only after three days of unrestricted violence.
25
See Shahmuratian 1990 for eyewitness accounts of the pogroms.
26
According to the eyewitness mentioned in Ftn. 18. Later the girls
were taken to the nearest town in Armenia. The pregnant woman man-
aged to give birth to a child without any serious problems, but her fa-
ther, who was in a hospital in Armenia when the misfortune happened,
didnt survive his daughters disgrace he died of a heart attack soon
after. Being a well-known and respected person in Kazakh, he couldnt
believe that the Azerbaijanis would do any harm to him or his family
and therefore he didnt follow his compatriots who fled the town ear-
lier. The girls were rescued, evidently, by some Azerbaijani acquaint-
ances of his.

268
of executioners during the Genocide of 1915 in Ottoman Turkey
and during the massacres of Armenians in Cilicia in 1909. It was
described in the poem The Dance (based on the evidence of a
German woman-eyewitness of the Cilician massacres
27
) by the
Armenian poet Siamanto (see H. Marutyan 2000: 281-282), who
himself became a victim of the Genocide in 1915. A question
inevitably arises whether we are dealing with a specific culture
of national violence here with more than 80 years of latent
functioning and secret mechanisms of the information transfer.
Like the sudden awakening of the banned fedayi movement
with specific details of behavior, attire and names during the
conflict over Mountainous Gharabagh a similar question arises
on the possibility of a functioning century long underground
military tradition in Soviet Armenia. I think, rather, that we are
dealing with a phenomenon, where a historically based trigger is
enough to give the aggressive behavior some specific cultural
shaping, while aggression and violence in general are more sub-
ject to self-organization rather than being the result of some
permanent culture of violence; the peculiarities of this self-
organization, of course, being in their turn products of a less ob-
vious and implicit cultural background including the culture of
violence as its intrinsic constituent.
Similarly, the violence against Meskhetian Turks in Fergana
(Uzbekistan) in the summer of 1989 almost immediately took
such a well-organized shape (the violent mob behaving like a
beast of prey, one moment hiding, the other moment attacking)
and was so brutal, that it was thought to be organized by crimi-
nals who specialized in such brutal acts. But, here too, we
seem to be dealing in the first place with the phenomenon of the
self-organization of violence, though the presence of criminals
here, as in any violent mass action, contributed its specific brutal
touch to the violent manifestations. By the way, the Fergana po-
groms show that interethnic violence does not distinguish race
and faith the groups in conflict here were both Turkic and
Muslim.
The self-organization mechanism is inherent not only for an
attacking group but also within a defending group and within
mass rallies in general. For example, during the February rallies
of 1988 in Yerevan, discussed in the Path of Rebellion and Fes-

27
This episode was used recently in A. Egoyans film Ararat.

tival, neither the Soviet authorities nor the official press could
believe that the huge disciplined rallies were a product of self-
organization and not of specific malefactors who had acquired
highly professional organizing capacities. The solidarity of Ar-
menians living all over the world was perceived, especially by
Azerbaijanis, as an impressive result of such perfect organization
and never as the spontaneous self-organization of the nation. The
outbreaks of destructive mob violence in Sumgait were by con-
trast considered to be spontaneous rather than carefully organ-
ized (Svietochowski 1990: 42), and never as a manifestation of
the respective culture of violence.
The burst of ethnic violence at the end of the Soviet regime
and during the post-Soviet period can be described as a violent
response by the living ethnic organism of the USSR to the forced
increase of entropy imposed by Soviet national policy we dis-
cussed the language aspects of this increase of entropy in the
Path of Language. Each culture reacts according to its own cul-
ture of violence, although there are also cases where the violent
response of a nation to the new conditions of life may create
some new types of violence, traditionally absent in that particular
society.
28
Nowadays, the unprecedented transition from social-
ism to a market economy (or an even more paradoxical transi-
tion, as we saw in the Path back to Prehistory) recreates some
old forms and creates new forms of aggression as a by-product.
In contemporary Moscow, for example, traditional anti-Semitism
has given way to animosity toward peoples from the Caucasus
and Transcaucasus, the so called persons of Caucasian national-
ity we discussed another aspect of this situation in the Path of
Ancestors.
As we already know, the war equalized both sides in this con-
flict. Today, only a few analysts may remember the nine months
of the fight for asymmetry and symmetry, a reflection of the dif-
ferent cultures of violence. Although Gorbachev certainly
didnt realize the situation of original asymmetry, he lost a
chance to stop the chain reaction of ethnic violence in his coun-

28
For example, the Soviet policy of providing Asian Eskimo and
Chukcha children with compulsory education in state boarding schools
brought to life in the 1960s and 1970s an unknown form of aggression,
which was a product of the new social unit the adolescent peer group
(see Krupnik and Chlenov n.d.: ch. 13).

270
try. It is true, he would hardly receive the Nobel Prize for estab-
lishing non-violence in the empire of evil, which he destroyed
by letting the djin of violence out of its communist bottle or by
creating a new one fed on the old myths.
Although peoples, and especially their rulers, rarely learn
from the lessons of history, nevertheless each case of ethnic vio-
lence has to be analyzed, since only by knowing the differences
between the cultures of violence of the societies in conflict is it
possible to predict and hopefully stop the ethnic violence, which
was a distinctive characteristic not only of the end of the 20
th

century but seems to have become a shameful mark of the 21
st

century as well.

The Path Decorated with Statues

THIRTEEN

THE PATH DECORATED WITH STATUES
Fighting with Memory and Monuments

The Path of Pre-Monuments
A monument is a coagulation of visualized memory in our world
of oblivion. It has memory in its meaning (monere means to re-
mind in Latin), though not so obviously as its synonym memo-
rial. A continuum of memory of past events would create an over-
crowded informational chaos, but fortunately we are granted with
a capacity to easily forget our past, if we dont have a means to fix
it. But even when we invent such a means, for example, a script,
we are not guaranteed from inaccuracies, misinterpretations and
disinformation, as we saw in the Path of Naming.
Monuments mark only key events, and the most important
key event of any human group goes back to the times of the Be-
ginning and the great ancestors we know this already from the
Path of Ancestors. In the Australian Aboriginal tradition, such
monuments are dissolved in a local landscape, since many ances-
tral heroes have passed away by transforming into or causing one
or another particular of the landscape a mountain, a rock, a
river or a lake. The landscapes of Armenia also sometimes bear a
story of the beginning. For example, the wavy hills on the east-
ern slope of the Greater Mt. Masis (Ararat) represent a merchant
and his caravan of camels hardened into stone as a result of
Gods punishment (Ghanalanian 1969: no.72); the Azhdaha Mt.
was once a vishap (dragon) that was turned into stone due to the
prayers of a shepherd, whose herd the vishap threatened, while
the many nearby stones represent the shepherd himself together
with his herd, who was hardened into stone for his attempt to
cheat God by sacrificing two rams instead of the promised

274
twelve (Ghanalanian 1969: no.63); the Shakeh waterfall in Sisian
miraculously appeared to hide the virgin Shakeh from her perse-
cutors (Ghanalanian 1969: no.246), or the Red Hills to the south
of Khoy gained their color from the blood shed by Vardan Ma-
mikonian and his warriors (Ghanalanian 1969: no.80). But while
stories like these are perceived today only as beautiful romantic
folk poetry, the Australian sacred landscape helps aborigines to
maintain ties with the roots of their culture. Thus a natural land-
scape presents a kind of memorial complex. However, a cultural,
man-made landscape may also become a memorial, as Armenia
as a whole is considered to present an open museum in the Path
of Memory.
Another universal type of monument is already man-made,
but nevertheless follows some natural scheme. This monument
rises at the spot where a hero or more often his dragonish oppo-
nent found his death. We already know one example of such a
monument the fiery pillars forming the Heavenly Temple of
Grigor the Illuminators vision mentioned in the Path of Faith.
This visionary monument, which served as a prototype for the
jmiatsin Cathedral, rose where the heavenly fighters arch-
opponent, the dragonish master of Hell, was beaten and where
the holy virgins perished.
1
Actually, we are dealing with the ar-
chetype of raising a vertical monument a pillar, a stele or other
variant of the axis mundi and Cosmic Tree from the body of a
sacrifice (cf. Abrahamian and Demirkhanian 1985). Thus archaic
monuments of this type are based on the idea of death and resur-
rection (vertical rising) no wonder archaeologists find stone
phalli in ancient burial sites as a natural embodiment of this idea.
That is why whenever one deals with a rising monument, one
should expect to find a sacrifice in the story of its origin cf. the
different types of building sacrifices (Bauopfer) in myth and rit-
ual (see Hartland 1913; Baiburin 1983: 55-69; Abrahamian
2001a: 366). Even if such a monument rose without an origi-
nal building sacrifice, it nevertheless gains one later, post factum,
for example, as a relic of a martyred saint, which is brought es-
pecially to be kept in a newly built church, or else as an occa-
sional victim the builder of the new Cathedral in Yerevan,
who was killed during construction in early 2001, can serve as a

1
On the virgins relation to the dragon see Abrahamian 2001a: 367;
1994: 25-26, 28-29.

The Path Decorated with Statues 275
recent dramatic example of this archetypal regularity, though the
official building sacrifice here was Grigor the Illuminator,
whose name the Cathedral was to carry and whose relics were
especially brought from Rome to be placed in the foundation
of the building on the day of the Cathedrals opening.
Thus a monument is in fact a grave tomb. In any case, this
seems to be one of the most significant features of the monu-
ment. In this sense the Armenian khach'k'ar (cross-stone) is an
ideal manifestation of this and many other characteristics of a
monument: it is a gravestone, rises vertically, often bears an in-
scription appealing to memory, and easily transforms into a
monument erected to commemorate events other than death.
2

The monument, being a manifestation of the key events of a
group, becomes an axis around which these events are regularly
commemorated. Sometimes the monument bears direct signs of
the rituals that were performed at the site, as the ancient stone
vishap (dragon) monuments found in Armenia show carved in
relief a bull skin thrown over their tops. So a monument, which
has originated from a sacrifice (has risen out of it), itself de-
mands some new sacrifices.
Key events are usually connected with the great ancestors
no wonder that monuments often tend to personify them. The
Australian tradition of hardening the ancestors into stone is al-
ready in a sense their figural personification a rock, in princi-
ple, has to resemble the heroic figure that it is believed to per-
sonify. Let us recall the aforementioned Armenian figurative
natural monuments representing one legendary figure or another,
although they personify, as a rule, some minor figures of tradi-
tional mythology. Theoretically, there is one step from recog-
nizing a hero in a natural rock to touching a rock up in order to
make it more recognizable and, finally, another step further to
carving a figure of a hero out of a shapeless stone.
3

2
See Sahakian 1994; H. Petrosyan 2001b: 60-70; 2004 for more detail
and bibliography on the khach'k'ar.
3
However, even in this last step of creativity the figure to be carved
seems to be hidden inside the stone or wood, and the sculptor who sees
it with his inner sight actually releases it out of the shapeless material
this phenomenon is said to be experienced by any carver in one form
or another. Cf. Pinocchios birth out of a log by guiding his father-
carvers hand from within the log.

276
However rough and speculative this outline of the develop-
ment of the monument idea may be, it nevertheless guides us
toward the monuments of the great Soviet ancestors, Lenin and
Stalin, who, like their ancient prototypes, demanded regular sac-
rifices the countless victims of the totalitarian regime.

The Path of Reinterpretation
The re-evaluation of history, heroes and gods naturally leads to a
corresponding re-evaluation of their embodiment in monuments.
Such re-evaluations can be observed when uncovering layers
during an archaeological dig: for example, a stone phallus wor-
shipped in a lower archaeological layer, is then used as a build-
ing material in the next to the surface layer. But, as a rule, this is
not evidence of an ideological revolution. Rather, this is evi-
dence of ethnic moves, conquests and the fall of cultures. A good
illustration of this is the cross-stone standing in the yard of the
city museum in Van, Turkey. Originally it was an Urartian stele
densely covered with cuneiform inscriptions, which was then
used by Armenian carvers almost twenty centuries later to trans-
form it into a cross-stone, proving once again the Armenian say-
ing about a trimmed stone that never lies too long on the ground.
Presently, the traditional composition of the cross-stone only has
traces of the cross left on it. Evidently the local Muslim popula-
tion broke off the relief of the cross in order to deprive the
monument of its Christian symbolism, when the Armenians of
Van were forced to leave their homeland during the Genocide.
However, as the Armenians couldnt erase in full the cuneiforms,
which were preserved in the lower part of the monument, the
Muslims couldnt eliminate the cross, which, being deprived of
its carved design, looks now even more accentuated, as a sign of
the cross.
4

Another example of the reinterpretation of a monument is the
fate of the 103-foot concrete cross sitting atop Mt. Davidson in
San Francisco. The monument was built in 1934 to commemo-
rate the San Franciscans in the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and
Merchant Seamen who fought and died in World War I. In 1990
the City was sued over its ownership of a Christian monument.
In order to uphold the principle of separation of church and state,
the City had two options demolish the monument or sell the

4
I am indebted to Hrag Varjabedian for this observation.

land upon which it stands. In the summer of 1997 the City put up
for public auction 0.38 acres of the 40-acre Mt. Davidson Park,
including the land upon which the cross was located. The win-
ning bidder was the Council of Armenian American Organiza-
tions of Northern California, who offered to purchase the land
for $26,000. The City accepted this offer, which was approved
by voters in November 1997 (Proposition F: Shall the City sell
0.38 acres of Mt. Davidson Park, including the land on which the
cross is located?). A Rebuttal to Proponents Argument in Fa-
vor of Proposition F claimed that contrary to the proponents
misleading claim, the Cross was not dedicated to the victims of
war, but was built specifically for Christian worship services and
was dedicated on an Easter morning as the Sunrise Easter
Cross. That is, the atheistic opponents (Sidney Kass, John Mes-
sina and Bruce John Shourt) were actually against concealing the
religious aim of a monument under secular commemoration.
They also expressed an anxiety that the new owners of the Cross
would add a memorial to the Armenians massacred by the
Turks. But while these opponents just expressed a general athe-
istic protest against entangling the city of San Francisco with
religion (the supposed Armenian memorial seemed to also be
perceived in a Christian context), the Turkish opponents (Federa-
tion of Turkish American Associations and Turkish American
Association of California) didnt doubt that the Armenian reli-
gious community would dedicate the Cross to the genocide of
the Armenians, an event which these Turkish opponents denied.
That is, the Turks were anxious that a religious monument would
be used to express political, namely anti-Turkish ideas. As a mat-
ter of fact, the Armenians didnt conceal this aim. More than that,
this strategy brought them an important ally, the Jews, who were
objecting against the Mt. Davidson Cross as a Christian symbol
(there was a rabbi among the nine San Franciscans who filed the
lawsuit of 1990), but, as a nation with a genocide in its past, didnt
object against the same Cross being used as a memorial dedicated
to the victims of a genocide (cf., e.g., Weinstein 1997).
On Easter Sunday in 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
pressed a gold telegraph key in Washington DC, sending an
electrical impulse to floodlights at the base of the structure light-
ing it for the first time. During the energy crisis of the 1970s,
night-time lighting of the cross ended. Efforts to illuminate the
cross again died in the 1980s amid threats of lawsuits (Fields

278
1997). The new owners of the Cross were allowed to light it up
for only two nights in a year. One of these dates was decided to
always be the 24
th
of April, the date of commemoration of the
Genocide victims, so that the Cross was actually becoming an
Armenian monument on this night. While the other date was
selected more loosely as American Easter Sunday,
5
stressing the
American national identity of the Cross, especially since a
non-Armenian group usually takes responsibility for illuminating
the Cross (for example, the first year it was a local gay church)
on this date. Thus since 1997, once a year the Mt. Davidson
Cross changes its American nationality into an Armenian one
and the Armenian victims of the 1915 Genocide join the Ameri-
can victims of World War I.
6

There are also many examples of the ideological re-
evaluation of monuments. As we know from the Path of Faith,
the conversion of Armenia to Christianity began with a fight
with pagan monuments. Even the vision of St. Grigor the Illumi-
nator, which preceded conversion, implicitly had the theme of a
pagan temple destruction (see Abrahamian 2001a). In the history
of culture, in general, reinterpretation, rather than destruction or
prohibition, often turns out to be a more effective means of fight-
ing the old, reformers have long since fought with ineradicable
gods, festivals and customs in this way. Though it is not always
clear whether this was a result of a wise and psychologically
precise strategy of the conductors of a new faith or whether it
was a way the tenacious old adapted in order to survive under
new conditions. The same could be said regarding monuments.
And while it is not difficult to recognize a Christian cathedral in
the modern mosque appearance of Aya Sophia, in the case of
other Christian monuments only an archaeological study (though
usually not available) may allow us to recognize a pre-Christian
foundation of the monument. More than that, the concept of de-
struction itself in ancient times could have another meaning
closer to that of reinterpretation (cf. Hakobyan 2001: 150-
152). In the case of memorial monuments, besides such reinter-
pretation, a technical-pragmatic moment is also present the old
monument is used as a base for the new one not necessarily as a

5
Armenians traditionally celebrate Easter on a different date.
6
I am indebted to A. Der-Kiureghian for the information on the Mt.
Davidson Cross lighting.

triumph of the new over the old, but just because an old and for-
gotten (or an alien) monument is a ready and prepared base for
creating a new one. We know already of one such example the
Urartian stele turned into an Armenian cross-stone turned into a
non-Christian monument.

The Path of Monument-Crushers
Beginning in the years of perestroika, the stormy processes of re-
evaluating traditional Soviet key events, heroes and gods was
started, which by the end of perestroika and especially in the be-
ginning of the post-communist era naturally was readdressed
toward the corresponding monuments.
From the Path of Renaming we know that such processes
usually ended in renaming the former significant Soviet realities.
That is, old realities were being eliminated on the level of
h e a r i n g, while the fight with old monuments realizes the
elimination on the level of s e e i n g, proving the saying Out of
sight, out of mind. This fight with monuments resembles simi-
lar fights that took place during the French revolution at the end
of the 18
th
century and the Russian revolution in the beginning of
the 20
th
century.
7
By the end of the 20
th
century, the Soviet
monuments, like their predecessors, were often dismantled very
aggressively, with a touch of barbarian euphoria.
8
For example,
the monument of Dzerzhinski, the forefather of the KGB,
which was one of the firsts in the long list of dismantled monu-

7
On the Soviet attitude toward monuments (in the context of architec-
tural monuments in general) see a very informative and stimulating
book by V. Papernyi (1996; English transl. Paperny 2002), which is in
fact a semiotical study of Soviet culture, the initial revolutionary Cul-
ture One and its successor, the totalitarian Culture Two.
8
In the context of the two cultures introduced by Papernyi, the post-
Soviet culture, at least its initial phase described in this Path, is in a
sense close to Culture One the two cultures are thought to form a cy-
cle. We leave the discussion of the nature of the coming new culture to
future investigators, though a number of new monuments both in Rus-
sia and Armenia seem to indicate the mixed, often kitch character of
this new post-Soviet culture. Let us only cite here the attitude of the
two cultures toward creation and destruction: Culture One strived to
destroy everything first and then to build up everything anew, while
Culture Two just combined these two trends into a single one (Papernyi
1996: 315).

280
ments in late-Soviet and post-Soviet space, was pulled down in
the night between the 21
st
and 22
nd
of August, 1991, and became
the culmination of the peoples festival of victory over the Au-
gust coup dtat in Moscow. The next day the people slaked their
thirst for revenge and lashed out their accumulated destructive
power by covering the pedestal of the monument with offensive
inscriptions, tearing off the KGB cast-iron coat of arms and
crushing the granite pedestal, which, however, was solid enough
not to yield to the peoples rage, so that the participants of this
barbarous action had to be content with only little fragments of
granite used later as trophies and souvenirs. There was an opin-
ion that through these aggressive actions the people kept them-
selves away from the temptation to apply violence toward the
communists (Panarin 1991). The disfigured pedestal in front of
the KGB building kept the traces of the successful fight against
Evil,
9
for a long time. The latters defeat being marked by the
winners symbol the Russian tricolor.
10

In the periphery of the USSR, in the national Republics, the
euphoria of the fight with monuments didnt confine itself only
to the symbols of the totalitarian regime. Nationalists addressed
their destructive rage toward everything related to Russia, these
anti-colonial outbursts making no distinction between commu-
nist leaders and men of culture.
11
In Yerevan, for example, some

9
On other evil-fighting (dragon-fighting) aspects of this fight against
the monument and the organizers of the coup see Borodatova and
Abrahamian 1992: 54-55.
10
Interestingly, just after the sculpture was taken away, three flags took
its place the Russian white-blue-red tricolor, the flag of the party of
constitutional democrats and the Armenian red-blue-orange tricolor
(Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1991, August 24, p.2). Later, naturally, only the
Russian tricolor was left to crown the pedestal. The Armenian tricolor
was evidently raised by an Armenian participant of the dismantling
Armenians were among other representatives of the former Soviet na-
tions who defended the White House, the building of the Russian
parliament. The Georgian national flag was also brought to the White
House by its Georgian defenders and was even exhibited in the Mos-
cow Museum of Revolution where an exhibit dedicated to the revolt
against the August coup was organized soon after its failure.
11
In some Russian regions, minor sculptures of the men of Russian
culture were also crushed. In Saratov, for example, sculptures of Gogol,
Ostrovski, Pushkin, Chekhov and Glinka were thrown down from their

minor monuments of famous Russian figures that were placed in
front of schools bearing their respective names were moved
months before the principal monument of Lenin was moved in
1991 from the central square bearing his name. The fate of the
bust of Lenins wife Krupskaia was also shared by the busts of
Pushkin and Chekhov. Pushkin, it is true, was returned to his
pedestal after just nine days,
12
and a new statue replaced Chek-
hovs bust in 1998.
13
In any case, the fight with monuments in
Yerevan only had an episodic anti-Russian focus
14
and didnt
involve enraged mobs. On the contrary, these monuments usu-
ally disappeared in secrecy, without spectators.
Perhaps, the strangest figure in the list of dismantled monu-
ments in Yerevan was the statue of the Worker in an industrial
region of Yerevan. It is still a riddle why the Worker shared the
fate of key communist figures. According to some residents of

pedestals in a public park (Respublika Armenia, 1992, 9 January).
However, these acts of vandalism were a result of anarchism and hooli-
ganism, rather than anti-communism or nationalism.
12
Pushkins statue was removed by the nationalist but still Soviet city
authorities in early September of 1990 in accordance with a resolution
they passed on dismantling dilapidated pedestals an excuse to get
rid of Soviet and Russian monuments and was returned due to the
efforts of a Pushkin school teacher of Russian language and literature.
13
As a matter of fact, the Chekhov monument was destroyed as a result
of the awkward maneuvers of a truck, and some nationalists used this
circumstance to add Chekhovs bust to the list of dismantled monu-
ments. Some activists of the Gharabagh Movement were eager to have
it back, but, as I was told, they couldnt trace the dismantled head, so a
stele was temporarily placed there with an inscription that said Chek-
hovs statue will be erected on this site.
14
This short anti-Russian attitude can be compared with a short, no more
than three days long burst of anti-Russian sentiment after a student was
shot to death by a Soviet Army officer during the cruel dispersal of the
peaceful protests at the Yerevan airport on the 4
th
of July, 1988. Interest-
ingly, no anti-Georgian or anti-Central Asian sentiments were noted dur-
ing this short anti-Russian manifestation, although the officer who shot
the student was Georgian by nationality and the Theater square, the tradi-
tional place of the rallies in Yerevan, was encircled by soldiers of Mon-
golian appearance. This proved once again that Soviet (Soviet Army
in this case) was perceived by the non-Russian population of the national
republics, at least in Armenia, as Russian, the Soviet Union being per-
ceived, at least unconsciously, as a Russian empire.

282
the neighborhood, the monument was moved because some local
businessmen wanted to create a complex of cafes, parking, etc.
on the place occupied by the vanished monument. Thus the
Worker, a symbol of the proletarian era of socialism, yielded its
place to the new symbols of the approaching era of capitalism. In
the late 1990s, an informant noted ironically that the monument
was removed prophetically: presently, when there are no work
places in Armenia, no statue dedicated to a worker is needed any
more.
15
Another informant was happy to know that this ugly
monument was removed at last that is, the fight with monu-
ments was approved of for aesthetic and not political reasons.
Aesthetic arguments also played a significant role when
Lenins monument and especially its pedestal were to be removed.
The statue was created by the famous sculptor Sergei Merkurov,
once a student of Rodin, who was trusted to take Lenins death
mask and who later created many highly professional statues of
Lenin. The Yerevan mayor of the time, Hambardzum Galstian,
said in his short speech before the official ceremony of disman-
tling that he was hesitating about taking the final decision on dis-
mantling the monument, since he was not sure whether the statue
was really a sample of high art or not. Now I am convinced that it
is not, said the mayor, evidently, an excuse for an action that
strongly resembled an act of vandalism.
Naturally, the main focus of the monument-fighters were the
great ancestors of the Soviet regime. Monuments of Stalin had
already been removed after his death. In Yerevan, one of the
largest monuments of Stalin, the pride of the Armenians during
the Stalin years, was dismantled in one night in the early 1960s
the death of the double of the tyrant, like the life of the proto-
type, was surrounded with secrecy. The monument was pulled
down causing the death of a soldier (the dismantling was done
by the army) being, hopefully, the last victim of Stalins
bloody regime. However, even after its death, Stalins statue
could remain dangerous. Thus the wise captains that ruled ships

15
A joke I heard in 2005 finally explains the whereabouts of the miss-
ing Worker monument. The joke relates that the Worker had left for the
United States to earn money and was even helping the monuments that
remained in Yerevan by sending them money from time to time during
the crisis years.

along the Siberian river Yenisei were said to change their course
in order not to pass over the spot where a white marble statue of
Stalin was sunk in 1961. This statue once stood in a pantheon
dedicated to Stalins years of exile in this region before the
Revolution.
16

After Stalin, Lenin remained the main focus of the monu-
ment-fighters revolutionary rage. Sometimes this rage took
whimsical forms, as, for example, in Tbilisi in August 1990.
People threw paint at the statue of Lenin that stood in the square
bearing his name, pelted it with bottles filled with petrol and fi-
nally put tires around it and set them on fire.
17
Thus the fireproof
monument of bronze was burned as if at a medieval stake.

The Path of Moderate Executioners
However, this fight was not so ferocious everywhere. In certain
cases Lenins monument was not destroyed but simply moved
within the hierarchy of values, as, for example, it is presently in
Moscow Lenins statue is presently accepted simply as a
monument marking an avenue bearing his name. Perhaps, the
most telling is the rearrangement of the sacral center in Elista,
the capital of Kalmykia. A monument of Buddha was erected
here in post-communist times the Kalmyks are geographically
the most western Buddhists. In Soviet times, the ideological cen-
ter of the city was a monument of Lenin not far from this new
monument. Lenin then faced the building where the local com-
munist party headquarters was located, which was a natural ori-
entation of the statue representing the communist god toward
the cathedral of his priests and worshippers. Presently,
when the symbols of the old faith have lost their significance and
power, Lenin nevertheless was not dismantled or dishonored
here, as elsewhere, although the reason for such tolerance was

16
See an article by N. Savel'ev in Komsomol'skaia Pravda (1988, 17
May, in Russian).
17
See the article Lenin in Tbilisi: Only Feet Were Left, Kommersant,
1990, No. 34 (in Russian). The title of the article refers to the fact that
the next day after this public execution, the city authorities decided to
dismantle the monument in a more civilized manner using cranes. But
since Lenin stood so firm, they were forced to just throw him down.
Nevertheless, Lenin was so well-rooted they couldnt get rid of his feet
and had to cover them with a tarpaulin.

284
not the Kalmyks faithfulness to communist ideas, but reflected
their respect toward a tribal ancestor Lenin was of Kalmyk
background from his grandmothers side.
18
However, in the pre-
sent organization of the sacral center, Buddha has been placed
behind the monument of Lenin, so, to keep religious etiquette,
Lenin was correspondingly turned and now faces Buddha in ac-
cordance with the new hierarchy of values. It is true, that for
some time Lenin showed his back to the party headquarters as
well, when the communist leaders moved into a new building
across from the old one, which was given to the Kalmyk State
University. In 1993, the Kalmykia presidents administration
occupied the new building, so that Lenin also disrespectfully
turned away from the new authorities. But when in 1994 the
statue of Buddha was erected nearby, behind Lenins monument,
Lenins non-etiquette behavior became too obvious, and in
1998 he was turned around 180. Even though Buddha is not
opposed to Lenin explicitly, this pair nevertheless presents a sys-
tem of semiotical oppositions quite well: big/small (Lenins
statue, which is placed on a tall pedestal, is considerably larger
in size than Buddhas), black/white (Lenin is cast of dark bronze,
while Buddha is chiseled of white marble), metal/stone and, re-
spectively, culture/nature, active/passive (Lenin stands and
even began to move recently, while Buddha sits), and finally,
inward/outward (Lenin appeals with his hand outstretched, while
Buddha is immersed within himself).
19

An example of a civilized dismantling is the already men-
tioned ceremony in Yerevan, where, in accordance with a decree
of the City Hall, Lenins monument was taken down. The popu-
lation gathered in a festive mood, but without engaging in any of
the acts of vandalism that typically accompanied such events.
Many people, in fact, witnessed the dismantling ceremony with a
sense of ambivalence, the sort of ambivalence that in psychoana-
lytic literature is traditionally attributed to feelings concerning
the father: fear, love, remorse and, at the same time, joy at hav-
ing been delivered from the tyrant, who in this particular case

18
Similar national pride saved Stalins statues in his native town Gori
in Georgia.
19
I am indebted to Elza-Bair Goutchinova for the semiotical analysis of
the Lenin Buddha pair, as well as for providing me with information
on the Kalmyk re-evaluation of monuments.

was also seen as the locus of the dark forces that had hindered
Armenias normal development. Although the ceremony was
expected to take place late in the afternoon, many people came to
the square in the morning to discuss the forthcoming event and
see the familiar view for the last time. The discourse, mainly be-
tween cautious elderly people and revolutionary youth, covered
topics from the concrete role of Lenin in the fate of the Armeni-
ans to the practice of removing monuments in general. Some
opponents of the dismantling also appealed to the artistic value
of the sculpture. In one of the many discussions that I witnessed
during these last hours of the monument, an elderly man, for ex-
ample, told his young opponent that by taking away Lenins
statue the stores would not fill with goods. Another man insisted
that whatever harm Armenia had endured because of Lenin, he
nevertheless remains a part of Armenian history, and to remove
him from the square will be equal to removing him from history.
His opponent noted that Lenin deserved to be expelled from Ar-
menian history in order to give it a chance for revival. As we can
see, the magical and psychological aspects of dismantling were
also present in this improvised round table. When the cere-
mony finally started and the monument was beheaded before
being moved from the pedestal, many people (including myself),
as I was told later, had a momentary uneasy feeling of being a
participant in an act of public execution, especially as some rain
water that had strangely accumulated inside the hollow head
flew out of it as if it was blood. But when the statue was lifted
high in the air by the hoisting crane, suddenly the inscription
ARMENIA on top of the hotel bearing this name, which had
been obstructed by the monument, became visible from where I
was witnessing the ceremony, the uncomfortable feeling left me.
People around me also noticed this opening of Armenia and
greeted this magic with cries of excitement and joy.
20

20
Currently, in 2005, the ARMENIA sign is no longer on the top of
the hotel. By the late 1990s, the hotel was purchased by a foreign
owner and its name was changed to Marriott Armenia. The elevation
of the hotel building facing the square now bears only the Marriott
inscription over the main entrance. The same sign can also be seen on
the side elevation facing a side street; it is written in large letters over a
smaller Armenia inscription, a symptomatic change that could hardly
have been imagined during this burst of patriotic feelings.

286
It is interesting to note that the dismantling ceremony concluded
unexpectedly with a distinctive and spontaneous ritual of its
own. When the statue was placed on the gun carriage next to the
pedestal, a couple of policemen had to guard it from some peo-
ples rage a young man even had a wild desire to urinate on the
thrown down Lenin in revenge of his fathers fate, as he ex-
plained to the policeman. Some of the people standing in the
public garden nearby began throwing pebbles at the toppled
leader. Then, when the gun carriage moved through the crowded
square, other people, witnessing the action of these individuals,
decided to follow suit. Not having any pebbles at their disposal,
they began throwing small change at the slowly and solemnly
receding statue. One may note that coins were a natural substi-
tute for pebbles in a crowded square, but the change of ritual at-
tribute aggressive stone being replaced by the coin, symbol-
izing prosperity immediately brought with it a change of mood.
For while the initiators of the ritual were clearly motivated by
feelings of aggression, those who threw coins acted with the sort
of joyous enthusiasm that always characterizes rites involving
the flinging of coins.
21
Thus the toppled leader made his depar-
ture from the square that bore his name, accompanied by clink-
ing coins and shouts of joy that dispelled whatever ambivalence
of feeling may have accompanied the ceremony of the statues
dismantling.
22

Coin throwing also signifies the idea of return people throw
coins, usually into water, in those places where they would like
to return once again. So the ritual of the monument expulsion
(throwing of stones) actually changed into a ritual of inviting it
back (throwing of change) beginning with farewell, it ended
with see you later. In this sense the dismantling ceremony in

21
A similar offering of coins to the Unknown Soldier memorial with an
eternal fire in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), a new practice introduced in the
late 1980s, was perceived by some people as an offence to the memory
of the perished heroes symbolized by this monument see a short arti-
cle under the pun title Would You Have Some Change for the Mem-
ory in Komsomol'skaia Pravda, 1988, 7 May (in Russian).
22
The psychoanalytical key to this act involves defiling the statue, in-
sofar as money has traditionally been used as a symbolic substitute for
excrement. For this observation I am indebted to the psychologist N.
Bogatova.

Yerevan differed from similar ceremonies elsewhere in the for-
mer communist states, which were intended to guarantee that the
ousted one would never return. As we know, during such rituals
people often crushed dismantled statues, insulted, kicked and
trampled them down. However, in an earlier case, described by
S. Arutiunov (2000: 183), the same goal was achieved by a pro-
pitiatory sacrifice: in Ulan-Bator (Mongolia) the dismantled
statue of Stalin was besprinkled with milk and vodka made of
milk, so that the propitiated spirit of Stalin would never return.
Like in Yerevan, this ritual was born spontaneously during the
ceremony of dismantling. Arutiunov compares the Ulan-Bator
ceremony of the 1960s and the one in Yerevan in the 1990s with
another ritual good-bye which marked the conversion to Christi-
anity of the Kievian Rus in 988: people dragged the statue of the
pagan god Perun to the river, pulled it into the water and by
pushing slightly from the shore, helped it to cross the borders of
the state and swim away.
In the Yerevan ceremony, the path of Lenins statue was
much shorter Lenin crossed the square that once bore his name
to lie ignominiously in the yard of the Museum, with which, as
we will see in the Path of Memory, the monument was fighting
for dominance in space all the previous years of the Soviet re-
gime. It is symptomatic that although the yard where Lenin pres-
ently lies is usually referred to as the yard of the National Gal-
lery of Fine Arts, it can be equally attributed to the State Mu-
seum of History of Armenia and the former Museum of the
Revolution (which quite logically is now a part of the Museum
of History) since all the Museums occupy the same building, to
which Lenins monument lost the battle for space. Thus the dis-
course on whether Lenins statue presents a historical, ideologi-
cal or aesthetic value came to its final solution.
As a matter of fact, the fate of Lenins statue was widely dis-
cussed much earlier before its dismantling, again raising ques-
tions regarding its artistic and historical value. I have discussed
this problem a number of times with Hambardzum Galstian, the
first mayor of Yerevan after independence. My idea was to or-
ganize a park-museum of totalitarianism, which would gather all
the visual and documentary memory of the Soviet past of Arme-
nia. The dismantled monument together with numerous minor
statues of Lenin and other communist leaders gathered from dif-
ferent regions and institutions of Armenia would form the

288
monumental part of this park-museum, which would remind fu-
ture generations of the dramatic past of their country to prevent
repetitions of this experience.
23
The mayor liked the idea and
already had some preliminary suppositions on the place where
the future park-museum could be situated. However, this project
was never realized.
24

A similar project was realized in the Budapest Sculptural
Park-Museum. In February 2002, Budapest obtained a new mu-
seum Home of Terror, which demonstrates the particulars of
the nazi and communist regimes in Hungary. It is remarkable
that the museum occupies the same building in the center of the
Hungarian capital, where the headquarters of a Hungarian pro-
nazi party was located in 1944, this party being responsible for
hundreds of thousands of victims of nazism. From 1945 to 1956,
the Hungarian KGB analogue used the basement of this same
building to torture and kill thousands of dissidents. The present-
day authorities of Hungary, when opening the museum, ex-
pressed a hope that just by placing the demonstrated horrors into
the museum showcases the country would be rid of them forever
in real life.
25
In Moscow, they just piled up the dismantled stat-
ues, including Dzerzhinski, in a park near a new big gallery of
fine arts. For several years the statues were lying here in disor-
der, presenting rather the revolutionary anti-monument rage
rather than a museum of totalitarianism. Presently they have
risen to their feet and are standing in the same disorder, as if
preparing to go back to their pedestals in accordance with the
authoritarian changes in Russia that could be foreseen after the
parliamentary elections of 2003.
The idea of memorializing the undesirable past through
monuments as a didactic reminder has its ancient forerunners,
although it is not so widespread as the opposite trend to erase the
dramatic experience from the memory of generations by exclud-
ing it from the national history. Thus, in Hang Zhou (China) a
monument dedicated to Yue Fei, a mid-twelfth century victim of

23
Or, on the contrary, would feed the present-day nostalgia for the
comparatively secure times of the recent Soviet past.
24
In 1992, Hambardzum Galstian resigned and in December 1994 he
was assassinated at the threshold of his house, the killers remain at
large.
25
I took this information from The Japan Times, 2002, February 22, p. 9.

a treachery was erected together with those who betrayed him.
The traitors are shown kneeling, as if asking his pardon. This
historical reminder was erected on Yue Feis grave recently,
when the grave was restored after being destroyed by the per-
formers of the cultural revolution who wanted to erase the
non-communist past of China. In Hang Zhou, a statue of Qin
Gui, the principal villain of this story, was especially erected to
give every Chinese a chance to spit in the face of the nations
traitor (Von Senger 1995: 120, 362, no. 15). Parallel to the eter-
nal worship of a national hero we have here the eternal dis-
grace of his antagonist. While in Armenian tradition this hero/
traitor opposition, personified in the Vardan/ Vasak opposition,
is reflected on the level of wo r d and t h o u g h t (see the
Paths of Prudence and Rebelliousness), the Chinese tradition
also adds the level of d e e d through an acting monument.
The latter case of permanent channeling of a historically based
emotional tension can be correlated with the regular channeling
of ritual hatred toward mythological anti-heroes during seasonal
festivals all over the globe. Carnival figures of these arch-
enemies are specially constructed to be destroyed in one way or
another
26
(usually they are burned or are thrown into the water)
by the end of the ceremony as, for example, the huge figures of
Ravana and his two demon-companions, the principal anti-
heroes of the Ramayana epic, are regularly burned down in the
Indian festival of Dasahra. These ritual scarecrows thus resemble
a disposable monument to be dismantled during a festival of
destruction. On the other hand, monuments dismantled during
the festivals of perestroika, actually played the role of occa-
sional ritual scarecrows, which in traditional societies are be-
ing regularly created and destroyed.
However, the logic of the political festival of monument
dismantling is rather to eliminate the monument once and for-
ever in any case, these festivals hopefully havent become
regular ceremonies yet. So that the main trend is, as we have
mentioned more than once, to erase the dramatic experience and
its anti-heroes from the history. Here another aspect of the

26
Cf. the doll bosses, which some Japanese bosses place in their firms
to be mockingly beaten up by the employees who in this manner dis-
charge their everyday tension and aggressiveness. I am grateful to Pro-
fessor Koichi Inoue for a helpful discussion of this example.

290
monument should be mentioned the one we began this path
with. I mean the possible origin of the idea of the monument
coming from the grave monument. In any case, since the monu-
ment in many senses is related with the grave monument em-
bodying the deceased, it often shares the fate of its prototype. In
many traditions the corpse itself is destroyed to leave no trace for
future resurrection or possible worship (cf. Bocharov 2001: 539).
Thus in 1775 the corpse of the executed Russian arch-rebel
Pugachev was quartered, then burned and spread in four direc-
tions. Catherine II ordered the burning of all portrayals of him,
and the house where he was born. She also ordered the moving
of his native village to the other bank of the River Don and its
renaming. The name of the River Yak in Ural, where the rebel-
lion started, was also renamed back to Ural (see, e.g. Borodatova
1992: 45). As we can see, here renaming goes parallel with the
elimination of the original figure and anything related to him. In
the same manner the corpse of Grigori Rasputin killed in De-
cember 1916 was secretly burned in March 1917 to prevent pil-
grimages to his grave (Argumenty i fakty, 1991, N 27). And, ac-
cording to unverified information, Stalin ordered the moving of
Hitlers corpse to Moscow in strict secret, where it was annihi-
lated for the same reason. Despite such magical eliminations
from memory, the figures to be eliminated were miraculously
resurrected in different contexts, as this happened, for example,
with Pugachev, who returned not only soon after the peasant
rebellion, but also quite recently being invited by the rebel-
lious spirit of the defenders of the Russian Parliament in August
1991 (Borodatova 1992: 47-52; Borodatova and Abrahamian
1992: 53). The sinister figure of Rasputin was also not lost to
oblivion.
27
For example, it was actively discussed during the first
days of Putins coming to power in Russia comparing and/or
mythologizing the names Putin and Rasputin in the contexts of
put' (way) and rasput'e (crossroad) in Russian history. And
Hitlers birthday nowadays is being militantly celebrated, para-
doxically, even by his Russian followers.
During the anti-monument movement, sometimes a kind of
reinterpretation of a monument instead of its destruction took
place after re-evaluating the prototype. We already know about

27
One can also see a kind of a carnival return of Rasputin in his exotic
caricature figure advertising a popular music store in Berkeley.

such reinterpretations in the history of culture. During the post-
Soviet war with monuments one could detect a definite trend
toward such reinterpretations. If we are not always certain today
whether the ancient reinterpretations of monuments were a result
of conscious, unconscious or more complex psychological proc-
esses, one can guess that the late- and post-Soviet monument
reinterpretations were of expressed conscious character. For ex-
ample, the monument of Karl Marx in Moscow attained in 1991
a telling inscription PARDON ME, marking the failure of the
theoretical prophecies of the great communist forefather. Close
to this humoristic transformation of the monument were the
more radical projects of V. Komar and A. Melamid concerning
the post-communist transformations of communist monuments.
These conceptualist artists proposed to transform the monuments
of totalitarian Soviet art into everlasting lessons of history.
According to this project, the aforementioned monument of
Marx was proposed to be turned upside down such inversion
was meant to symbolize the return of Hegelian dialectics into its
normal position. They suggested the dismantled Dzerzhinski be
brought back to his pedestal, but be fixed monumentally in the
moment of his dismantling, with a wire noose around his neck.
Such cruel projects hopefully will not be realized, since they
would turn the totalitarian monuments into the scenes of ever-
lasting execution, the shameful vandalism of the revolutionary
mob becoming a lesson of history.
28
However, the conceptual-
ist project of these artists to edit Lenins Mausoleum by add-
ing ISM to the present inscription LENIN could present a
laconic post-communist re-evaluation of Leninism (of course,
after moving the mummy of Lenin into a regular tomb) without
demolishing or disguising this principal monument of the Soviet
regime. However, in this case an edifying tone of the school-
instructor of history is also preserved. Perhaps, another idea of
the same artists to replace the present inscribed marble slab
above Lenins tomb with a running LED news display would
typologically better correspond to the usual value rearrangement
and reinterpretation of a monument. I think, much more respon-

28
See a criticism of this project in Aristov 1992. The subtitle of this
article (Dont pen the remains of monumental Soviet art into a concen-
tration camp) also expresses my anxiety in creating a new totalitarian
reality instead of a museum of totalitarianism.

292
sive to the spirit of the time, as well as being safe for the monu-
ments themselves would be the original method of monument
reinterpretation by Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Polish conceptualist
who for almost twenty years has been editing various famous
monuments and buildings around the globe by projecting the
most unexpected correcting images on them.
29

The Path of Substitutes
The ceremony of a monument dismantling usually does not end
by simply removing the statue because the pedestal remains
empty and open to speculation regarding the new aspirants to the
position of the dethroned ancestor/hero. In Armenia, after Sta-
lins huge monument was dismantled, the correspondingly large
pedestal remained uninhabited for a long time, and people
were guessing who would occupy the place of the Father of Na-
tions. Although Stalin Avenue which was running topographi-
cally toward the hill crowned with the monument was renamed
Lenin Avenue, Lenin was not a real aspirant to Stalins place,
since Yerevan already had a monument of Lenin the one in the
square, the dismantling ceremony of which we have just de-
scribed. Of course the discussion in the early 1960s was not as
emancipated as the one concerning Lenins pedestal in the early
1990s. According to one non-official idea, the huge pedestal
should bear a non-proportional extremely tiny figure of a worker,
symbolizing the real hero of the Soviet state.
30
However, the
post-Soviet dismantling epidemic in Yerevan, as we have seen,
didnt even spare the Workers monument. The place of Stalins
statue was finally occupied by the sculpture of Mother Armenia
the Father of all the Soviet nations yielded his place to the
Mother of a particular nation. It has to be noted that statuary
monuments of this type are not a very old tradition in Armenia;
they came here from the West, mainly via Russian culture. More
characteristic to the ancient Armenian tradition are stele-shaped
monuments (a development of the cultural version of the
aforementioned model of pre-monuments), which even led to the

29
See examples of such editing projections in Wodiczko 1999. I am
indebted to Tomek Bogdanowicz for pointing out this method of harm-
less monument editing.
30
This idea belonged to the architect A. Droznin (personal communica-
tion).

specific national genre of the khach'k'ar. The image of Mother
Armenia, generally speaking, was most probably borrowed from
the modern Russian tradition cf. the famous poster Mother-
Homeland Calls You of the first days of World War II and the
huge post-war memorial in Volgograd (Stalingrad). Perhaps, this
was one of the reasons why the Mother Armenia monument was
not enthusiastically received and never succeeded in becoming a
new symbol of Armenianness
31
yielding this function to the
large monument of David of Sasun (Sassoun) a hero of the Ar-
menian epic, at the citys railroad station.
No wonder, that this epic hero embodying the fighter of for-
eign (historically Arab) invaders was seen as a substitute for the
dethroned Lenin. In a political advertisement for the Dashnak
party during the 1999 electoral campaign for Parliament seats, a
miracle takes place in the former Lenin and now Republic
Square. With a flash of light the monument of David suddenly
appears on the spot where Lenin was recently standing, this sub-
stitution being accompanied with another miracle: Mt. Ararat
changes its orientation from the usual view in Armenia (with the
bigger peak on the right), to the mirrored one (with the bigger
peak on the left) a symbol widely used to denominate the re-
gaining of historical territories of Armenia (a view from Turkey).
But in this clip Davids statue miraculously moves from its place
together with its pedestal, while discussions regarding a possible
aspirant focused on who would rise onto Lenins empty pedes-
tal. The pedestal itself was now being seen as something unre-
lated to the former monument, but rather as an eternal pedestal,

31
Armenians have their own figure of Mother Armenia, which has
been very popular since the late 19
th
century. This is not a victorious
mother but a mother, the symbol of the country, mourning over the
ruins of her lost glorious towns, villages and monuments. In Armenian
tradition, like in other agricultural traditions, there is also an archaic
symbolic closeness between the images of earth (soil) and woman a
mother in delivery; however, the nationalist discourse here had rather a
patriarchal orientation toward fatherland-hayrenik' (from hayr fa-
ther). In recent times even a paradoxical formula mayr-hayrenik'
mother-fatherland is used. Following the logic of this formula, the
monument should have been an androgynous figure. (I would like to
thank Professor T. Uyama for constructive discussion of the Mother
Armenia monument.)

294
where somebody or something must be placed.
32
In idle talk, hot
discussions, gossip or TV street interviews, people guessed at or
supposed whom the pedestal might or should feature next, some-
times referring to secret and authoritative sources. The candi-
dates covered a wide range from Noah and king Argishti, the
founder of Yerevans Urartian predecessor rebuni, to general
Andranik, the fedayi hero of the times of Genocide and the first
Republic,
33
and President Levon Ter-Petrossian. The latter opin-
ion belonged to the few opponents who were against keeping the
pedestal their idea was that the President ordered to preserve it
with the secret hope of climbing up there himself. However,
when the President finally decided to dismantle the pedestal in
1996, evidently, to uproot all kinds of pedestal-related specula-
tion,
34
a very active wave of protests arose, which mainly accen-

32
A striking example of this idea can be seen in the long succession of
monuments, which were erected in a Tashkent public park at the same
point, on the same, or on a somewhat modified or on an entirely new
pedestal. In 1913, the first monument dedicated to general von Kauf-
nam, the subjugator of Central Asia, was erected. In 1918 it was re-
placed by a monument to Liberated Labor to be replaced in 1927 by a
monument dedicated to the 10
th
anniversary of the October Revolution,
and from the early 1950s to 1962, a monument of Stalin stood at the
same spot. In 1968 it was replaced by Karl Marx, and in 1993, Marx in
his turn yielded to Tamurlane (see Knizhnik 2001) I am indebted to
E. Abdullaev for this bright example. For a similar succession of
monuments in Moscow from the pre-revolutionary monument of
general Skobelev to the revolutionary monument of Freedom to a to-
talitarian monument of Russian king Yurii Dolgorukii (Long-Armed)
see Papernyi 1996: 189.
33
It was later decided that a huge, ten meter tall statue of general An-
dranik was to be erected near the newly built cathedral in Yerevan. In
2001, a stone-marker was placed at this spot announcing the future
monument, and by the end of 2002, the monument was erected. The
legendary general is riding in a somewhat tricky position two horses
symbolizing Armenia and the Armenian diaspora or even the two Ar-
menias Eastern and Western.
34
Cf. Caesars opposite order to restore the thrown down statues of
Pompejus back onto their pedestals after his victory over the latter.
Cicero was believed to say on this occasion that Caesar, by restoring
Pompejus statues, affirmed his own (Plutarchs Lives. Caesar. LVII).
This and other attitudes toward monuments in ancient times were often
recalled during the period of post-Soviet monument-fighting (see, e.g.,

tuated the aesthetic aspect of the pedestal. The pedestal and trib-
une from where the communist leaders were once greeting pa-
rades during Soviet celebrations, was constructed by the archi-
tects N. Paremuzova and L. Vardanyan. It was a really good
piece of architecture
35
and, despite the Soviet symbolism (a large
flying red banner carved of porphyry on the the hammered white
marble face of the tribune),
36
was perceived by the majority of
Yerevanites as a sample of national art, especially the tribune.
The fight for preserving the pedestal proved to be much more
ferocious than the discourse on removing Lenin from the square.
Journalists, architects, artists, poets, well-known figures of cul-
ture and less-known people wrote articles in newspapers in de-
fense of the pedestal, blaming those who were eager to remove it
from the square. (In some indignant reactions one can also see a
regret for the fate of Lenins statue.) For example, in the follow-
ing passage from a selection under the telling title It extremely
grieves us in Golos Armenii
37
: I felt an endless pain when
I saw how chisels were destroying the ornament. It is equal to
undermining the peak of Ararat with chisels. Without the monu-
ment, the square looks deserted and orphaned. Or in another
quote from the same opinion piece: This overthrown pedestal in
the center of Yerevan, this scorched ruin became a symbol of
some general misfortune This overthrown pedestal is just the
mirror of the level of our culture And here we, the best of the
best, ventured to do such a thing which nobody in the world
would dare to do. A professor of architecture noted that for
[m]illenia our monuments were destroyed by foreigners, now
this improper role falls already to our lot (Golos Armenii, 1996,
August 8). The famous poet Silva Kaputikian wrote that she
would strike out the name of President Levon Ter-Petrossian in
the voting ballot only because such an act of vandalism as dis-

Vail 1992).
35
This is not just my opinion: I didnt record a single opposite opinion
neither among specialists, nor ordinary people, even if they were not
objecting to the pedestal being removed for political purposes.
36
An informant of mine, who would have liked to preserve the tribune
in the square, did not object to removing the red banner from the front
of the tribune and another proposed changing it to the national tricolor.
37
Golos Armenii [The Voice of Armenia] (1996, August 15), a news-
paper in Russian.

296
mantling of the pedestal, a work of art, takes place on Armenian
soil with his consent, laying aside the long list of his sins (Go-
los Armenii, 1996, August 6). And an elderly woman even com-
pared the destruction of Lenins pedestal with the destruction of
the Poghos and Petros (Paul and Peter) Church in Yerevan in the
early years of the Soviet regime. On July 31, 1996, some 50 par-
ticipants of the picket organized by the Communist party of Ar-
menia managed to break through the barrier raised around the
pedestal and shut off the compressor, so that the work of disman-
tling was temporarily stopped. Banners calling to stop crushing
cultural values and graffiti reading, May the hand of the de-
stroyer shrivel up appeared on the barrier. Workers engaged in
the dismantling seemed to be ashamed of their work and scat-
tered in all directions when a newspaper photographer directed
his camera toward them (Golos Armenii, 1996, August 1).
Such an anxious attitude toward the pedestal reveals some
deeper roots in the human psyche than just an anxiety for artistic
legacy. A pedestal seems to present a kind of axis for historical
orientation. It seems to have its specific roots in the history of a
nation,
38
although the pedestal of Lenins statue was constructed
especially for this monument in 1940 and had no history of its
own more than that, it was not originally planned by the archi-
tect Alexander T'amanian who was the author of the first (1924)
General Plan of Yerevan.
39
However, in the case of the Dzerz-
hinski monument in Moscow the pedestal was immediately in-
volved in a specific pedestal mythology: rumors circulated that it
was much older than the statue of Dzerzhinski and belonged to a
monument of one of the Russian czars before the Revolution,
that is, it was rooted in Russian history. When Dzerzhinski
was thrown down, the new czar, Yeltsin, addressed the people
from the steps of the pedestal (Borodatova and Abrahamian
1992: 53-54). So the pedestal seems to be a special spot that
links the present with the past to make the future possible. It is

38
Because of the pedestals extreme solidity difficulties faced during
the dismantling (see Golos Armenii, 1996, August 3) seemed to support
this perception.
39
This latter fact was used in the speculations of those who wanted to
move the monument together with its pedestal from the square. In
1937-1938 the future location of Lenins monument in the square was
also a theme of hot debates see M. Grigorian 1969: 29, 61-63.

eternal, rooted in the history, while those who crown it, are
just temporal. Interestingly, the theme of roots also arises in a
case when a monument does not have a pedestal at all: thus the
Azerbaijanis blame the Armenians in erecting the monument
We and Our Mountains (heads of an old man and woman in
national headdress sculptor S. Baghdasaryan) without a pedes-
tal in Mountainous Gharabagh on purpose to stress that these
representatives of local Armenians have their roots in native soil
(Aliev 1988: 36).
In 1992, a year after the dismantling of Dzerzhinskis monu-
ment, a project was proposed to build a chapel where the pedes-
tal had been as a burial vault for all the unknown victims of the
Red Terror,
40
of which Dzerzhinski was a famous executor.
However, today there is only a grassy patch on the spot where
the pedestal once stood. In the same way, a similar, but larger
grass-plot uprooted Lenins pedestal in Yerevan, as if embody-
ing Pushkins metaphor of the grass of oblivion. However, as
Yeltsin made an attempt, though a short and preliminary one, to
occupy the pedestal in Moscow, the Armenian President in fact
also realized such an attempt in Yerevan. During his electoral
campaign of 1996, a stage was built exactly where the pedestal
had been, from where the President addressed the people. This
topographic coincidence was largely discussed in a negative con-
text as a result of the Presidents low popularity at that time
and also because his address was followed by a concert of popu-
lar music, which some people perceived as an act of disgrace and
sacrilege toward the dethroned Lenin. By the 1
st
of January 2001,
as we already know from the Path of Faith, a huge cross was
erected at this very spot to commemorate the 1700 years of
Christianity as a state religion in Armenia, which was interpreted
by a religious informant of mine as the final victory of the Chris-
tian faith over the antichrist Lenin.

The Path of the Dead
But more popular was the opinion that this cross was a sign of

40
See Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1992, August 13. During the improvised
meeting regarding the dismantling, the famous cellist Rostropovitch
arrived from abroad especially to participate at the rebellion, and sug-
gested the statue of Solzhenitsin be erected in the place of Dzerzhinski
(Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1991, 24 August).

298
the grave, into which Armenia has transmuted meaning the
poor economic and social situation of Armenia on the eve of the
21
st
century. Thus we come back to the idea of the monument as
a grave monument, from which we started this Path. In general,
the tombstone and graveyard theme was very popular in jokes of
the time, which were created in the genre of black humor. For
example, one joke said that the dead keep coming back to Arme-
nia, while the living keep leaving her, meaning the many cere-
monial reburials in the late 1990s, a kind of repatriation to
Armenia of famous dead Armenians from the diaspora, on the
one hand, and the simultaneous mass emigration of the popula-
tion from Armenia, on the other hand.
41

The tombstone roots can be seen in many (if not all) ancient
and modern Armenian monuments. Perhaps, the best example of
a grave monument of modern times is the Memorial for the vic-
tims of the Genocide erected in Yerevan in late 1967. The au-
thors of the monument (architects A. T'arkhanyan and S.
K'alashyan) conceived it as a gaping grave, the twelve inclined
slabs rounding the eternal fire visualizing this act of a grave
opening.
42
In 1988, a khach'k'ar (cross-stone) in memory of the
victims of the Sumgait pogroms was erected within the territory
of the memorial complex not far from the main monument and
several true graves of fedayis killed during the Gharabagh con-
flict soon joined the symbolic graves of the memorial. In 1994,
an underground Museum of Genocide completed this symbolic
graveyard, especially as it obtained its key exhibit a scull of an
unknown Genocide victim from the Deir el-Zor desert, where
thousands of Armenians perished.
43
It is not mere chance that the

41
A version of this joke involves the legendary fedayi general An-
dranik, whose ashes were brought from Paris to Yerevan and reburied
with great honor in 2000. The spirit of the general wonders why they
have brought him back to Armenia, when everyone is leaving. Ironi-
cally, the call Andranik, save the Armenians! was popular during the
1988 rallies for example, it was traditionally present on the broad hat
band of a woman activist of the Movement.
42
However, people give another universally accepted interpretation to
the slabs and their number: they are thought to symbolize the six
vilayets and other places in Ottoman Turkey, where Armenians used to
live in great numbers before the Genocide.
43
I am indebted to Jrgen Gispert for this discussion of the grave sym-
bolism of the Genocide memorial. Different aspects of memory realiza-

memorial complex was supplemented with a khach'k'ar, a tradi-
tional multifunctional monument, which was widely used also as
a gravestone. Presently the khach'k'ar, both in its traditional and
modernized form, plays the role of the most prestigious grave-
stone this revival of the death symbol began in the 1960s
after a long period of relative oblivion. In the 1990s, it also re-
gained its ancient function of the memorial stele (H. Petrosyan
2001b: 68). However, even in these cases it often commemorates
some heroic but dramatic events involving death. And even if it
doesnt, the cross of the cross-stone refers to the Cross of Cruci-
fixion and the grave of Adam beneath it. There is, of course, also
an idea of resurrection in the khach'k'ar cf. the Tree of Life
typology both in the blooming cross of the cross-stone and its
divine prototype. But while the idea of resurrection is present
here structurally and implicitly, the idea of death is present ex-
plicitly and is well articulated.
44
However it may be, the cross
erected on the square to commemorate the first Christians, as we
know, turned out to become a symbol of their death after 1700
years. Some people even think that this temporal cross was
erected to symbolize the cross of the Armenians, that is, the
eternal cross the Armenian people are doomed to carry.
In 2001 many people were anxious that this clumsy cross
would spoil forever the strict architectural harmony of the
square, but fortunately it was removed in 2002. However, as a
Russian saying states, a holy place will never stay unoccupied,
and the populace once again started to discuss whose monument

tion of this monument are discussed in his forthcoming dissertation on
Memorial Culture in Armenia see Gispert 1998 for a synopsis of
his paper Monument As Dialogical Performance: The Case of Arme-
nia presented at the 5
th
Biennial EASA Conference (Frankfurt am
Mein 1998).
44
Cf. the ritual dictated by the Genocide memorial: the pilgrims de-
scend into the grave to go out of it as if resurrected. There is also a
visual embodiment of the idea of resurrection a vertical two-part
structure rising some 20 meters from the grave. Perhaps, such im-
plicit symbols and rituals of resurrection are necessary for Armenians
to survive the ever-present tragedy. However, the resurrection theme
seems to be overshadowed by a more powerful memory of death. Let
us remember that the original resurrection symbolism of the 12 slabs of
the monument was immediately overtrumped by a more stable symbol-
ism of death.

300
should be placed at or moved to the spot where Lenins monu-
ment once stood.
45
In 2004, the city council organized an open
competition to find a replacement monument. An exhibit of the
entries opened at the Yerevan House of Architects where
sketches and draft models ranged from Noahs Ark to Jesus
Christ (see Hovsep'yan 2004).
However, this new stage of the discourse on a substitute for
Lenins monument seemed to be in general less ideological, than
in previous years. Rather, it had aesthetical grounds: some of my
informants would have liked the square to regain a substitute
monument preferably a symbolic stele in order to fill the gap
in its architectural circular frame. This gap has been particu-
larly visible during the evening lighting of the perimeter build-
ings. Meanwhile a large monitor has been placed at the same
spot, displaying commercials, fashion shows and other images
all day and all night long a non-ideological pole of its ideologi-
cal predecessors.
In 2003 another vigorous debate on aesthetic grounds took
place around the grotesque and even somewhat caricature-like
sculpture of the composer Arno Babajanian erected in the vicin-
ity of the Opera Theater. The debate was even more ferocious
than the mentioned one regarding Lenins pedestal, though it
didnt involve a nationalistic agenda. It resulted in forcing the
sculptor to change the too expressive fingers of the composer a
little, though the monuments opponents were not satisfied with
this cosmetic change.
The post-Soviet fight with monuments on ideological grounds
was moving parallel to the robbery of monuments on economic
grounds. The most vulnerable to this economic fight were head-
stone monuments a picturesque forking path decorated with
statues, which we will not discuss here. In the city, the most
visible and symbolic result of this economic fight with monu-
ments was the disappearance of the copper cup that was under

45
See articles with telling titles Davids to David (by W. Gukasyan,
in Novoe Vremia, 2002, May 8, in Russian) and Center to David (by
K. Mikaelyan, in Novoe Vremia, 2002, May 18, in Russian) where the
project of moving the David of Sasun monument from the Railroad
Station Square to the former Lenin Square was again proposed. But this
time the constructive and not symbolic arguments were discussed in
favor of this project.

the hoof of David of Sasuns horse. The cup symbolizes the cup
of peoples patience, which overflows with water, as the heros
horse overturns it, making the water flow down into a pool sur-
rounding the monument. Even though there was a lack of water
in Soviet times, the cup was deprived of water once and for all in
post-Soviet times. Soon the monument lost even the cup of pa-
tience itself: evidently it joined the non-ferrous metallic raw ma-
terials and wares that were exported in great quantities as loot to
neighboring foreign countries during the years of economic cri-
sis. It is true, a smaller copy of the cup replaced the original sto-
len one by the end of 2003. One may interpret this as a signal
that now the peoples patience has less space to accumulate and
will soon overflow, but since the cup is still lacking in water, one
can hope that there is enough space and time for peoples pa-
tience.

The Path of Memory

FOURTEEN

THE PATH OF MEMORY
Museum as a Mirror and Generator of Identity

The Path from Temple to Museum
The word museum derives from the name of the Greek and
Roman temples, which were dedicated to the Muses. These tem-
ples are considered to be the first museum-type institutions in the
history of human culture, although temples in general were al-
ways kinds of storehouses where valuable things were kept. That
is the reason why they were invariably robbed during invasions.
The Armenian word for museum is t'angaran, the root of which
means valuable (t'ang). Thus, we can trace what was consid-
ered to be valuable in the history of Armenian museums.
The god Tir was the equivalent of the Muses in ancient Ar-
menia, so the first museums, or rather, proto-museums, are con-
sidered by Karo Ghafadarian to be the temples dedicated to Tir,
the patron of sciences, education, and the arts.
1
Thus, the main
functions of modern museums were already present in prototypi-

1
See Ghafadarian 1972: 22. Except where otherwise noted, data on
Armenian museums has been taken from this work.
According to the archaeologist S. Hmayakian (personal communi-
cation), the most ancient temple-museum on the territory of historical
Armenia was the temple dedicated to Khaldi, the principal god of
Urartu, in Musasir. Musasir is first mentioned in the Assyrian inscrip-
tions of the 13
th
century BC and flourished in the 9
th
century. Assyrian
king Sargon II who robbed the temple when conquering Musasir in 714
BC, ordered the compilation of a list of the treasures from this temple,
which consisted of about 333,500 artifacts. According to Hmayakian,
this temple-museum had thoroughly designed expositions with detailed
explanatory cuneiform inscriptions similar to the legends of modern
museums.

306
cal form. According to Ghafadarian, Tirs principle temple was
located on the site where the ruins of the 7
th
century temple,
Zvart'nots', are now to be found. This pinnacle of Armenian
Christian architecture is therefore considered to have inherited
not only the pagan name of its predecessor, but many of its mu-
seum features, such as a special hall in which Grigor the Illumi-
nators remains were exhibited along with other cult objects.
2
But it was the same Grigor the Illuminator who, in introduc-
ing Christianity to Armenia at the beginning of the 4
th
century
AD, not only destroyed most of the pagan temples, but also de-
stroyed the images of the pagan gods and goddesses as well,
which, to judge from the comments of early historians and the
few recent archaeological finds, were works of great artistry. The
state, in which these statuettes were found, with heads missing
and arms broken, suggests they were damaged as part of the
campaign against these masterpieces of the proto-museums. Of
course, they were not viewed from an aesthetic point of view;
they simply represented the idols of a hated faith and therefore
had to be destroyed. Other valuable objects, especially those of
gold and silver, kept in temples, became the booty of king Trdat
III, first the persecutor and later, along with his companions-in-
arms, the eager devotee of Grigor the Illuminator. Agat'angeghos
(1983: 786), a 5
th
century historian, describes how Christian
converts, led by Grigor the Illuminator, destroyed the golden
image of the goddess Anahit in one of the temples dedicated to
her, and took the gold and silver.
After Christianity became established in Armenia, the Chris-
tian monastery gradually became a kind of a museum. We have
already mentioned the exhibition hall of Zvart'nots', which con-
tinued the museum tradition of its pagan predecessor. There were
probably other monasteries that functioned as storehouses for

2
Grigor the Illuminator was known for his discontent with the widely
practiced worship of remains belonging to Christian saints rightly con-
sidering this cult to have been carried over from the pagan past. He was
even said to pass away by disappearing in order not to give the new
Christians a chance to use his own bones as an object of this pagan
worship. However, ironically, his remains were nevertheless found by
some zealous followers and became one of the first exhibits in the first
Christian proto-museum (H. Petrosyans note 4.2.6 in Abrahamian and
Sweezy /eds./ 2001: 280).

The Path of Memory 307
valuable cult objects. Hence the origin of the word t'angaran as a
place for storing valuable objects. This term first appears in Ar-
menian manuscripts at the beginning of the 7
th
century, where it
refers to these monastery storehouses (Ghafadarian 1972: 23). In
the 10
th
century, we can already distinguish three types of t'anga-
rans: royal, feudal aristocratic, and monastic. We learn of them
from Hovhannes Draskhanakertts'is (1912: 210) story about the
bribes that were paid by the three types of t'angarans. But the
two types of secular museums did not play as significant a role in
the development of Armenian museums as did their European
counterparts. In Europe, it was the castle museums with various
kinds of curiosities, which developed into modern museums. In
Armenia, the museum tradition developed within the framework
of the monastery museums. That may have been one more con-
sequence of the significant role of the church in Armenian his-
tory, where for centuries it actually acted as a substitute for the
state.
Although the monastery museums were responsible for pre-
senting Armenias history, indeed, Armenian identity, it was the
history of the Armenian Church and the glory of Christianity that
the monastery museums exhibited. The museum represented,
as it were, Armenian experience in the context of biblical his-
tory. Thus, a hypothetical viewer might see an artifact illustrat-
ing the story of Noahs Ark, or even a piece of the Ark itself; the
spear which pierced Christ on the Cross; the remains of Grigor
the Illuminator or other important Christian figures, and other
valuable objects which mark Armenian history. It must be said
that these early museums were not designed for the occasional
curious visitor of today; rather, they were oriented toward the
abstract viewer who could see even those objects which were
stored but not displayed. Nevertheless, some of the objects were
directly aimed at the pilgrims who came to these proto-museums
to see a particular holy object. As for the identity put forth by the
exhibits, one may compare it with the traditional Armenian term
of self-reference, Hay-k'ristonya (Armenian-Christian), per-
ceived as a single concept.
Mkrtich' Khrimian, the dean of Varaga monastery (Varaga-
vank) in Vaspurakan, attempted to broaden the concept of Ar-
menian cultural history and hence of Armenian identity. Later to
become the famous Catholicos Khrimian Hayrik (Father
Khrimian), he continued his museum activities on a larger

308
scale. In 1858, he established a museum at Varagavank where,
together with Christian cult objects, even more ancient items
were displayed. One of these items was a bronze bust found by a
shepherd, and thought to be an Armenian pagan idol. According
to Khrimians biographer, this caused a great deal of trouble.
When people learned about the idol, they tried to destroy the
pagan sanctuary the museum, and Khrimian only succeeded
with great difficulty in stopping the mob and convincing it (evi-
dently by explaining what the museum was for) that he did not
worship the pagan gods (Malumian 1892: 58). His biographer
stresses the fact that people thought the museum was a pagan
temple because of the objects that were exhibited there. Thus, we
see how the transition from temple to museum (as with the de-
velopment of the Muses temples) can easily reverse direction,
from museum to temple.
There is another interesting aspect to this reversal: while the
first Armenian catholicos, Grigor the Illuminator, fought his own
people by demolishing their temple-museums, the people later
fought their future catholicos, Khrimian Hayrik, by trying to de-
stroy his museum-temple. But the most remarkable feature of this
case is the fact that it was an educated clergyman who sought
from above, and by means of a museum to broaden, and even
change, the identity of his people. A century later, in 1955, when
archaeological excavations at jmiatsin Cathedral uncovered a
pagan hearth under the Christian altar,
3
it became part of the ca-
thedral museum. An object of great pride, only the most eminent
visitors are allowed to see it (it is excluded from the usual tourist
itinerary not because of religious rivalry, but because the narrow
underground passage makes it inconvenient to view). And so let
us sum up the direction in the creation of national identity: from
the rejection and destruction of the pagan past, to acquiring and
displaying this past in museums.

The Path of Collectors
The jmiatsin museum has another remarkable feature not pre-
sent, as far as I know, in other museums of this kind. In the late
19th century, catholicos Gevorg IV, after repairing the eastern
wall of the cathedral, allocated three rooms for the present-day

3
On the archaeological and mythological aspects of this hearth see
Abrahamian 2001a.

museum. He began to collect artifacts from Armenian religious
centers throughout the world. This museum therefore took on a
very different character from those of Europe. Many European
museums, as mentioned above, developed from secular castle-
museums, which up until the first third of the 19th century, em-
phasized the strangeness of the world as seen by the curious
traveler. The museums, which developed out of such Kunst-
kammers were in fact models of this strange world (cf. Eneeva
1991: 95). The jmiatsin museum, however, represented the
same idea, as it were, but through the g e o g r a p h y of the
Armenians scattered all over the world. India, for example, was
represented through the artistic creations of Armenians living in
India, who embroidered or printed elephants and exotic birds on
church curtains; Western Europe was represented through the
woodcuts which appeared in the first Armenian printed books,
and so forth.
Beginning in the 5th century, rich churches often had an
avandatun (from avanduyt', tradition, and tun, house), that is,
places where traditions were kept. It is not clear what the differ-
ence was between the avandatun and the monastery t'angaran
(mentioned, for example, by Draskhanakerttsi), for both con-
tained precious cult objects and clothing. In fact, in the late 19
th

century, the t'angaran began to take on modern functions by
e x h i b i t i n g rather than storing. Perhaps it was under the in-
fluence of secular museums that the word t'angaran took on the
meaning of museum, rather than the word avandatun, since tra-
ditions, kept in these houses of traditions were exclusively re-
ligious traditions. Accordingly, the curator of the avandatun and
later, of the t'angaran, was referred to as an avandapah, literally,
the keeper of traditions. This term, as Ghafadarian notes, corre-
sponds to the European conservator (Ghafadarian 1972: 23).
4

The latter word, however, does not contain the meaning of tra-
ditions, as in its Armenian analogue, which is why the conser-
vators duties were transmitted to the curator, one who takes
care, and the conservator became the person who conserves the
display items (for example, in archaeological museums). Thus,

4
The name avandapah was attached to Vrt'anes Kertogh, the curator of
the catholicos residence museum, at the beginning of the 7
th
century,
when, according to Ghafadarian, the term t'angaran arises
(Ghafadarian 1972: 23).

310
we see that the two words, avandatun and t'angaran, as it were,
compete to define what it is they do keep traditions or valu-
ables. The competition was resolved much later, at the end of the
19
th
century, when it became clear that the real valuables to be
kept in museums were the cultural traditions of the Armenian
people.
Instead of placing the avandatun within the church building,
the larger monastery complexes constructed special buildings
called gandzatun, or treasure house, which had the same func-
tion as avandatun, but were evidently closer (in reality or per-
ception) to storehouses than to the t'angaran-museums. This per-
ception still dominates today, which is why the government of
Soviet Armenia agreed to use the term gandzatun rather than
t'angaran for the museum which Alex and Marie Manoogian
built in 1982 near the jmiatsin Cathedral. The government con-
sidered it acceptable for a donor to fund a storage facility for the
cathedral, but considered that the state rather than the Church
or an individual must control the powerful educational capaci-
ties of a museum. But it is interesting to note that from the first
days of its existence, the most recent gandzatun in the history of
Armenian church architecture, the one sponsored by the Ma-
noogians, played the role of a museum, thereby affirming the
functional proximity which characterized gandzatun, avandatun
and t'angaran in medieval Armenia.

The Path from Museum to Temple
We have already seen, with Khrimian Hairiks first attempt to
organize a scientific museum, how easily a museum contain-
ing a deitys image could be transformed into a temple. This
phenomenon has today found a new representation. The sacred
scripts which were transferred from the monastery museums to a
secular museum the Matenadaran (literally, repository of
manuscripts) seem to have breathed into it their sacred power,
and have even created a new type of spirituality. It is not so sur-
prising that, as we know already from the Path of Language,
people who donated sacred books that had belonged to their
families to the Matenadaran continued to worship them. The
Matenadaran has in this way become a kind of sanctuary
where manuscripts are treated not only with scientific respect but
also adoration. Thus, making a ritual offering of flowers to a
manuscript (Greppin 1988), approaching the book storage room

on ones knees, and other gestures of adoration take place in the
Matenadaran, which is both a museum, and since 1959, a re-
search institute.
But interestingly enough, the Matenadaran became a new
symbol of Armenian identity, containing as it does, proof of Ar-
menian claims to antiquity, civilization, and spiritual enlighten-
ment. It also became a symbol of the return to the motherland for
Armenians scattered throughout the world, who by donating
their manuscripts to the Matenadaran, return them, as it were, to
their original spiritual source (which bears the name of Mash-
tots', the father of the alphabet in which these manuscripts are
written). This unconscious model is represented by an impres-
sive manuscript Menologium from Mush, which in 1915 was
separated into several sections so that it could be rescued, and
experienced, together with its saviors, all the sufferings of the
Genocide before the different parts found each other and were
reunited in the exhibition hall of the Matenadaran (H. Petrosyan
2001b: 273, note 2.4.2).

The Path of Competition
The Matenadaran as a whole gives us an amazing example of a
museum which displays the full spectrum of museum features.
One of the most important of these features is its location a
factor of its history as a temple. As such, it occupies a central
or governing position in cultural space. The fight for space is one
of the most fascinating phenomena in the history of culture. Here
we will look at some examples.
The location of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. is
one of the recent and best examples of the successful fight for
space. In the future, when the details of World War II will inevi-
tably be forgotten (American school-children of today already
have a rather vague notion of it), the museum in the center of the
capital of the United States may easily delegate a greater role to
the Americans in the war and particularly in the fate of the Jews.
5

Architects themselves, as Michel Foucault has noted, enjoy less
influence in the fields of power relations than other key figures

5
The idea of the Armenians to build an Armenian Genocide Museum
in Washington pursues another aim besides the fight for space it is
a fight for memory, a new stage in the continuing fight of Armenians
for international official recognition of the Genocide of 1915.

312
(such as priests, prison wardens, or psychiatrists) (The Foucault
Reader 1984: 247-248).
6
Perhaps, this happens also because
sometimes an architect, like a Demiurge, plans to create the most
convenient buildings and even entire cities for the people, but
very often his successors or even those intended to inhabit and
enjoy these structures, transform them into something much less
utopian than the original project intended. This was the case of
Yerevan, which was planned by Alexander T'amanian as a small
harmonious city of some three hundred thousand inhabitants, but
it turned into an urban monster with a population of more than
one million by 1990, which swallowed the tiny accurate city
imagined by T'amanian.
But sometimes the archaic ideas of the architect profaned by
the builders and successive generations, suddenly return to life,
and the structure begins to play the very role its creator had con-
ceived for it. We discuss one such case in the Path of Rebellion
and Festival: in the late 1980s, during the mass rallies related
with the Gharabagh issue, T'amanians Opera building actually
transformed into the Peoples House originally planned by the
architect, and the square near it, where the rallies were mainly
taking place, regained its original Theater Square name (later
to be renamed Freedom Square). More than that, the architect
built his Opera on the spot where, as he believed, a pagan temple
of love and song was at one time located. So the rallies realized
the dream of the architect: the modern Opera house turned into a
sort of pagan temple, near which an archaic festival took place.
It also turns out sometimes that the structure reveals some ar-
chaic trends of which the architect was even hardly aware, or at
least was only aware of unconsciously, and which in proper time
turn the building into a much more powerful one. I believe this
was the case with Mark Grigorian, the architect of the Matenada-
ran. The Matenadaran is located high up the side of a hill, on the
top of which a huge monument of Stalin stood until the early
1960s. Although construction of the Matenadaran was completed
by 1957, that is, in the post-Stalin era, it was planned for this site
when the monument still dominated the city, and the avenue

6
The totalitarian Culture Two seems to be an exception in this gener-
ally true observation see Papernyi 1996 for the influence (as well as
the misfortunes) enjoyed by the architects, the prophets and priests
of this Culture.

leading up to the museum bore Stalins name. Later, the monu-
ment of Mother Armenia was erected on the site where Stalin
had stood, but it was only a substitute, standing on the oversize
pedestal left by its predecessor, and it never succeeded in becom-
ing a real symbol of Armenia, as we discussed in the Path Deco-
rated with Statues. And we also know from the Path of Renam-
ing that the avenue was renamed after Lenin, whose great ideas
Stalin was thought to have violated. Later, Lenins profile, out-
lined by electric lights, appeared near the top of the hill, as if
control over the city was distributed between Mother Armenia
(by day) and Lenin (by night). In 1990, after a stormy re-
evaluation of Lenins ideas, his profile disappeared from the
landscape, and the avenue was renamed once again, this time
after Mashtots. So suddenly, the Matenadaran, which had always
played a secondary role in these battles for space and power, be-
came the true master of the hill, dominating the avenue that at
last regained its true name. And it was not by accident that
during the 1988 demonstrations, when the communist authorities
banished the people from the Theater Square, they did not meet
in the outskirts of the city, as they were told to do, but chose the
Matenadaran and the avenue leading up to it for their rallies.
There are other even more archaic schemes underlying the ar-
chitects plan, which he never suspected. Thus, the Matenadaran
has acquired some of the characteristics of the originators of the
Muses, the mice of ancient Indo-European mythology (Toporov
1977a), by being, as it were, a mountain treasure cave. The re-
cent extension of the Matenadaran into the depths of the rocky
hill confirms the chthonic image of a cave-museum; let us also
recall the gandzatun or treasure-house, and the root t'ang in the
Armenian word for museum.
The case of the Matenadaran, which won the battle for space,
is quite different compared to the struggles for space and power
that the European museums fought. One of the most remarkable
examples of such a struggle is that of the Moscow Museum of
History, built at the end of the 19
th
century in the Red Square, to
oppose the famous temple of Vassilii Blazhennyi. It was espe-
cially designed to resemble a temple, but a temple of Science,
which is what museums came to be thought of beginning in the
1830s, as a result of the spread of European positivist philoso-

314
phy.
7
As we have seen, the Matenadaran was able to assert its
dominance not as the result of a conflict between Science and
Religion, but because it had specific characteristics as a scientific
museum which allowed it to c o n t i n u e rather than oppose the
traditions of the monastery museums. Nevertheless, the Matena-
daran, as a manifestation of Armenian identity, won (although
rather passively) the battle against a kind of religion, which in
fact is what the totalitarian communist ideology was.
The following example strikingly demonstrates how even if
an architect constructs his own plans, it later turns out that he
was acting according to a much more general symbolic scheme
of which he was completely unaware. Thus, Grigorian, the archi-
tect of the Matenadaran, also designed a large building for Yere-
vans Lenin Square, where several museums (the Museum of
History of Armenia, the Gallery of Fine Arts, the Museum of the
Revolution, and the Museum of Literature) were already located
together under one roof. The architect was obviously trying to
compete with his famous predecessor, Alexander T'amanian,
who had planned the original square along with some of the
buildings on it, which became exemplars of modern Armenian
architecture. Even if nobody referred to the competition between
Grigorian and T'amanian,
8
people generally compared the two
architects work in favor of the latter. But in fact, the Museum
was not competing with T'amanians masterpiece, but rather with
the monument of Lenin which stood across from the museums
on the other side of the square.
9
If we imagine a dome on top of
the rectangular museum building, we would have a typical, if
somewhat clumsy, temple
10
this can be compared to the way in
which the Museum of History competes with the Christian tem-
ple in the Red Square. Although Lenin supported national cul-

7
See Eneeva 1991 for a detailed and stimulating discussion of the mu-
seum concept in European culture. For the post-communist transforma-
tions of the Museum of History, see Khazanov 2000: 41-46.
8
Traces of such competition are implicitly present in M. Grigorians
memoirs of the planning and building of Lenin square in Yerevan (see
Grigorian 1969).
9
Interestingly, Grigorian himself placed Lenins statue in this position
on the square (see Grigorian 1969).
10
The author of this idea, Garegin Zak'oyan, confirmed his reconstruc-
tion by means of an impressive collage.

tures (and national museums), manifestations of national identity
were discouraged and later persecuted by Lenins followers (see,
e.g. Suny 1983). Thus, one can consider the monument of Lenin
that stood across from the national museum, the symbol of an
anti-museum.
11

Interestingly, in the early 1980s, Moscow sent a decree to the
capitals of the Soviet republics to build museums to Lenin either
in the central squares, or on the main thoroughfares through
which parades passed during official Soviet holidays. In Yere-
van, an active discussion took place, with leading architects
ready to destroy the few remaining examples of old Yerevan ar-
chitecture to support this new phase in the battle for space.
Gevorg Barseghian, the architect for this part of the city at that
time, proposed allocating Grigorians museum building (which
already contained the Museum of Revolution) for this purpose,
thereby preserving the citys historic architecture, and at the
same time moving the national museums to more convenient
premises, especially since Grigorians building lacked many
modern requirements for a museum.
12
This last battle for space
and power ended in 1991, when Lenins monument was disman-
tled and the square renamed, which event we discussed in the
Path Decorated with Statues.

The Path of Cooperation
We have seen that there has not been any opposition between
religion and science in the development of museums in Armenia
comparable to that which occurred in Europe. On the contrary, it
was clergymen who organized the scientific museums. We al-
ready know about Khrimian Hayrik, who attempted to deepen
Armenian history and widen Armenian identity through his Va-
ragavank museum. He continued his museum activities 35 years
later, as the catholicos of the Armenian Church. Between 1892
and 1907, he established a museum at jmiatsin, which had two
sections: history and archaeology, and ethnography. It is remark-
able that another museum of archaeology and ethnography al-
beit small and short-lived was established in 1872 by another

11
I am grateful to Sebouh Aslanian for a helpful discussion of this idea.
12
Personal communication. Indeed, if this proposal had been accepted,
Lenin would have conquered the entire square with his name, his
statue, and his museum.

316
clergyman, Vahan Bastamian, at the Gayane monastery complex
in jmiatsin. Indeed, there were also many archaeologists and
ethnographers, some of them outstanding, among the clergymen
and especially the missionaries, who contributed significantly to
the enrichment of the European museums, but here I wish to
stress the role Armenian clergymen played in the development of
Armenian museums. This tradition has continued up to the pre-
sent time. A recent example is that of Fr. Paren Avedikian, who
initiated and organized the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum
in Southfield, Michigan, in 1992.
13
This is not to say that there were no secular enthusiasts or
scholars in the history of Armenian museums. But I must repeat
that these museums were not o p p o s e d to the traditional mu-
seums I discussed above. Secular (scientific) museums also
aimed at the creation and affirmation of Armenian identity. That
is why the first secular museums, even those founded by clergy-
men, focused on the past (archaeology) and the present (ethnog-
raphy) of the Armenian people. Nature has also been the subject
of exhibition in the museum which Khach'atur Abovian founded
in the Yerevan Province school in 1846. This museum existed
for only two years, until its organizers mysterious disappearance
in 1848. But nature was not the museums main purpose; rather,
all the miracles of nature came third in the official proposal.
More important were antiquities found in the country and
lapidary monuments with historical inscriptions (Melikset-bek
1947). Even the name of this museum, The Cabinet of Arme-
nian Antiquities, shows concern with national issues rather than
the positivism of its European contemporaries.
Although some museum organizers, as we have seen, intro-
duced ethnographic objects, that is, the present of ordinary Arme-
nian peasant life into their exhibitions (the living traditions of the
Armenian church were already exhibited in many monastery mu-

13
This beautiful museum adjoins the St. Johns Armenian Church, to
which Fr. Avedikian was affiliated at the time. Although in this case his
being a clergyman seems to have also played a negative role, since his
attachment to this specific site in the Detroit area, far away from the
mainstream cultural life of America, brought the museum to a defeat in
the battle for space just in the same manner as the Holocaust Mu-
seum won this battle in Washington and the future Armenian Genocide
Museum is thought to win.

seums), the problem of what to choose from these ordinary objects
was raised as a serious museological problem only in the begin-
ning of the 20
th
century by Yervand Lalayan, founder of the Mu-
seum of Ethnography and Archaeology (1907-1908) in Tbilisi,
which was transferred to Yerevan in 1921-1922 (Ghafadarian
1972: 29-31). Before organizing the museum, he published a
Program on collecting objects for the Armenian ethnographic
museum This program stressed the great importance of the eth-
nographic museum for learning about the unique development of
the nation, especially of Armenians, because of the rapid changes
in their life and the loss of ethnographic objects (Y. Lalayan 1907:
26). The museum was thereby acknowledged as witness to and a
means for preserving Armenian identity.
The identity of a nation especially requires witnessing of its
past, for any human society, even the simplest, always tends to
find its Beginning, to reconstruct its historical and/or mythologi-
cal past. That is why museums always focus on clearly estab-
lished evidence, as we saw above in Abovians museum pro-
posal regarding monuments with inscriptions. It is noteworthy
that after the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, a group of scholars
(including the author) from the Armenian Academy of Sciences
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, who took part in res-
cue work in Spitak, chose the spot where the regional museum
was located, hoping to save its 2
nd
century BC stone road-sign
monument with King Artashes inscription. Now this famous
monument (ultimately rescued by someone else) is housed in
Yerevans Museum of History as a witness not only to Artashes-
sian times, but also, by the damage it sustained during the earth-
quake, as a witness to this recent tragedy in the history of the
nation.
Other important contributions to national identity are made
by memorial museums dedicated to prominent national figures,
or to significant events. These can be compared with khach'k'ars
(cross-stones), which are also dedicated either to a person or to
an event. It is interesting to note that the museum at Sardarapat,
which commemorates the Armenian victory over the Turks in
the battle of 1918, was transformed into the State Museum of
Ethnography. Although this transformation was the result of the
enthusiasm and energy of its founder and first director, Lavrentiy
Barseghyan, rather than by governmental directive, it fits the
general identity-creating model of the museum discussed here.

318
Instead of commemorating the concrete (albeit important) bat-
tle
14
that saved the Armenian state, the museum became an im-
pressive collection of objects attesting to the survival of Armeni-
ans over many centuries. Of course, these speculations have
nothing to do with the rather unhappy choice of the site, far from
Yerevan and difficult to reach by means of public transportation.
A visit to the Museum of Ethnography should not be such a tour-
ist feat, as it has been from its first days of existence. In this
sense the museum, located on the site where Armenians won a
historical battle, lost the battle for space just because of its lo-
cation.

The Path of the Monument-Museum
The last point I will make concerns the attitude toward the his-
torical monument as a museum. The first museum organizer who
encountered this problem was, I believe, Nickolai Marr, a
prominent linguist and archaeologist who carried out excavations
in Ani from the end of the 19
th
century. He sent the finds of his
first excavations in 1892 and 1893 to St. Petersburg, because, as
he explained, there were no appropriate museums for them in
Armenia. That, incidentally, was the reason why Khrimian Hay-
rik decided to establish the museum in jmiatsin. Later, Marr
organized three archaeological museums in Ani, between 1904
and 1912. These museums were referred to as hnadarans, re-
positories of antiquities, and, as many Armenian museums,

14
Originally, this museum was intended to display the history of heroic
Armenian battles. This purpose was partially carried out through the
bas-relief on a wall erected at the Sardarapat Battle Museum complex,
on which scenes of the mythological and epic battles of dragons and of
the Sardarapat battle (linked as well with the historic battle of Avarayr)
are shown. The Sardarapat battle was also commemorated in a special
hall of the Museum. In 1998 the Museum passed from the Ministry of
Culture to the Ministry of Defense with a natural shift of attention
back to the Sardarapat battle. The fight for the battle began, as one
could guess, from renaming the Museum into The State Museum of
Ethnography and History of the National-Liberation Struggle of Arme-
nia. Then followed a fight for space the largest hall with a unique
ceiling, a concrete replica of the wooden hazarashen cover of the Ar-
menian traditional home (see Marutyan 2001a for illustrations), is pres-
ently under construction aimed at transforming it into a panorama of
the Sardarapat battle.

were also short-lived, destroyed in 1918 by Turkish troops. Nev-
ertheless, it is interesting to trace how the idea of establishing
museums developed in Ani. To house the first museum, Marr
chose a medieval building, thought to have been a royal palace
or medieval customhouse before its transformation into a
mosque. Thus, the first museum was organized, in a sense, in an
alien building. One can compare this with the Soviet model, in
which the struggle against alien religions was carried on by
transforming monasteries or mosques into secular museums
dedicated, for example to the friendship of peoples. For the
second museum, Marr had a special building constructed; only
the third museum was organized in a medieval church, which
had never been altered. But the three museums were very soon
filled with finds from his archaeological excavations, so that
more and more museums were needed. As Ghafadarian notes,
Ani was a museum in and of itself, which should have been pre-
served as a whole (Ghafadarian 1972: 32). So we see how the
progression from alien, to neutral, to national took place
during this one short process of museum building, and how a
historical monument a temple became a new type of mu-
seum. The notion of Armenia in itself constituting an open-air
museum, which today sounds rather banal, in a sense developed
directly from this particular experience.
So we have traced the process by which an ancient temple-
museum developed into a museum in the temple, how a museum
extracted from the temple became a kind of temple in and of it-
self, and how the ruined temple came to life again as a museum.
These changes and transformations help us to reveal the past,
witness the present, and model the future of Armenian identity.

The Path of Dispersion

The Path of Dispersion 323

FIFTEEN

THE PATH OF DISPERSION
Divided Armenians

The Forking Paths of Homeland and Diaspora
The term diaspora, which originated to describe a Jewish reality,
began to be related to other, more or less similar situations. And
this is not a unique case: the history of science consists of nu-
merous such examples and much more bizarre cases of changes
to the original meaning of a term. But presently, as a result of
continuous ethnic, cultural and economic tensions in many coun-
tries of the world and globalistic trends in general, as well as the
post-modern carelessness in terminology, the term diaspora
tends to embrace such a wide range of phenomena that not only
the Jewish understanding of the diaspora, but also the modern
extended one might be lost.
On the other hand, the original meaning of the term is so
prevalent that the general definition and characterization of dias-
pora are often done with a reverence to the Jewish dispersion as
the classic and ideal type (see, e.g., Safran 1991: 84), while the
latter is rather an exclusive situation for the greatest part of
their history Jews had imagined rather than lived in the real
homeland,
1
while for many other diasporas an important charac-
teristic is just this relationship with a real homeland.
We will follow this path of Armenian dispersion, having in
mind the original Jewish case especially since many aspects of
the Armenian diaspora are similar to it, but at the same time we
will not follow any special or strict directions and definitions
2

1
See Chlenov 1994: 153 on the three phases of Jewish dispersion.
2
Cf., e.g., Safran 1999; 1991: 83-84, for a list of characteristics, at least
a part of which an expatriate minority should have to be classified as a

324
let us remember that the paths in our Park of Identity are being
tread unconsciously, guided by some inner fatal logic. Our
starting point will be the spot where the original path divides into
two forking paths, homeland and diaspora; these two paths,
however, dont move too far off from each other and always an-
ticipate an eventual rejoining.
The beginning of the Armenian diaspora is usually traced
back to the 4
th
century AD; the first diaspora being formed in
Byzantium as a result of the first emigration of Armenians after
Armenia was divided between Byzantium and Persia in
385/387.
3
This diaspora became larger beginning in the 10
th
cen-
tury, as a result of the expansionist policy of Byzantium, and
after the Seljuk invasion in the 11
th
century. The spread of Ar-
menians outside their homeland is well reflected in the dynamics
of the Roman Popes attitude toward the geography of Armenian
church influence: in the 9
th
century he recognized the spiritual
rule of the catholicos (head of the Armenian church) only in Ar-
menia, while by the 12
th
century this rule was already also rec-
ognized in Cappadocia, Media and Persia (Bozoyan 1997: 79).
One can see further evidence of the formation process of the
Armenian diaspora in the new understanding of the Hayots'
Kat'oghikos title of the Armenian catholicos. Since the second
half of the 11
th
century, this title, as A. Bozoyan rightly consid-
ers, underwent an important transformation by starting to carry
primarily an ethnic meaning, the word Hayots' starting to mean
Armenian, of the Armenians, while formerly it meant of
Armenia.
4
Before this turning point, the title of the catholicos
was Hayots' Metsats' Kat'oghikos meaning catholicos of Greater
Armenia and was actually emulating the title of the king, as we
discussed in the Royal Path. Beginning with the 60s-70s of the
12
th
century and particularly in the 13
th
and 14
th
centuries the
catholicos is more often mentioned by the title Amenayn Hayots'

diaspora. Since the Armenian diaspora meets all the requirements of
this (and any other) list, we have the right to follow our existential
way of beating paths.
3
The traditional date of this event (387) is presently being reconsidered
(see Danielian 1980; Akopian 1987: 109, no. 1).
4
Here, once again, we are dealing with this grammatical form with a
double meaning let us recall Hayots' Patmut'iwn with its ambivalent
interpretation as History of the Armenians and History of Armenia.

Kat'oghikos meaning catholicos of all Armenians, a title that
has been in use ever since. This change shows, evidently, that by
this time the catholicos had Armenians living outside their
homeland under his spiritual guardianship as well (Bozoyan
1997: 78, 81). This gives us sufficient grounds to consider such
places in Cilicia, Northern Syria, in the Balkan Peninsula and
Egypt as a real Armenian diaspora. That is, after losing state-
hood and spreading in the Middle and Near East and neighboring
countries, the Armenians continued to enjoy the protection of the
catholicosate, which for many centuries substituted for the for-
mer doubled sovereign power (king and supreme priest) by a
single figure of the catholicos. This provided an important eth-
noprotective mechanism of culture,
5
since religion, as we know,
often played (and continues to play) a principal role both in
maintaining national identity and establishing diaspora models.
So we have a confessional model of the Armenian diaspora as
a segment of the people living outside the homeland under the
spiritual guardianship of the supreme priest of the home coun-
try.
6
Although the territorial division of Armenia in the 4
th
cen-
tury eventually led to the division of the Armenian Church, up
until the 11
th
century one catholicos, elected from either Persian
or Byzantine territory, was the spiritual leader of all (Bozoyan
1997: 75). Even when several Armenian catholicosates were es-
tablished after the 11
th
century in different parts of historical
Armenia and even outside the original ethnic territory of the Ar-
menians, they had no theological problems, only hierarchical
ones let us recall the competition for primacy between the Al-
banian and Armenian catholicosates discussed in the Path of
Naming. The present-day split of the Armenian Church into the
catholicosates of jmiatsin (with the residence in jmiatsin, Ar-
menia) and of Cilicia (a legacy of the Armenian Cilician King-
dom of the 12
th
-14
th
centuries, with the residence in Antelias near
Beirut, Lebanon) also only reflects the political opposition be-
tween communist (and post-communist) Armenia and the Dash-
nak part of the diaspora.
From the religious perspective, the Armenian diaspora differs
from the Jewish diaspora with its diasporal rabbinical system,

5
On ethnoprotective mechanisms of culture see Melkonian 1980.
6
On the secular mechanisms of diaspora survival and the colony to
diaspora transition see Abrahamian 1999b; 2000: 54-58.

326
which plays a specific role as an ethnoprotective mechanism in
the Jewish model.
7
In the Armenian model, the supreme priest,
the catholicos, as we know already, only had his title changed,
but not his primary functions. Perhaps, this difference is a result
of different types of diaspora formation in the Armenian and
Jewish cases. The Jews lost their homeland after losing state-
hood, while the Armenians only lost statehood, and even this
was in a sense substituted by the institute of religion. Only the
Armenians of Western Armenia lost their homeland like the
Jews, but here too there is a considerable difference between the
two types of diaspora. All this brings us back to the problem of
the homeland, which seems to be the crucial characteristic of the
Armenian diaspora.

Two Paths That Were Always Divided
In the list of diasporal characteristics of W. Safran (1999), the
first criterion considers an expatriate community to be a dias-
pora, only if they or their ancestors have been dispersed from the
homeland to one or more peripheral, or foreign, regions. This
actually expresses the formal limitation of any substantial inter-
pretation of the term diaspora, which concerns only those
movements of human communities that result in dividing the
original single community into at least two groups, which find
themselves in at least two territories after the division (Mili-
tarev 1999: 29).
It is characteristic that modern analysts of diasporas may eas-
ily neglect this inner meaning of the key term. Thus, in an earlier
article W. Safran proposes considering only those expatriate
groups who have moved at least into two regions outside their
homeland a diaspora (Safran 1991: 83), evidently, in order to
limit the number of rapidly growing groups who claim to be di-
asporas. On the other hand, post-modern enthusiasm for vague
definitions and relativism recently has re-evaluated the phe-
nomenon of movements of human communities cited above.

7
Rabbinical Judaism, which was established after the destruction of the
Second Temple in 70 AD, shifted the center of religious and social life
from the temple with its High Priest (kohen gadol), who was responsi-
ble for ritual sacrifice, to the synagogue as a meeting-house with its
minister (rabbi) as an expert and interpreter of the tradition see Chle-
nov 1994: 153.

Thus, the collapse of the last empires, especially the Soviet one,
and the re-carving of boundaries that followed, resulted in con-
siderable masses of people finding themselves in a foreign coun-
try without making a move. The boundaries have moved and not
the people. Some scholars dont hesitate to define these groups
as diasporas: W. Safran (1999) calls them beached diasporas
and R. Brubaker (1999; 2000) calls them accidental diasporas,
while other authors declare these groups diasporas without any
specification (Khalmukhamedov 1999: 82; Tishkov 2000: 44).
While in some cases such pseudo-diasporas may in the future
transform into real diasporas (for instance, Russians of the for-
mer Russian colonies after the collapse of the Soviet empire),
many other cases, especially those concerning autochthonous
groups, follow other regularities. Thus, while the fixed idea of
a diaspora is the idea of an eventual return to the ancestral home-
land, the fixed idea of the groups expatriated as a result of
borderline changes, is the return to the original borders, a na-
tional-liberation struggle becoming the main mechanism of real-
izing this idea. The case of Mountainous Gharabagh illustrates
this very well. The Armenians of Gharabagh have never left their
homeland, which was one of the main arguments of their na-
tional-liberation struggle in the late-1980s and early-1990s. No
wonder that in order to deny the claims of the Armenians of
Gharabagh, the Azerbaijanis used a contra-argument declaring
them a migrant group from Iran (see, e.g., Aliev 1988: 21-28),
that is, the argument of diaspora was used to fight the argu-
ment of homeland.
Going back to the movements of human communities re-
sulting in diaspora formation, we should note that, as a matter of
fact, the original group divides into t wo parts, homeland and
diaspora, the latter being understood as a single unit regardless
of how many subdivisions it consists of. The point of interest for
us here is the fact that these two parts often behave as binary op-
positions. This is an important mechanism of diaspora formation
and functioning and could be classified even as an intrinsic char-
acteristic of a diaspora. This characteristic is absent in the Jewish
case during the longest, rabbinical, phase of its history, but has
been regained soon after the recreation of the homeland-diaspora
structure in modern times.
This homeland/diaspora opposition is an inevitable product of
the original splitting. It could result for different reasons, these

328
reasons being sometimes evident, sometimes obscure the most
obvious ones are usually based in the differences between the
homeland and the host country, where the diaspora has found its
second homeland.
Sometimes the way of splitting itself may produce an opposi-
tion. Thus in the case of the Armenians the bulk of the present-
day diaspora was formed after the genocide of 1915, the experi-
ence of the survivors becoming a specific differentiating charac-
teristic of the expatriated group. Just in these terms, for example,
an elderly Syrian Armenian woman explained in the 1980s the
difference between her compatriots living in Syria and Armenia:
the latter never experienced the dreadful passage through the
Deir el-Zor desert, which the former had experienced in 1915.
8

Such an experience uniting the expatriate group can take the
shape of a collective memory even for the generations who
didnt experience the dramatic process of splitting.
9
This mem-
ory is typologically close to the Myth of Beginning, the universal
appeal for a human group toward its origins (either historical or
mythological), be this group a prehistoric tribe, a modern nation
or a diaspora.
10
Although the Myths of Beginning may have a
touch of drama in them,
11
those dealing with the origin of a dias-
pora often are exclusively based on historical tragedies. The Ar-
menian post-genocide diaspora is a typical example of such a
diaspora. In this sense the genocide became a real Creation Myth
for this part of the diaspora Armenians (cf. Adalian 1997: 331;
A. Petrosyan 1997a: 49-51). This does not mean, of course, that
the problem of the genocide is less articulated in the homeland
than in the diaspora. Thus, during the mass rallies of 1988 in
Yerevan, the posters and banners concerning the problem of

8
Personal communication of Ulla Kasten.
9
Some representatives of the third generation of the Armenian diaspora
may lose all characteristics of Armenianness except the knowledge of
the genocide their grandparents experienced in the Ottoman empire. In
some cases, on the contrary, this exact same knowledge is a reason for
some people to shun their national identity in order to avoid the label
of victims of genocide.
10
John Armstrong (1982: 207) calls such groups archetypal.
11
Cf. Creation Myths dealing with the idea of death and sacrifice in the
beginning of time which are necessary to give rise to the Cosmos
and/or its elements (see., e.g., Lincoln 1991: 167-175).

genocide were much greater in number (315) than those appeal-
ing to the main theme of the rallies reunion of Mountainous
Gharabagh with Armenia (60) (H. Marutyan 1999: 28).
12
How-
ever, the genocide is such a strong marking point of the Arme-
nian diaspora, that Armenian scholars, as a rule, use the word
sp'yur'k', the equivalent of diaspora, only for the (greater) part of
the diaspora formed as a result of the genocide of 1915, while all
the other constituents, of both ancient and modern times, are
called gaght'ojakh or gaght'avayr (lit. center or place of reset-
tlement).
13
This resembles the use of the word Holocaust to
exclusively denote the Jewish genocide. In a somewhat similar
manner, the word Diaspora with a capitalized d is often used
in order to differentiate the Jewish diaspora from all other dias-
poras (see, e.g. Safran 1991: 84).
By the way, the origin and meaning of the Armenian terms
sp'yur'k' and gaght'avayr correspond, respectively, to the Greek
term diaspora in its meaning Jewish diaspora and its modern
Hebrew equivalent glt with an evident negative connotation
(see Militarev 1999: 29). The only difference is that the Jews
tend to free the concept diaspora from the tragic connotation of
exile by introducing new and neutral terms (Militarev 1999: 31-
32), while Armenians presently perceive the word gaghut'
(gaut') (translated as colony in modern dictionaries) rather
neutrally,
14
while the word gaght'avayr (gat'avayr) with the

12
Only the textual analysis of the posters (which appeal to ecological
genocide, language genocide and other genocides) show that the
genocide became one of the key perceptions to form the modern Arme-
nian world view. Cf. the already mentioned model of the root paradigm
used by Nora Dudwick (1989) for describing this phenomenon of mod-
ern Armenian culture.
13
See, e.g., the respective articles on the two parts of the Armenian
diaspora in the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia Haykakan
gaght'avayrer (by V. Barkhudarian) and Hay sp'yur'k' (by E. Melk-
onian) (Sovetakan Hayastan 1987: 182-195). See also A. G. Abraha-
mian 1964-1967. Cf. the use of the word dispersion instead of dias-
pora, which seems to be an attempt to unify all types of diaspora see
Bardakjian 1999.
14
See, e.g. Hay-r'useren bar'aran 1984: 143. It is interesting that in a
19
th
century explanatory dictionary (Nor bar'girk' 1836: 524) and in the
etymological dictionary of H. Acharian (1971: 505) this word is inter-
preted with a shade of forced emigration.

330
same root contains a more pronounced connotation of exile.
The differences and even the opposition between homeland
and diaspora can also be traced back to the initial differences
between Eastern and Western Armenia, which later became the
homeland and the post-genocide diaspora respectively. This dif-
ference is rightly thought to be a result of the permanent splitting
of Armenia between two opposing great powers, beginning with
the division of Armenia between Persia and Byzantium in
385/387 and ending with the pre-genocide division between the
Russian and the Ottoman empires. This difference was later
deepened as a result of the communist and capitalist systems
where the two already differing segments of the Armenian peo-
ple managed to survive (see Melkonian 1998: 76-77). There are
also local ethnocultural differences between Eastern and Western
Armenians, including language. Nowadays, when pre-genocide
ethnocultural and post-genocide socio-political differences seem
to have the potential to eventually disappear sooner or later, the
existence of the two languages, with their two literary versions
and orthography, seems to indicate that in any case there are
some differences between the two segments of the Armenian
people that do not tend to vanish in the course of time, hence the
ideas of unification to be discussed in the Path of Reunion.
This split of the language was already present long before the
post-genocide splitting of the Armenian people and seems to be a
result of a later differentiation of a single language under the
conditions of different ethnocultural environments (cf. Dja-
hukian 1972: 180-192). Even if this split was based on an initial
differentiation of two clusters of dialects, these dialects had to be
rather close to each other, since, according to H. Acharian (1945:
363, see also 114-140, 362-439), in 5
th
-century Armenia, the dia-
lects were sub-dialects rather than strictly differing dialects. In
any case the language situation in early medieval Armenia, as we
supposed in the Path of Tradition, was typologically closer to
that of a modern nation-state (cf. Djahukian 1987: 365), than it is
usually thought.
However homogenous and typologically close to a kind of
proto- or pre-nation-state Armenian society was in early medie-
val times, historic Armenia was already divided into two sub-
ethnic parts, Eastern and Western Armenia, before the dramatic
split at the beginning of the 20
th
century. And a significant pecu-
liarity of homeland/diaspora relations in the Armenian case is the

circumstance, that the post-genocide split predetermined the
homeland on the basis of Eastern Armenia and the diaspora on
the basis of Western Armenia.
This dichotomous structure of Armenian society seems to fit
a more general structure beyond the dramatic splits ranging from
the division of Armenia between Persia and Byzantium at the
end of the 4
th
century to the split into homeland and post-
genocide diaspora in the beginning of the 20
th
century. The pres-
ence of the two Armenias, Greater and Lesser, in historical times
and the present-day Armenia-Gharabagh formation, the constitu-
ents of which are neither divided nor united, but are in any case
differentiated, seem to represent the different aspects of this in-
trinsic dichotomy. Even the double-peaked Mt. Masis (Ararat),
the symbol of Armenia, seems to express the same idea, in addi-
tion to presenting the asymmetry of the two constituents of this
dichotomous unity.

The Paths of Prudence and Rebelliousness
There is a dichotomy of another kind in Armenian society, which
is not connected with the geographical structure of Armenia, but
may sometimes coincide with it. Following N. Adonts' (Adonts
1948), we can characterize this dichotomy according to two ten-
dencies, which seem to be distinguishable at least since the 5
th

century. These two opposed trends represent, respectively, the
trend toward rebelliousness and toward prudence.
15
Adonts'
traces these opposing trends back to the famous opposition be-
tween Vardan Mamikonian and Vasak Syuni during the anti-
Persian rebellion of 451, which created the traditional Armenian
stereotypes of a national hero and a traitor. According to Adonts',
this was rather a reflection of the rebellious and prudent attitudes
toward an ambiguous situation, which was characteristic for the
Mamikonian and the Bagratuni families respectively (Adonts
1948: 23-26). These two trends may correlate with the East/West
differentiation of Armenia, although they may change places, as
well as switch between the two high ranking families represent-
ing the two trends. Thus, at the end of the 6th century Sahak
Mamikonian was representing the prudent principle and the

15
Adonts' also uses the term parties for these trends, but we will not
use it here in order to avoid confusing it with modern political parties,
which also correlate with these two trends.

332
West, while Smbat Bagratuni was representing the rebellious
principle and the East (Adonts 1948: 34). However, the general
trend to caution and prudence was more accentuated in Ba-
gratuni generations, than among the Mamikonians.
One may speculate on the necessity of such an intrinsic di-
chotomy for a nation: when conditions are continually changing,
having the flexibility of both orientations simultaneously allows
for the possibility to choose the best approach depending on the
situation. Though such an ambivalent mechanism of national
survival might sometimes be dramatic for the nation itself, as
was the baneful animosity between the Mamikonian and Ba-
gratuni lines.
However, Adonts' seems to look for the roots of such a di-
chotomy in the social sphere rather than in essentialist psychol-
ogy. Thus he connects the prudent trend of the Bagratunis with
the rise of the lower middle classes, the burghers, and the growth
of towns, which need stability as a principal component for their
survival, and the Mamikonians rebellious spirit with the tradi-
tionalism of the feudal lords. In short, the prudent trend was op-
posed to the rebellious trend as the centralized power was op-
posed to the parceled feudal structure (Adonts 1948: 46-47).
However that may be, the two trends also continue to exist in
modern times, when there is no opposition between feudal and
centralized social structures. In Soviet times, the two trends were
represented, respectively, by a prudent and oblivious Armenia
resigned to the communist regime and by the post-genocide in-
dependent diaspora fighting for national memory.
16
Of course,
such distribution of the two trends between the homeland and
diaspora is very rough and conventional. At the same time, the
diaspora itself can be divided into two parts representing the two
trends, thus proving the universal nature of the discussed dichot-
omy. Thus the Dashnak party represents the rebellious trend (cf.
the evident rebelliousness of its name The Armenian
Re v o l u t i o n a r y Federation), while the R'amkavar party, be-
ing more loyal to the state structure, is closer to the prudent
trend. This characterization is also conventional and represents

16
The characteristic of the rebellious trend as true to their vows,
faithful and the prudent trend as faithless, treacherous (Adonts
1948: 26) since the Vardan/Vasak opposition is understood also as be-
ing faithful/unfaithful toward national memory.

the ideal, rather than the actual characteristics of the two parties.
As the Mamikonians and the Bagratunis (and West and East as
well) sometimes change places in the opposing trends, so the
homeland and the diaspora may also change places. Thus during
the first stage of the Gharabagh movement, the diaspora parties
were more cautious and prudent, than the rebellious participants
of the mass rallies in Gharabagh and Armenia,
17
who were even
attributed with the rebellious label of extremists by the Soviet
authorities. Later, as the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict deep-
ened, the diaspora, especially the Dashnaks, regained the Ma-
mikonian attitude toward the war in Gharabagh.
When discussing the two trends in the case of the Var-
dan/Vasak opposition, Adonts' notes an interesting detail in the
rebellious trend. The success of the anti-Persian rebellion was
based primarily on the help expected from the West, namely
from the Byzantine emperor (Adonts 1948: 25). Although these
hopes were never realized, this model of rebellion was repeated
at least twice in more recent times. First, in Ottoman Turkey be-
fore the Genocide, when the revolutionary parties, the followers
of the Mamikonian line, hoped to get help from Europe and Rus-
sia in their fight for independence, as had happened in the Bal-
kan case. The latest attempt to realize the same model was un-
dertaken during the Gharabagh rebellion against Azerbaijan. The
Gharabaghians started their fight (from constitutional referen-
dum and rallies to armed resistance) hoping to get support from
the Russian czar Gorbachev. The case of Gharabagh is also in
good accordance with the already mentioned opposition between
town, the rising lower middle classes, and the parceled feudal
structure as an origin of the two trends as put forth by Adonts'.
By the beginning of the Gharabagh conflict, as we already men-
tioned in the Forking Path Toward the Feudal Future, Gharabagh
was typologically very close to its feudal prototype of the 18
th

century. The late-20
th
-century Gharabaghians were fighting
against the Azerbaijanis (Muslim Turks) under the leadership
of Soviet feudal lords in the same way, as the 18
th
-century
Gharabaghian Armenians were fighting against Turkic and Mus-
lim invaders under the leadership of the meliks, the local feudal
lords. And, what is important for our typological comparison, in

17
Cf. the joint statement made in October 1988 by the three diaspora
Armenian political parties see Libaridian 1991: 127-129.

334
both cases the Gharabaghians were appealing to the respective
Russian czar for help. At the same time, the rebellion in Yere-
van, which took place parallel to the Gharabaghian one, had
many features of a social revolt, producing a kind of short-lived
civil society born in the square, as we have seen in the Path of
Rebellion and Festival. Thus the modern Armenia-Gharabagh
binary unity displays not only the discussed two trends, but also
even reveals, although typologically, the same principal social
differences, which Adonts' originally observed in early medieval
Armenian society.
According to Armen Petrosyan (1995), the discussed two
trends are a particular case of a more universal and ancient di-
chotomy specific to Armenian culture. He thinks that even the
modern opposition between homeland and diaspora (Western)
scholars in Armenian studies, the formers primordialism and
essentialism and the latters hypercriticism, conformism and un-
truthfulness regarding national history, are a reflection of these
two trends. The severe criticism of the approach to Armenian
history in the American historiography undertaken recently by
Armen Aivazian (1998) and many replies to it (see, e.g.,
Aslanian 2003) are a good example of such opposition.
However ancient this dichotomy may be, judging from the
legend about the Armenians rebel progenitor Hayk (Khorenats'i
1913: I.10), one may speculate that primordially Armenians
only had one, the rebellious trend.
Parallels to the two trends can also be found in other cultures,
for example in the 19th-century Russian differentiation of Occi-
dentophiles and Slavophiles. The ratio of the rebellious and pru-
dent parts of a society may vary in the course of history and from
society to society, feeding various and sometimes speculative
hypotheses and theories (cf. Gumilev 1990: 258-312). However
that may be, this ratio plays a considerable role in determining
national history and national character, since the two trends,
wherever they originate from, are materialized in the people who
express and realize these trends. Thus it often serves as an indi-
cator when differentiating peoples and sometimes even leads to
academic ethnogonies. For example, in 19
th
-century Russian eth-
nography the Ingush were not thought of as a separate people,
but rather as the peaceful segment of the Chechen people since
they did not participate in the severe resistance of the militant
Chechens against the Russian conquest of the Caucasus (see To-

karev 1958: 243). Although the split of these two related peoples
from a common stem took place earlier and not according to this
scenario (see, e.g. Keligov et al. 1994: 161-162), theoretically
such splits could play a considerable role in the processes of eth-
nogenesis.
In the case of the Armenians, we have yet another problem
here, which is much discussed both in Armenia and the diaspora
and which is connected with the present-day peak of emigration
of Armenians from their homeland. In terms of the aforemen-
tioned split, this problem discusses the nature and quality of
those who stay and those who have to leave their fatherland as a
result of the economic crisis of the 1990s and for other reasons.
According to one opinion, which can be called patriotic or na-
tion-oriented, the departing segment of the nation is viewed as its
most capable part, which nevertheless is doomed to be lost for
Armenia and Armenianness, the dangers of this process ranging
from vanishing to the considerable weakening of the Armenian
nation. Thus the diaspora, namely its new, economically stipula-
ted part is considered by this opinion as potentially unreliable for
preserving national identity, that is, is perceived as something
close to the prudent, oblivious trend of the Armenian nation.
The same opinion classifies the people who stay in the homeland
despite unbearable conditions, as true patriots of their nation,
that is, perceives them as something close to the Mamikonian
trend cf. the motto praising death for faith (independence, na-
tion), which is present in the rebellious trend from the Avarayr
battle to the present-day programs of nationalist parties.

The Path of Reunion
The idea of an eventual return to the homeland is one of the typi-
cal characteristics of a diaspora, whether this idea is expressed
directly or on the level of memory, thought and symbolic action
(cf. Safran 1991: 83-84, Nos. 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6). Repatriation,
which had several phases, the first beginning in the early-1920s
and the last ending in the late-1970s, was in fact a realization of
the idea of return and an attempt to liquidate the original home-
land/diaspora split. However, counting out the Iranian Armeni-
ans, whose repatriation to Soviet Armenia (in the 1960s and
1970s) could be classified as a return to the homeland of their
ancestors, that is, to Eastern Armenia, the other diaspora Arme-
nians were not returning to their actual homeland, which was

336
Western Armenia, but to its symbolic substitute.
18
Although the
idea of eventual return to the homeland continues to play its role
in the programs of political parties or in the popular perception
of historical justice, the presence of this symbolic substitute
brings specific nuances into the diaspora attitude toward the
homeland, and, consequently, into the Armenian case of home-
land/diaspora relations in general. The will of William Saroyan
materializes such relations: his ashes were divided into three
parts to correspond to the three fatherlands: California, where he
was born, Western Armenia, the homeland of his ancestors, and
the Republic of Armenia, the symbolic homeland.
19

Thus repatriation was not just an encounter of East and West
(in cases where the repatriates were from Western countries), but
also of Eastern and Western Armenias. This was not the first
such encounter in the history of Armenia: a great mass of West-
ern Armenians moved to Eastern Armenia in the first half of the
19
th
century as a result of Russian-Persian and Russian-Turkish
wars, and another wave of Western Armenians found refuge in
Eastern Armenia after the Genocide at the beginning of the 20
th

century. The present ethnographic mosaic of Armenia, consisting
of both Eastern and Western Armenian segments is precisely the
result of these two encounters. As always happens in such cases,
the differentiation between old residents and newcomers lingered
for a long time, almost until the present. Now the two groups are
not opposing each other, rather they are competing for domi-
nance in Armenian culture, as was the case with the temporary
victory of the music and dancing style
20
of Sasun (Sassoun) (i.e.
Western Armenian) in a series of folk festivals in Yerevan in
the1970s. As the remnants of the old differentiation seem to be
smoothing out, a new differentiation, between old residents (now
represented by these two groups) and fresh newcomers, refugees
from Azerbaijan, became accentuated in the 1990s.

18
Many repatriates of the first, pre-WWII, wave considered Soviet
Armenia a temporary step before returning to their real homeland in
Western Armenia, which, they hoped, would be liberated in the near
future (Step'anyan 2005).
19
An interesting point in Saroyans will is the hierarchy of homelands:
from personal to familial to national.
20
This style was performed by the descendants from Sasun living in the
Talin region of Eastern Armenia.

Repatriation was presented, both by diaspora illusions and
communist propaganda of the homeland, as a reunion of the split
parts of the Armenian nation. While in reality the group of repa-
triates (hayrenadardz), which somehow escaped an even further
journey East, to a Siberian exile, just became a sub-ethnic group
of new-comers (norek) in Armenia, whom the old residents gave
the pejorative name akhpar after the repatriates manner of
pronouncing the Armenian word akhper (colloquial from egh-
bayr) meaning brother, which they used in addressing each
other. The newcomer brothers brought many Western values
and habits into the life of the Easterners, ranging from Euro-
pean hats to capitalist modes of production (small handicrafts).
The not so prestigious status of the akhpars rose during
Brezhnevs stagnation years and especially during perestroika,
when to have an akhpar wife or husband meant to have a real
chance to emigrate to the West.
21
Thus repatriation in reality be-
came just a temporal illustration of the idea of the return to the
homeland: the majority of those who returned and/or their de-
scendants not only went back to join the diaspora, but they also
carried a considerable amount of old residents of the homeland
along with them. That is, the original split, after a temporal at-
tempt to regain the imagined unity, became even more empha-
sized. The modern diaspora Hayastants'i group we have men-
tioned earlier is comprised mainly of former repatriates and their
affiliated members, to which a new group of former homeland
residents have joined in the difficult post-Soviet years. As I said
already, the Hayastants'i group is quite interesting in many re-
spects. The peculiarities of the new expatriates encounters with
the old diaspora residents reflect the hidden opposition between
homeland and diaspora well. Leaving this theme for future
scholars, I would only like to stress here, that the Hayastants'i
diaspora group might be the best mediator between homeland
and diaspora, since for them Armenia is a real homeland, not a
symbolic one. While the question of identity is often a problem

21
A reflection of the high status of repatriates in the late 1980s can be
seen in the repatriate background of the first president of Armenia, al-
though here too one can see the ambiguous attitude toward this group:
in the mid-1990s, people disappointed in their president attributed his
negative qualities to his akhpar nature.

338
for other diaspora groups,
22
the Hayastants'is, at least their first
generation, identify themselves in almost absolute accordance
with the name which they acquired in the diaspora and which
shows their direct connection with the homeland (Hayas-
tan/Armenia). Any realistic and globalistic strategy of future
homeland/diaspora relations should use this group as a potential
intermediary, especially since this approach already works on the
level of the family. As we noted in the Path of Tradition, one of
the answers to the riddle of survival of the Armenians in post-
Soviet Armenia is the occasional financial support from relatives
who have recently emigrated to join either an internal or ex-
ternal diaspora.
23

While repatriation was a materially expressed idea of the re-
union, there were and still are various symbolic and metaphysi-
cal ways of realizing this idea. One of them is the modern per-
ception of a rich diaspora as the savior of the poor homeland.
Actually, this is a new expression of the old Armenian idea of
looking to the West for help in critical situations. We have al-
ready mentioned this idea, or rather strategy of survival, when
discussing the two trends in Armenian society. In the 5
th
century,
during the anti-Persian rebellion, this was the expected help from
Byzantium. Since the late 11th century, the time of the Seljuk
invasion and the Crusades, expectations of rescue from the West
were based on a series of visions and prophesies, which were
traced back to the famous vision of Nerses the Great, the catholi-
cos of Armenia in the 4
th
century (see Hovhannisyan 1957: 16-
17; H. Petrosyan n.d.). In the 18
th
century, Armenians of endan-

22
For example, an American student of Armenian descent claimed that
to be Armenian is her hobby (UC Berkeley, 1997).
23
Internal diaspora or nerk'in sp'yur'k' in Armenian, which supposes an
external, artak'in diaspora, is a remnant of the Soviet mentality of
Armenians, who in many respects still continue to perceive themselves
as a part of the former Soviet empire. After the collapse of the USSR,
the Russians introduced the term blizhnee zarubezh'e meaning near
abroad (foreign country) to designate territories of the former Soviet
Union where Russians continue to live after the collapse. The real
foreign countries with a Russian diaspora are called respectively
dal'nee zarubezh'e far abroad (foreign country). This gives them the
right to speak of Russians of the near abroad avoiding the term
diaspora, which is another product of the Russian (Soviet) imperial
mentality.

gered Gharabagh looked to Russia for help (the West being sub-
stituted by the North); in the beginning of the 20
th
century, dur-
ing World War I, Western Armenians were expecting rescue
from the European countries, and at the end of the century, dur-
ing the Gharabagh movement, again from Russia. The dias-
pora, being located mainly in the West and embodying Western
values, now becomes the most recent expression of this universal
strategy of survival. And although this strategy never seemed to
help Armenians survive in the past, it continues to feed Arme-
nian dreams of survival, now by inviting wise ministers from
the diaspora.
The election of the late Garegin I, a Westerner and diaspora
representative, as catholicos of all Armenians in 1995 expressed
yet another symbolic avenue of realizing the idea of reuniting
diaspora and homeland. We discussed this failed symbolic reun-
ion advocated by the first president of Armenia, Levon Ter-
Petrossian, in the Royal Path.
Another theme related to the idea of reunion and solidarity is
the question of the orthography of the Armenian language which
was raised in the late-1980s and 1990s. This question was much
discussed both in academic journals and in the mass media, us-
ing a variety of genres including scholarly research, denuncia-
tions, round tables, talk-shows, manifesto-like declarations, and
pamphlets.
24
The cause for the discussion was the idea of return-
ing to the classical orthography which was changed by the re-
forms of 1922 and 1940. And since these reforms were realized
only for the Eastern Armenian literary language, while the West-
ern Armenian literary language preserved the old, Mesropian
orthography, the problem of the unified orthography becomes a
problem of uniting the two parts of the Armenian nation. Some

24
See, e.g., Sharabkhanian 1990; Gasparyan 1992; Unified Orthogra-
phy 1997; Djahukian et al. 1997; On the Orthographies of the Arme-
nian 1998; Ter-Vardanean et al. 1998; H. Movsisyan 1997
[Movsisyan is a pseudonym. It has a postscript An unknown lin-
guist]. I will not present the bulk of literature on this topic for the sake
of space, especially as we are mainly interested in the home-
land/diaspora aspect of this problem. I am indebted to Hovhannes
Zak'aryan, one of the active discussants (an advocate of the return to
classical orthography) for providing me with the full literature on the
question.

340
people think the reforms were introduced by the anti-nationalist
Bolsheviks to more deeply divide Soviet Armenia from the capi-
talist and nationalist diaspora, while others trace the idea of the
reforms back to the late-19
th
century and the time of the first Re-
public, seeing in the reforms a natural process of language de-
velopment. However that may be, as a result, the two parts of the
Armenian nation presently are not only differing in language, but
also in orthography. In the homeland/diaspora controversy, the
advocates of the return to the old, pre-reform, orthography usu-
ally represent the views of the diaspora (see, e. g. Unified Or-
thography 1997: 48), while the advocates of the reforms focus
their attention on the residents of Armenia and the Hayastants'i
group of the diaspora (Djahukian et. al. 1997: No. 5). Those who
believe we should keep the reformed orthography sometimes
regard the diaspora as a structure doomed to vanish (Unified
Orthography 1997: 48) or else they believe the number of Ar-
menian readers in the diaspora is incomparable to those in Ar-
menia. .
25
The discussion goes on, but the point I would like to
note here is that the idea of unifying the orthography will hardly
unite the two parts of the nation, since they speak differing lan-
guages (cf. Djahukian et al. 1997: No. 4). Let us remember that
repatriates got their akhpar nickname due to their Western Ar-
menian language. That is, the attempt to reunite through the lan-
guage here too seems to have a metaphysical nature: its rather
bringing closer the already divided ones, and not recreating the
ancient and blessed state of original unity.
Even more metaphysical are attempts to create situations ap-
proaching this original unity. Such a big event was organized in
September 1999 in Yerevan under the motto One nation (azg),
one culture. This event was thought to be a kind of a Pan-
Armenian forum, involving all the diaspora structures (territorial,
political, social, etc.). It was as if the diaspora as a unit (includ-
ing all the diasporas) was reuniting with the homeland. The

25
For example, this was one of the arguments of L. Yezekian, the Chair
of Armenian language of Yerevan State University on a TV talk-show
(Yerevan, 16 January 1999, Armenia). In a sense, such an asymmet-
rical attitude toward homeland/diaspora construction can be compared
with the attitude of those representatives of the diaspora, who refuse to
support diaspora structures thinking that the diaspora should only focus
on helping the homeland.

motto of the event, One nation, one culture, reflected this
mythological primordial entity, rather than the actual situation,
which anthropologically could be better defined as One nation,
many cultures.
However, forums like this, and especially events like the Pan-
Armenian Games in Yerevan, create a kind of a festive unity,
realizing the idea of a reunion of the split parts of the Armenians
during the short period of a festival of reunion.
While these events realize the dream of reunion in a material-
ized form of temporal forums and festivals, on rare occasions the
feeling of solidarity and the absence of a diaspora/homeland op-
position can take place on the spiritual level despite the physical
division. The mass rallies of 1988 regarding the Mountainous
Gharabagh conflict are an example of such a case. In many re-
spects these rallies resembled an archaic festival, which, as we
saw in the Path of Rebellion and Festival, was marked (and
stipulated) by the weakening and even vanishing of the main
oppositions within Armenian society. From a more general per-
spective, the opposition between homeland and diaspora also
temporarily vanished, since diaspora Armenians were also par-
ticipating in this political festival. This means that the split
between homeland and diaspora was miraculously eliminated,
although this was only a temporal state of reunion.

The Path of Mediators

SIXTEEN

THE PATH OF MEDIATORS
Armenia and Armenians Between
East and West

In this final Path we will outline a strange coincidence: Armeni-
ans always seem to appear on the borderline between East and
West. This coincidence is such a constant in the course of history
that one is even tempted to call it the fate of the Armenians or
else one has to at least take this phenomenon into account when
classifying characteristics of Armenianness.
Presently this phenomenon is mainly expressed in the
Europe/Asia controversy when identifying the Republic of Ar-
menia and the Armenians. Since there is no distinct natural bor-
derline between Europe and Asia,
1
it is drawn differently. Mainly
this borderline varies in the area between the Caspian and the
Black Sea. Usually it is drawn along the Central Caucasian
mountain ridge or a little to the north of it, across the Kumo-
Manych valley, leaving Armenia, together with Transcaucasus,
in Asia.
2
But sometimes Transcaucasus is included in Europe,
3

so that Armenia finds herself in Europe. However, according to
other divisions, Armenia finds herself in Europe with greater
permanence. For example, the Armenian soccer team is a mem-
ber of the European Soccer League or Armenia is admitted to the

1
See Rabinovich 2001: 59-61 for the original scope of the Europe men-
tioned in a Homer hymn.
2
Cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, any edition, article Europe (section
Geography and Statistics).
3
See, e.g. Bol'shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1952: 383-384), article
Europe (sections General Data and Physical-Geographical Essay).

346
Council of Europe,
4
from where she is threatened to be with-
drawn in case she will not behave like a European, that is a civi-
lized country. Such European encouragement from the outside
is met with a counter-reaction from the inside: Armenians usu-
ally consider themselves Europeans anyway. However, this
seems to be a civilizational self-appraisal of many, maybe even
all peoples living near a geographical borderline. Thus, Turkey
seeks to enter the European Union, while Georgians, after the
recent find of the most ancient scull of European appearance,
often treated by Georgians as an ancestor of the Europeans,
begin to consider themselves Europeans in a paleoanthropologi-
cal respect as well.
At the same time, present-day Armenia semiotically mani-
fests its closeness to Asia. For example, the first Western free
market in Yerevan (represented on the level of small vendors)
was introduced through a typical Asian bazaar structure, or
Western consumer goods were introduced in their Eastern dis-
guise (Abrahamian, Gulyan et al. 1997). Let us also recall the
situation already reflected in the Path of Music: the part of the
Armenian populace oriented toward European music co-exists
with a greater part of the populace oriented toward r'abiz music,
which itself is a synthesis of Oriental and Western musical
styles. And all the r'abiz, jazz or flamenco type phenomena indi-
cate that we are dealing with a borderline situation, an interme-
diary space between at least two cultures. In the case of Arme-
nia, in addition to the mentioned geographical intermediary posi-
tion, many signs also indicate her being (or imagining herself) in
a borderline intermediary position between Asia and Europe. A
good illustration of the Armenians fixed idea of their inter-
mediary position could be the results of one brainstorming ses-
sion and sociological investigation carried out in Yerevan in the
autumn of 1990. This investigation was aimed at locating the
future Europolis, a city that was planned to be built after the
earthquake of 1988 but never was. The majority of the respon-
dents wanted this illusive city with a telling name to be built near
the village of Yeraskhavan in the Ararat valley, a site which is
simultaneously the closest to Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan.
The present Asia/Europe controversy presupposes and was
preceded by a more general East/West controversy. Unlike the

4
Cf. Kukhianidze 1995: 68 for a similar situation in the case of Georgia.

The Path of Mediators 347
borderline between Asia and Europe, which may shift a little in
the minds of geographers, policy makers and borderline territory
dwellers, the borderline between East and West is much more
flexible and mobile. Thus, this borderline shifted toward the West
as a result of the Seljuk expansions. And suddenly an Armenian
kingdom of Cilicia appeared just on this borderline in the 12th-
14th centuries, away from the ethnic territory of the Armenians.
For relations between Russia and Oriental countries, the
East/West direction corresponded to the South/North direction,
in cases when the road to the East passed via the Caucasus. And
it is just in this borderland that we find the Circassian Armenians
we spoke about earlier in the Path of Faith, who played the role
of an important intermediary link between South (East) and
North (West).
5

Another example is the dramatic end of Jugha, a city in Ar-
menia, which was a flourishing trade center in the 16
th
century.
When the Persian king Shah Abbas decided to move the border-
line between East and West toward his country, he accomplished
this by destroying Jugha, the former intermediary point between
East and West, and moving its population to Persia in the begin-
ning of the 17
th
century to found New Jugha, which soon became
a new intermediary point between East and West. Nearly two
centuries later, when this borderline moved further to the East, to
India, this time as a result of the activities of the Dutch and later
British East India Company, the British found Armenians, who
had already created a trade network there, just at this borderline.
The Armenians, who were tradesmen from New Jugha, helped
the Company in its initial steps into the Indian market and played
the role of a buffer between Western and Eastern merchants.
6

There are many more such examples and each example has,
of course, a different and specific history ranging from deporta-
tions to adventurous trade expeditions, which hardly fit a com-

5
Cf. Grigorian 1980: 49, 61 on a similar intermediary role of the Ar-
menians of the Ukraine and Poland.
6
Armenians were even granted the privileges of the British in India in
1688 due to this important intermediary role, but were deprived of them
when they supported the rebel Bengal nawab Mir Kasim (Kasim Ali-
khan) in the early-1760s (R. Abramian 1968: 70). On this anti-British
rebellion and Gergin-khan, the legendary Armenian commander-in-chief
of the Bengal army, see Seth 1983: 383-418; R. Abramian 1968: 50-71.

348
mon model. But, however different the reasons for these moves
were, the result was the same: wherever the flexible borderline
between East and West shifts, Armenia and/or the Armenians are
in some mysterious way right there, as if waiting to become in-
termediates between the newly distributed East and West. Usu-
ally this happens against their will, Armenians are as if doomed
to become intermediates, but sometimes it becomes a point of
political strategy, as it is, for instance, in the case of present-day
Armenias ambiguous intermediate position between Iran (South
[East]) and Russia (North [West]), which takes aback and annoys
the West, especially the United States.
The many minor cases, in which Armenians play the role of
intermediates in local East/West divisions, for example, between
the British and the Turks in Cyprus, show that we really are deal-
ing with a universal model of an Armenian way of life. The last
example also illustrates that this model is not always a successful
model of survival. In Cyprus, the Armenians that fled Turkey
during the Genocide first settled in the part of the island inhab-
ited by local Turks (that is why they played the role of interme-
diates between the British and the Turks), but after the
Greek/Turkish conflict they had to move to the Greek part of the
island (Pattie 1997: 50-51, 108, 119-122). Beyond this mini-
model, the general model discussed in this Path shows that there
are two sides of the coin and a cost to being in between: the
same fate of being in between has brought many misfortunes to
Armenia and the Armenians, since the West and the East not
only cooperate, but also war, and those in between become the
immediate victims of such wars.
This trend of always being between East and West also re-
fers to the diaspora-forming processes in one way or another.
Both sides of the coin contribute to these processes. Let us recall
the division of Armenia between Persia and Byzantium in
385/387. Nowadays, when caravans do not cross Armenia any
more, Armenians look toward new models that fit the old inter-
mediary model to survive in the modern world of airplanes fly-
ing over the former busy crossroads of East and West. Especially
as the East/West borderline seems to be preparing for a new
shift. The mystical logic outlined in this final Path gives us a
clue, a litmus test for prognosticating the location of the new
borderline between East and West: one just has to look for large
accumulations of Armenians on the world map. Presently, such a

The Path of Mediators 349
place is California. The increasing numbers of Asian people liv-
ing there gives a visible confirmation of such a possible future
shift. The trend of the US to realize trade communications via
the Pacific instead of the Atlantic ocean since the1980s (Hague,
Harrop and Breslin 1992: 116) also points in this direction.
7
So,
perhaps, it will be the Armenian diaspora with its internal struc-
ture of successive intermediary components (including the Ha-
yastants'is and all other different old and new diaspora groups
with their many levels of social and professional standings) that
might play an important role in establishing a new model of
homeland-diaspora relations and thus enter a new stage of Ar-
menian identity in a changing world.

7
A. Kukhianidze (1995: 67-68) uses this possible Pacific orientation of
the future world center to prognosticate a new East/West division of the
world, but sees the Caucasus as the possible intermediate between the
future Eurocenter and the Pacific center.

Epilogue

Epilogue

A GARDEN OR A LABYRINTH?

Our walk in the Park of Armenian Identity has come to its end.
Of the three ways of laying out a park introduced in the Preface,
we have tried to use the English method of self-organizing
parks more often, with the hope that the Armenian identity
would be outlined and revealed by itself. However, the many
forking paths hardly seem to create a well-organized space. Not
to mention that we could have a few more principal and many
more secondary forking paths and blind alleys in our Park. Some
themes that appear in several paths could have formed separate
paths, while some separate narrow paths could have joined
broader paths. In any case, instead of an optimal and natural
English park we seem to have obtained a kind of Garden of
Forking Paths the ideal labyrinth created by Jorge Luis Borges
(1981), though, of course, our park is far from being such an
ideal labyrinth. However, here too, a curious or investigating
visitor may come across the same phenomenon in different
paths, times and appearances. And as in Borges Garden of Fork-
ing Paths one might meet someone as a friend on one path and as
an enemy on another, so in our Park of Forking Identities the
same phenomenon could be auspicious on one path, while on
another path it could be harmful and destructive for the nation.
Perhaps, the other two methods of park building, especially
the dogmatic one, would have created more organized and
patriotic parks. But one sometimes needs to enter a labyrinth
of nationalism in order to leave it having grown wise with ex-
perience so as not to be lost there forever.

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Index

INDEX

Abkhazia(ns), 12, 23, 55, 57, 58,
72, 158, 178, 261
Abovian, Khach'atur, 47, 250, 316,
317
Acharian, Hrach'ya, 19, 67, 139,
140, 330
Adonts', Nikoghayos, 118, 331
334
Africa(n), 8, 9, 21, 22, 106, 231,
235
Agat'angeghos, 117120, 306
aggression, aggressiveness, 247,
248, 255; change of direction,
260, 263; discharge of, chan-
neling, 255, 265, [279], 289;
ethnic, 250, [255], 264; exter-
nally-directed, 255, 257; in-
ternally-directed, 255257;
lack of, 260; name aggres-
sion, 56; sleeping, 252; ver-
bal, 70, 257. See also violence
Albania (Caucasian) / Aghuank', 17,
3341, 53
Albanian(s) (Caucasian), 14, 16
20, 3341, 53, 80, 325; alpha
bet, 14, 17, 41, 80; Church, 39,
40; identity, 17, 33
alien(s), 13, 15, 22, 66, 67, 71, 79,
86, 171, 279, 319; aggression
toward them, 249, 257; king as,
22, 69, [81], [96], 211; in na-
tional models, trees, 8, 10, 14
17, 19, 22, 32, 57; transform-
ing into us, 67, 319
alphabet, script, 14, 17, 48, 74, 75,
7982, 88, 273; Albanian, 14,
17, 41, 80; Arabic, 8082; Ara-
mean, 82; Armenian, 48, 79
81, 84, 86, 88 (computerized),

141; Cyrillic, 81, 82; Georgi-
an, 14, 54, 7981; and iden-
tity, 79, 81, 82, 140; invention
of, 14, 48, 54, 80, 8486, 140,
311; Latin, Latinized, 81, 82
America, American(s), xiv, 8, 9,
14, 30, 31, 36, 38, 41, 70, 87,
108, 151, 152, 154158, 162,
185, 213, 214, 225, 228, 277,
278, 311, 334, 338. See also
United States
ancestor(s), 7, 1013, 15, 19, 22,
24, 28, 32, 33, 35, 37, 47, 53,
60, 112, 124, 129, 146, 155,
175, 176, 214, 273, 275, 276,
282, 284, 292, 326, 335, 336,
346; the path of, 7, 32, 38, 46,
48, 57, 59, 61, 65, 68, 71, 72,
80, 84, 95, 113, 122, 129, 142,
[157-158], 200, 210, 211, 269,
273. See also forefather(s) and
progenitor
Anderson, Benedict, 31, 32, 138,
139
Andranik, general, 132, 185, 294,
298
Andropov, Yuri, 61, 194, 207
anecdote(s), 12, 84, 156, 183, 199,
210. See also jokes
Ani, 131, 234, 318, 319
Antelias, 209, 325
aphasia (political), 74
Arabic, Arabian, Arabs, 8082,
132; invasions, 33, 233, 293;
music, 100, 104
Ararat, Mt., 11, 58, 59, 268 (film
Ararat), 273, 293, 295, 331,
346 (Ararat valley). See also
Masis, Mt.

Index 392
Araratian kingdom, 11
Armenian: alphabet, see alphabet,
Armenian; Church, see Church,
Armenian; diaspora, see dias-
pora, Armenian; genocide, see
genocide, Armenian; Highland,
10, 11, 50; history, 35, 36, 54,
59, 60, 134, 192, 218, 240, 285,
287, 307, 310, 314, 315, 334,
336, see also Movss Khore-
nats'i, History of Armenia;
kings, dynasties, kingdoms,
22, 33, 34, 3941, 48, 59, 83,
114, 117, 208212, 325, 331
333, 364; language, see language,
Armenian; model, see models,
Armenian; nation, 19, 36, 141,
143, 146149, 166, 209, 335,
337, 339, 340, see also azg;
national tree, xi, 10, 11, 14, 19,
20, 22, 23 (Gharabaghian), 33,
65; nationalism, nationalists,
ix, xiii, 25, 36, 68, 69, 73, 75,
76, 88, 138, 142, 143, 145, 181,
209, 219, 221, 222, 256, 260,
281, 293, 300, 335, 340; pre-
nation, 139, 141, 143, 330; Re-
naissance, 143; state symbols,
5860; studies, xiv, 53, 139, 143,
334; Western, see West, West-
ern Armenian(s)
Armenian identity, passim; in-
ward orientation of, 160; para-
digms of, 76, 97, 151, 152, 155,
[166], 329; symbols of, 11, 58,
131, 311, [314]
Armenianizing, 11, 38, 39, 47, 97
(armenization), 163
Armenianness, 1, 115, 122, 127,
128, 159, 293, 328, 335, 345
Armenians: Catholic, 50, 113, 116,
117; Circassian, 114, 115, 137,
347; diaspora, 102, 102, 130,
132, 148, 165, 209, 298, 328,
335, 340, 341, 347; Eastern,
xii, 294, 330, 331, 335, 336,
339; fate of, 160, 161, 262,
263, 345; of Georgia, 50; of
Gharabagh, 23, 41, 55, 56, 220,
224, 297, 327, 333; of India, 347;
massacres, pogroms of, 257,
[258], 263, 264, 266, 268, [277],
[298]; Muslim (Khemshil), 113;
new, 105, 106; Persian (Ira-
nian), 115, 335; pioneer com-
plex of, 113, 127, 131, 140,
145; proto-, 55; refugees from
Azerbaijan, 73, 151, 336; re-
patriates, 100, 336, 337, 340;
Russian-speaking, 73, 89; of
the Ukraine and Poland, 116,
347; Western, see West, West-
ern Armenian(s)
Arts'akh, 12, 33, 38, 41. See also
Mountainous Gharabagh
Arutiunov, Sergei, 56, 78, 158,
287
Asia, Asian, Asiatic, 14, 21, 106,
158, 269, 345, 346, 349; Cen-
tral, 80, 81, 205, 265, 281, 294;
and Europe, 345347; Minor,
50; mode of production, 138
Assyrians, modern and ancient, 82,
83, 305
Atropatena, Atropatenians, 17, 32
Australia (aboriginal), 28, 29, 85,
123, 124, 224, 228, 233, 247,
248, 273275
Avarayr battle, 122, 126, 140,
142, 143, 318, 335. See also
rebellion, anti-Persian
Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani(s), 9, 10,
12, 14, 1621, 23, 24, 3234,
3638, 41, 5358, 61, 69, 72,
73, 78, 81, 95, 100, 101, 112,
151, 159, 183, 186, 195, 198,
205, 210, 211, 218, 221, 222,
238, 243, 249, 251, 252, 254,
255, 257260, 262267, 269,
297, 327, 333, 336, 346; iden-

Index 393
tity, 16, 20, 32, 266; model, see
models, Azerbaijani; national
tree, 18, 19, 22, 23, 32; proto-
Azerbaijanis, 16; Southern (Ira-
nian), 17, 18, 23, 32, 251, 266.
See also Caucasian, Tatars
azg, 37, 146149, 155, 340

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 192, 226, 230
Baku, 48, 55, 56, 101, 250, 252,
255, 257, 258, 260, 263, 266
barbarian(s), 40, 66, 258, 279
Bashkortostan, Bashkirs, 19, 49
Basques, Basquean hypothesis, 13,
14
Bauopfer, 121, 274
Bible, biblical, 11, 27, 28, 37, 59,
85, 88, 118, 185, 307; Adam,
28, 68, 299; flood, 11, 27, 37;
Genesis, 28; Japheth, 37, 40;
Joseph and his brothers, 118;
Noah, Noahs Ark, 11, 27, 37,
59, 68, 131, 294, 300, 307; Tower
of Babel, 68, 88, 89, 127, 234
bilingualism, bilingual(s), xii, 68,
7579, 88, 89, 228, 238
Bolshevik(s), 21, 75, 81, 178, 195,
340
Brezhnev, Leonid, 69, 193, 207,
337
Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 41, 100, 178
Bulgars, 31
Byzantium, Byzantine, 122, 123,
125, 126, 128, 324, 325, 330,
331, 333, 338, 348

Cappadocia, 324
carnival, 153, 171, 176, 192195,
226, 236, 289, 290; carnivali-
zation of history, 192, 194;
civil society, 186, 187, 224, 235,
239, 242, 243, 249, 334; eco-
nomic, 197, 219 (festival);
(political), 198, 199, 200, 229,
232, 235, 249; see also festival
Catholicism, Catholic(s), 50, 111,
113, 116, 117, 125; Armenian,
50, 113, 116, 117
catholicos(i), 39, 40 (Albanian),
85, 114, 125127, 129133, 142,
206 (Georgian), 207209, 256,
307309, 315, 318, 324326,
338, 339; and king, 115118,
134, 206, 208210. See also
Grigor the Illuminator
Caucasus, Caucasian, 8, 11, 27, 69,
81, 95, 157159, 195, 253, 257,
258, 269, 334, 345, 347, 349;
Albania, see Albania (Cauca-
sian)/Aghuank'; ethics (adat),
159; etiquette, 158; mountains,
49, 253, 345; nationality, 8,
269; North, 27, 49, 114 (North-
West), 156, 158; South, 49;
Tatars, 251
Celts, 20
Chaos, chaos: carnival, festive, rit-
ual, 193, 197, 225, 228, 235238;
chaosology, 219, 239; and
Cosmos, cosmos, 191, 197, 228,
230, 235237, 239; economic,
153; informational, 273
Chalcedon Council, Definitions,
122128, 140
Chalcedonism, 127
Chechnia, Chechen(s), 27, 69, 247,
250, 257, 261, 334
Chernobyl power plant, 197
China, Chinese, 21, 22, 31, 32, 66,
288, 289, 386
Christianity, Christian(s), xii, 8,
11, 15, 39, 82, 96, 97, 111,
113115, 117, 119122, 125,
128131, 133, 140, 159, 260,
261, 264, 276, 278, 279, 297,
299, 306308, 314; adoption
of, conversion to, 8, 39, 113,
114, 117, 119, 122, 130, 133,
140, 141, 208, 278, 287, [306];
anti-Christian, 15, 118, 119;

Index 394
Armenian-Christian(s), 111,
114117, 261, 307; martyrs, 117,
119121, 134, 142, 274; pre-
Christian, 116, 117, 121, 128
Church: Albanian, 39, 40; Ar-
menian, 19, 39, 40, 85, 86, 115,
117, 123, 125, 127129, 131,
133, 134, 142, 208, 209, 256,
307, 310, 315, 316, 324, 325;
Byzantine, 122; Catholic, see
Catholicism; Georgian, 206;
Orthodox, 82, 111, 113, 116,
125
Cilicia, 29, 209, 268, 325, 347
civil society, ix, x, 61, 145, 213,
219, 225, 235, 239, 241243,
249; born in the square, vir-
tual, carnival, 186, 187, 224,
235, 239, 242, 243, 249, 334
civil war, 61, 115
Clinton, Bill, 213, [214]
communism, communist(s), pas-
sim; anti-, 61, 145, 173, 178,
219, 255, 281; post-, 62, 74,
83, 167, 210, 256, 279, 283,
291, 314, 325; religion, [134],
176, 178, 179, 207
conflicts (ethnic), 55, 69, 78, 219,
265; Armenian-Azerbaijani, 198,
218, 251, 333; and imitation,
266; religious aspect of, 264,
265
conspiracy theories, 23, 250, 267
Constantinus I, 114
constitution(al), 8, 50, 57, 72, 223,
224, 235, 241, 242, 257, 280,
333; anti-constitutional, 8, 56,
223
conversion: to Catholicism, 50; to
Christianity, 8, 114, 117, 119,
122, 130, 133, 140, 141, 208,
278, 287, [306]; to Islam, 112;
of Yezidis to Kurdish identity,
112, 113; back to Zoroastrian-
ism, 122
Cosmos, cosmos, 238; Armenian,
[149], 151, 152, [155]; and Cha-
os, chaos, 191, 197, 228, 230,
235237, 239; Cosmic Tree,
131, 274. See also Tree of
Life
Cossaks, 248
coup dtat, 56, 200, 201, 223, 280
crisis, 130, 151155, 158, 162,
165167, 173, 181, 183, 197,
255, 256, 277, 282, 301, 335
Crumrine, N. Ross, 235, 238, 239
Crusades, crusaders, 264 (mod-
ern), 338
cultures of sin and of shame, 158
160
Cyprus, Cypriots, 37, 348

Dal', Vladimir, 66, 164, 165
Daskhurants'i, see Movss Das-
khurants'i/Kaghankatuats'i
Dashnakts'ut'yun (party), Dash-
nak(s), xii, 50, 60, 174, 209,
260, 293, 325, 332, 333
David of Sasun, 293; monument
of, 293, 300, 301
Deir el-Zor desert, 298, 328
demiurge(s), demiurgic, 2730, 37,
48, 51, 143, 149 (Creator), 177,
312
Demirtchian, Karen, 61, 148, 208,
211, 212, 221
democracy, democratic, democ-
rats, 15, 56, 61, 129, 130, 156,
174, 207, 213, 214, 217, 221
(war democracy), 223, 230, 241,
248, 253, 258, 280; democra-
tization, 196, 219, 220, 230, 237
demonstrations, 56, 72, 75, 83, 113,
197, 220, 221, 225227, 229,
230, 257, 313, see also meet-
ings and rallies
diaspora, 323328; Armenian, ix,
x, xii, 102, 130, 132, 151, 155,
209, 260, 294, 298, 323326,

Index 395
328341, 348, 349; acciden-
tal, beached, 327; and col-
ony, 325, 327, 329; and home-
land, 323328, 330341, 349;
internal and external, 151,
338; Jewish, 323, 325327, 329;
and Myth of Beginning, 328;
post-genocide, 328, 330332.
See also dispersion
dispersion, xii, 208, 323, 329; path
of, 34, 122, 128, 131, 148, 151,
163, 200, 238, 323. See also
diaspora
dissent, dissidents, 145, 173, 223,
288
dragon, dragonish, 28, 120, 121,
177, 201, 273, 274, 375; dra-
gon slayers, dragon-fighting,
177 (Khrushchev), [201] (Yel-
tsin), 280, 318; and martyred
virgins, 120, 121, 274; vishap
(dragon) monuments, 28, 273,
275
Dumezils three functions, 183186

earthquake, quake, ix, 46, 52, 87,
129, 132, 150, 153, 157, 159,
160, 161, 197, 262, 317, 346
East, Eastern, 13, 14, 27, 36, 39,
69, 125, 158, 273, 308, 325,
336, 337, 347; Near, 10, 54, 82,
95, 205, 325; and West, 21, 96,
106, 125, 159, 331337, 345
349; Eastern Armenia, Arme-
nian(s), xii, 36, 336; and West-
ern, xii, 294, 330, 331, 335,
336, 339
ecology, ecological, 23, 184, 253
255; genocide, 329; movement,
219, 253255, 257; pseudo-,
254
Eghish, 68, 118, 140, 143 tity, 151, 152, 155, [166]; pri-
jmiatsin (Echmiadzin), 117, 119,
209, 316, 325; Cathedral, 120,
133, 274, 308, 310; museums,
308, 309, 315, 318
elections, 89, 156 (of toastmas-
ter), 173, 174, 196, 208212,
241, 242, 255, 288, 293, 297,
339
elite, 40, 61, 75, 97, 139, 173, 225,
256
emigration, xi, xii, 74, 152, 298,
324, 329, 335
England, English(men), 2, 9, 20,
60, 68, 140, 149, 253; model,
21, see also models, omnivo-
rous
rebuni, 46, 294. See also Yere-
van
Eskimos (Asian), 269
essentialism, essentialist(s), 141,
142, 145, 332, 334
ethnogenesis, ethnogenetic, 9, 13,
14, 1618, 20, 21, 36, 7072,
335
ethnonym, 30, 31, 33, 35, 139,
146, 211
etiquette, 158, 161, 209, 210, 284
etymology, etymological, 15, 27,
30, 68, 85, 86, 148, 149, 151,
161, 329; code, 229, 237, 240
Eurasianism, 21
Eurocentrism, xiii, 138, 142
Europe, European(s), 8, 10, 21, 22,
28, 67, 70, 82, 96, 105, 112,
116, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146,
158, 192, 213, 226, 307, 309,
313316, 333, 337, 339, 345,
346; and Asia, 345347
extremist(s), 8, 73, 217, 261, 333

family: extended, 146148, 154;
family-state, 140, 149; and
nation, 145148, 155, 165, 166;
as paradigm of Armenian iden-
mordial model of, 214; trans-
formations of, 154
fatherland, 84, 142, 293 (mother-

Index 396
fatherland), 335, 336, see also
motherland and homeland
feasts (and identity), 94, 95, 107,
155157
fedayi, 183186, 218, 223, 230,
260, 263, 268, 294, 298
festival: archaic, traditional, x, 60,
85, 89, 104, 133, 142, 149, 153,
192194, 218, 224, 226230,
233235, 278, 289, 312, 336,
341; economic, 197 (carni-
val), 219; modern (political),
x, 60, 88, 89, 141, 153, 197,
217, 218, 224, 227230, 232,
236, 238, 239, 240, 242, 280,
289, 341; path of, xi, 47, 60,
73, 80, 89, 122, 131, 141, 153,
171, 172, 174, 186, 194, 196,
211, 217, 228, 249, 258, 268,
312, 341; proto- (Ur-), 224, 226,
228, 230, 231, 233235; of re-
union, 341; theories of, 218,
227; of violence, 252
feudalism, feudal, 15, 33, 34, 54,
174, 182, 186, 307, 332, 333;
future, 182, 188, 220, 242, 333;
lords, princes (modern), 186,
205, 211, 221, 333; modern
(Armenian, Soviet), 174, 186
188, 205, 211, 220222
First Man, 30, 84, 191, 198, 200,
208, 214, 239; as another, 22,
96, 210; and First Lady, 198, 199;
his language, 84; local, 198, 199;
sexual potency of, 213
Fomenko, Anatoly, new chrono-
logy of, 22, 23, 122, 142
36, 40, 41, 5557, 61, 101,
160, 185, 186, 195, 210, 211,
218, 220222, 224, 225, 230,
240, 251, 252, 254, 255, 257,
259, 260, 262266, 297, 312,
327, 329, 331, 333, 334, 339;
forefather(s), 1214, 17, 24, 158,
175, 178, 279, 291, see also
ancestor(s) and progenitor(s)
fool (mythological, carnival), 171,
193, 219; Gorbachev as, 195
198, 200; Hamlet as, 192; (jes-
ter) and king, 192, 193, 195,
200, 201, 205, 214, 226, 240;
Khrushchev as, 193, 195; path
of, 171, 177, 191, 219, 224,
239, 240; Yeltsin as, 200, 201
France, French, x, 9, 139, 140, 143;
revolution, 51, 121, 279

Gamkrelidze, Thomas, 10, 14, 69,
80
garden (of national identity), see
park
Gellner, Ernest, 130, 150, 156
genocide, 3, 277, 329; Armenian,
29, 76, 97, 100, 112, 132, 160,
251, 259, 260262, 267, 268,
276278, 288, 294, 298, 311,
328, 329, 333, 336, 348; eco-
logical, 329; Jewish, 329;
language, 76, 329; memo-
rial, 298, 299; museum of, 298,
311, 316; post-genocide dias-
pora, 328, 330332; victims of,
97, 268, 277, 278, 298, 328;
of the Yezidis, 112
Georgia, Georgian(s), 9, 10, 12
15, 2224, 35, 38, 49, 50, 54,
55, 57, 58, 61, 69, 72, 79, 80,
81, 94, 95, 113, 116, 205, 206,
208, 251, 253, 254, 261, 280,
281, 284, 346; identity, 12, 14,
19, 79, 95; model, see model(s),
Georgian; national tree, 19, 22, 23
Germany, German(s), 1, 15, 16,
22, 66, 71, 75, 201, 262, 268
Gharabagh/Mountainous Ghara-
bagh, 10, 12, 16, 23, 33, 34,
Committee, 34, 199, 221, 222,
238; conflict, war, 58, 184, 185,
247, 251, 298, 333, 341; Ghara-
baghians, see Armenians, of

Index 397
Gharabagh; movement, rallies,
x, [50], [76], 175, 217222, 224,
225, 231, 234, [238], 241, 243,
266, 281, 333, 339
glasnost, x, 55, 196, 219, 220, 229,
230, 237
globalization, globalistic, 51, 103,
111, 127, 323, 338
God, god(s), 28, 68, 88, 89, 123,
124, 127, 132, 134, 159, 161,
163, 177, 273, 276, 278, 279,
283, 287, 305, 306, 308; Indo-
European, 28; King-god, 205,
206; Sun-god, 177, 207; Thun-
derer, 30, 120, 175, 177, 207
Golden Age, 176; of Armenian cul-
ture, 48; of translation, 84, 85
Gorbachev, Mikhail, x, 69, 76, 141,
153, 159, 160, 178, 194198,
200, 207, 219, 220, 229, 231,
237, 239, 240, 243, 252, 259,
264, 267, 269, 333
Goths, 10, 15, 22, 71
Greece, Greek, 66, 85, 100, 126,
305, 329, 348
greetings, 161, 162, 165, 166
Grigor the Illuminator, 48, 117,
118, 120, 121, 134, 275, 306
308; Cathedral of, 130, 131,
133, 155, 234, 275; and King
Trdat, 117, 118, 137, 306; the
vision of, 117, 119, 120, 128,
274, 278
Gyumri, 45, 46, 52, 116, 197, see
also Leninakan

Hay, Hayots', 30, 36, 114, 116,
137139, 141, 146, 298, 307,
324, 329, see also Armenians,
Armenian
Hayk, the Armenian progenitor,
28, 30, 37, 146, 334
Herodotes, 56
hero(es), 9, 162, 187, 193, 194,
196, 198, 199, 201, 257, 261,
275, 276, 284, 299, 301; anti-
heroes, 119, 289; mythologi-
cal, 28, 37, 58, 119, 257, 273,
274, 289, 293; (national), 22,
48, 132, 143, [184], 185, 218,
260, 289, 293, 294, 298, 301;
phallic, 214; Soviet, 279, 286,
292; and traitor, 122, 289, 331,
332
historians: and national identity,
12, 17, 23, 40, [41], 50, 51,
[54], 58
historical: falsification, 5355;
model, 10, 46, 48, 68, 113;
path, 79, 81
history: carnivalization of, 192, 194;
constructing, 23, 3437, 48, 53,
55, 5759, 70, 218, 225; His-
tory of Armenia, see Movss
Khorenats'i, History of Arme-
nia; and identity, 24, [31], 32,
121, 141, 307, 315; lessons of,
270, 291; museum of, 313, 314,
317; national, 12, 16, 31, 35,
57, 71, 80, 140, 160, 206, 232,
288, 334; rewriting, manipulat-
ing with, 22, 45, 54, 55, 57,
62, 69, 121, 122, [276]. See
also prehistory
home: building sacrifice, see Bau-
opfer; cosmic aspect of, 149, 150;
guesthouses, 157; home-state,
149; as paradigm of Armenian
identity, 151, 155
homeland, x, 10, 28, 50, 222 (na-
tive-land), 276, 293, 324, 326,
335337; and diaspora, 323
328, 330341, 349; of Indo-
Europeans, 10, 12, 69; symbo-
lic, 336. See also motherland
and fatherland
hospitality, 157, 158, 161, [212],
[227]; guesthouses, 157
Hungary, Hungarian(s), 19, 208,
288

Index 398
Hurrian, 10, 27, 69

Iberia (Iveria), Ibers (Iberians),
13, 14
Iberian Peninsula, 14
identity (national): accuired, ap-
propriated, 17, 20; Albanian
(Caucasian), 17, 33; alphabet,
Latin, 79, 81, 82; American,
278; Armenian, see Armenian
identity; Assyrian, 83; Azerbai-
jani, 16, 20, 32, 266; Byzan-
tine, 128; changes, 113, 141,
184, 194, 217, 308, 315; of
children, 88; confessional, re-
ligious, 82, 114; and diaspora,
335337, 349; and ethnogene-
sis, 71; and everyday life, xiii,
137; fight for, 10, 12, 17, [24],
32; Georgian, 12, 14, 19, 79,
95; and historians: 12, 17, 23,
40, [41], 50, 51, [54], 58; Is-
lamic, 80; and key events and
figures, 9597 (Komitas), 112
(in Yezidism), 121, 126, 317,
143 (saint translators); Kurd-
ish, 112; and language, 65, 67
71, 74, 76, 78, [79], 83, 89,
111, 115, 127, 137; and lin-
guistics, linguists, 13, 23, 67,
6871, 74, 76, 78, 79, 139,
[140], 339; making, construct-
ing, building, xi, 7, 20, 50, 56,
58, 69, 84, 88, 119, 142 (in-
venting), 143, 266, 308, 316,
317; Median, 17; models, see
models (of national identity);
Moldovan, 81; and museums,
305, 307, 308, 315, 317; mu-
sical, xi, 93; omnivorous,
swelling, 20, 21; pagan, 114;
paradigms of, 151, 155; park
(garden) of, see park; Persian,
128; and religion, 82, 111, 114,
116, 127, 128, 132, 325; Rus-
sian, 21; shunning, 328; So-
viet, 76; symbols of, 11, 47, 58,
131, 311; Turkic, 32; Udin, 20;
underground nervures of, xiii;
Yezidi, 111, 112
imagined communities, 144, 145
and 250 (Soviet society)
imposture, impostor, 193, 200, 206
independence (political), ix, 45,
46, 49, 50, 5759, 73, 129, 179,
181, 183, 184, 186, 206, 221,
223, 224, 232 (Square), 238,
242, 254, 287, 333, 335
India(n), 77, 78, 100, 123, 145,
161, 239, 289, 309, 347
Indo-European(s), 11, 28, 68, 146;
homeland of, 10, 12, 69; lan-
guage, 28, 68, 74, 149; my-
thology, 120, 313
Ingush, 334
intelligentsia, ix, 83, 183, 184, 225
Iran, Iranian, 17, 18, 32, 100, 251,
266, 327, 346, 348; Azerbai-
jan(is), 17, 18, 23, 32, 251,
266. See also Persia, Persi-
an(s)
irredentism, irredentist, 16, 17, 41,
79
Islam(ic), 80, 112, 264, 265
Ivanov, Viacheslav, 10, 69, 120,
236

Japanese, 158, 162, 289
Jesus Christ, 23, 119, 123, 127,
300, 307; nature(s) of, Chris-
tology, 123, 126
Jews, Jewish, 8, 9, 22, 113, 211,
222, 277, 311, 323, 325327,
329
joke(s), 9, 12, 46, 55, 83, 84, 94,
95, 127, 134, 149, 156, 157,
160163, 173, 176, 193, 199,
210, 227, 256, 261, 282, 298
journalists, xi, 41, 154, 175, 222,
225, 236, 254, 265, 295

Index 399
Jugha, New Jugha, 17, 115, 347

Kaghankatuats'i, see Movss Das-
khurants'i/Kaghankatuats'i
Kalmykia, Kalmyks, 283, 284
Kazakh (Ghazakh), 263, 267
KGB, 61, 179182, 187, 279, 280,
288
khach'k'ar (cross-stone), 17, 275,
293, 299, 317
Khorenats'i, see Movss Khore-
nats'i
Khrushchev, Nikita, 177, 193, 195,
207
king(s): alienness of, 22, 69, 96
(foreignness of, as another),
210 (as outsider), 211; Arme-
nian, see Armenian, kings; and
catholicos, 115118, 134, 206,
208210, 324, see also Grigor
the Illuminator, and King Tr-
dat; false, see impostor; and
fool, jester, 192, 193, 195, 200,
201, 205, 214, 226, 240; Geor-
gian, 22, 80, 205, 206, 208; as
god, divine, [177], 205207;
phallic, 212214; (president)
and chief priest (catholicos),
134, 207210; president as, 134,
209212; royal path, code, 84,
96, 117, 125, 129, 134, 185,
200, 205, 208, 210214, 239,
324, 339; Russian, see Rus-
sian, czar(s)
kinship: terms (Armenian), 147,
199; ties, 155
Kirovabad (Ganja), 255, 260
Kocharian, Robert, 61, 134, 185,
186, 210212, 220, 222, 249
Komitas, 9597, 210
Koran, 80, 81, 264
Koryun, 14, 48
Kremlin, 55, 56, 114, 159, 160,
196, 221, 222, 249, 264
Kura River, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41
Kurds, Kurdish, 111113
Kyrgyzstan, 49, 259

labyrinth, 353
language(s): Armenian, 13 (proto-
Armenian), 16, 17, 19, 38, 66,
68, 7274, 76, 83, 85, 86, 89,
97, 100, 107, 115, 118, 126,
137141, 143, 146149, 152,
155, 161, 164, 165, 176, 199,
222, 227, 229, 237, 250, 276,
305, 307, 313, 329, 330, 337
340; Caucasian Albanian, 18,
see also alphabet, Albanian;
dead, 83, 84; foreign, 16, 19,
65, 66 (as pseudo-language),
67, 77, 85; and identity, 65, 67
71, 74, 76, 78, [79], 83, 89, 111,
115, 127, 137; Indo-European,
28, 68, 74, 149; jargon, ur-
ban slang, xii, 86; mother tongue,
xi, 6568, 76, 81, 82, 8588;
musical, 100, 105; national, 72,
7577, 80, 81, 88, 140, 143;
orthography dispute, 330, 339,
340; path of, xi, 65, 126, 127,
140, 145, 172, 224, 228, 269,
310; policy, 7276, 140; semi-
lingualism, 78, 79; state, 72;
Syriac, 82, 83, 185, 224; Tur-
kic, 16, 18 (proto-Turkic), 20,
163, 251; Urartian, 69; West-
ern Armenian, xii, 165, 330,
339, 340
Lenin, 45, 48, 51, 52, 69, 87, 176,
258, 282, 284, 285, 292, 297,
300, 313315; as folk hero, 177,
178, 201; Mausoleum, 291; mo-
nument, statue of, 134, 276,
281285, 287, 292, 294297,
300, 313315; museums to, 315
Leninakan, 45, 46, 52, 99, 153,
197, see also Gyumri
Leningrad, 45, 46, 107, see also
St. Petersburg

Index 400
linguistics, linguists (and identi-
ty), 13, 23, 67, 6871, 74, 76,
78, 79, 139, [140], 339

Mamikonian aristocratic family,
22, 122, 274, 331333, 335
mana, 180, 181
marginality, marginal(s), 55, 68,
79, 184
Marr, Nikolai, 71, 318, 319
martyrs: of the Avarayr battle,
142; Eghisha, 39; Shushanik,
15; virgins (Hr'ip'simean), 117,
119121, 134, 274
Marx, Karl, 138, 177; monument
of, 291, 194
Marxism, Marxist(s), ix, 22, 69,
175, 176
Mashtots', see Mesrop Mashtots'
Masis, Mt., 11, 273, 331. See also
Ararat, Mt.
mass media, TV, [ix], 11, 41, 55,
56, 65, 70, 103, 108, 113, 130,
134, 185, 187, 210, 211, 226,
256, 265, 294, 340
Matenadaran, 86, 87, 237, 310
314
Media, Median(s), 1618, 324
meetings, x, 89, 173, 217, 219, 221,
223227, 229232, 237, 238,
254, 255, 297. See also rallies
and demonstrations
memorials, 274 (landscape as),
277, 278, 286, 293, 298, 299
memory, xii, 8 (Memory Soci-
ety), 29, 32, 50, 115, 205, 250,
273, 275, 286288, 290, 298,
299, 311, 328, 332, 335; doz-
ing, 115; fight for, 312; path
of, 48, 87, 114, 237, 274, 287,
305
Meskhetian Turks, 259, 268
Mesrop Mashtots', 14, 38, 48, 54,
80, 84, 85, 96, 140, 311, 313
minorities (ethnic), 19, 72, 75, 76,
81, 82, 250, 253, 323
models (of national identity),
xiii, 7, 21, 23, 54, 56, 61, 95,
200; Armenian, 10, 13, 16, 32,
68, 113, 129, 326, see also
models, root-oriented and
historical; Azerbaijani, 9, 11,
16, 18, 24, 32, 33; see also
models, omnivorous; Euro-
pean and non-European, xiii,
138, 145; Georgian, 11, 12, 14,
15, 113, see also models,
prestigious; historical, 10,
46, 48, 68, 113, see also mod-
els, Armenian and root-ori-
ented; and jokes, 9, see also
jokes; omnivorous, 7, 9, 16,
17, 20, 21 (English and Chi-
nese cases), 32, 68, see also
models, Azerbaijani; presti-
gious, 7, 9, 1216, 18, 113,
see also models, Georgian;
root-oriented, 7, 9, 10, 12,
[65], [79], 142, see also mod-
els, Armenian and histori-
cal; Russian, 9, 14, see also
models, selective; selec-
tive, 7, 8, 10, see also mod-
els, Russian; Soviet, 319. See
also tree(s)
Moldova, Moldovan(s), 81, 82,
100, 101, 104
Mongolia, Mongols, 122, 281,
287
monody, monodic, 9496
Monophysite, 113, 123
monument(s), statue(s), 9, 11, 12,
31; anti-monument movement,
290; archetype of raising, 274,
see also Grigor the Illumina-
tor, the vision of, and Bauop-
fer; of Buddha (in Elista), 283,
284; civilized dismantling
of, 284, 285; of David of Sa-
sun, 293, 300, 301; as didactic

Index 401
reminder, 288; of Dzerzhin-
ski, 279, 288, 291, 296, 297;
fight with, 195, 279283, 291,
300; of general Andranik, 132,
294; as gravestone, 275, 290,
298, 299; of Karl Marx, 291,
194; khach'k'ar (cross-stone),
17, 275, 293, 299, 317; of Le-
nin, 134, 276, 281285, 287,
292, 294297, 300, 313315;
Mother Armenia, 292, 293,
313; Mt. Davidson Cross, 276
278; as museum, 38; natural,
275; pedestal, 280282, 284,
292297, 300, 313; pre-monu-
ments, 273, 292; re-evaluation
of, 276, 278, 284; reinterpreta-
tion of, 291, 292; ruins as, 132;
transformations of, 276279;
Urartian, 276, 279; vishap
(dragon), 28, 273, 275
Moscow, 8, 9, 47, 81, 182, 221,
223, 226, 228, 264, 280
motherland, 311, see also father-
land and homeland
Mountainous Gharabagh, see Gha-
rabagh
movements: All Armenian Natio-
nal, 50, 238; anti-monument,
290; democratic, 56 (in Azer-
baijan), 174, 253; ecological,
197 (green), 219, 253255,
257; fedayi, 263, 268; Ghara-
bagh, see Gharabagh move-
ment; hippie, 106, 107; Kurd-
ish, 112; monarchic, 206; na-
tional(ist), 82 (in Moldova),
83 (among Assyrians), 175
(national liberation in Ghara-
bagh), 181, 184 (for national
independence), 222, 234 (in
the former USSR), 253 (in Es-
tonia), 254, 255, 258, 266 (in
Azerbaijan); see also Ghara-
bagh movement; religious, 128;
secessionist, 34 (of Albania/
Aghuank'), 196 (in Lithuania);
Stakhanovite, 196
Movss Dashurants'i / Kaghanka-
tuats'i, 11, 27, 28, 29, 30, [32],
[33]
Movss Khorenats'i, 6, 24, 2729;
History of Armenia, 36, 53,
54, 137, 141, 324
museum(s): jmiatsin 308, 309,
315, 318; fighting for space,
287, 311, [312], 313, 315, 316,
318; of Genocide, 298, 311, 316;
and identity, 305, 307, 308,
315, 317; of Lenin, 315; memo-
rial, 317; monastic, 306, 307,
309, 310, 314, 315; monu-
ment as, 38; park-museum, 287,
288; proto-, 305307; secular,
307, 316319; and temple, 305,
308, 310, 311, 313, 314, 319;
of totalitarianism, 287, 288, 291
mythologeme: of initial sacrifice,
121; see also Bauopfer; of ri-
val brothers, twins, 118, 124
(and natures of Christ), [177]

Nagorno-Karabagh, see Ghara-
bagh
Nakhijevan, 27, 266
naming, 2729, 5153, 111, 177,
279; path of, 17, 27, 31, 32, 37,
41, 52, 53, 120, 137, 138, 144,
146, 225, 273, 279, 325; pol-
icy of, xii
nation, national: Armenian, see
Armenian, nation; character, 12,
78, 86, 94, 127, 161, 177, 334;
consciousness, x, 18, 68, 76,
172, 234; and family, 145148,
155, 165, 166; identity, see
identity (national); and mobil-
ity, 138, 150, 156; nation-
hood, 67, 138, 140; nation-
state, 36, 80, 138, 140, 148

Index 402
150, 167, 330; non-Western
model of, 146, 147; policy, 75,
81, 269; stereotypes, 161, 260
262; theories of, see national-
ism, theories of; tree, see tree(s).
See also azg
nationalism, nationalists: Albani-
an (Caucasian), 40; Armenian,
ix, 25, 36, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76,
88, 181, 209, 219, 221 and 222
(Gharabaghian), 256, 260, 281,
293, 300, 335, 340; Armenian
medieval, ancient, xiii, 138,
142, 143, 145; Azerbaijani,
17, 36, 61, 254; Estonian, 77,
253; European, 138, 143145;
Georgian, 72; and intellectuals,
35, 68, 74, 117, 142145, 172;
and language, 70, 127, see also
linguistics; modern, 138, 180;
Moldovan, alphabet, 81, 82;
Russian, 8, 16, 21, 280; theo-
ries of, ideas related with, xii,
31, 40, 69, 77, 79, 84, 111,
115, 138, 141146, 219, 253,
281; in the USSR, 76, 155;
Vietnamese, 31, 32; Yugoslav-
ian, 69
nationality, 9, 54, 65, 66, 81, 113,
150, 180, 251, 253, 278, 281;
Caucasian, 8, 269
Near East, 10, 54, 82, 95, 205, 325
neo-paganism, 8, 129
Nestorius, Nestorianism, 82, 123,
124, 126
Normans, 20
Nzhdeh, Garegin, 129, 185

opposition (political), 50, 83, 84,
173, 174, 199, 212
opposition(s) (semiotic): between
Armenian and Russian (langua-
ges), 89, 227, 238 (schools);
between barbarous and ci-
vilized, 258, 259; center
periphery, 46; of centrifugal
and centripedal trends, 34; be-
tween East and West, 96, 125;
embodied in Komitas, 96, 97;
between the hippies and the
r'abiz, 106, 107; between home-
land and diaspora, 34, 327, 328,
330, 334, 335, 337; of nature
and culture, 3, 284; between re-
gular army and the fedayis,
185; between religion and sci-
ence, 315; of the society, their
transformations, xii, 29, 89, 153,
226229, 235, 236, 238, 240,
265, 341; between symbolic and
literal, 265; urban social, 106;
between town and feudal struc-
ture, village, 86, 227, 238
Ossetia, Ossets, 50, 254

pagan, xii, 37, 66, 96, 97, 111, 114,
117, 120, 121, 129, 133, 146,
176, 208, 237, 260, 278, 287,
306, 308, 212; neo-paganism,
8, 129
park: (garden) of Armenian iden-
tity, 2, 3, 7, 9, 22, 23, 65, 81,
95, 115, 128, 137, 145, 324,
353; methods of laying out, 1,
2, 353; park-museum, 287, 288
Parthian, 22
perestroika, x, 55, 61, 178, 194,
196, 207, 219, 220, 237, 240,
249, 250, 252, 255, 279, 289,
337
Persia, Persian(s), 33, 38, 48, 74,
112, 118, 122, 123, 125, 126,
211, 250, 251, 324, 325, 330,
331, 347, 348; anti-Persian re-
bellion, 331, 333, 338, see also
Avarayr battle; Armenia, Ar-
menians, 115, 141; Russian-
Persian wars, 336. See also
Iran, Iranian
pioneer complex, 113, 127, 131,

Index 403
140, 145
policy, policies, xii, 73, 7577, 81,
89, 198, 199, 209, 221, 251,
269, 324; of democratization
and glasnost, 196, 220; lan-
guage, 7276, 140; making, 218,
250, 347; national, 75, 81, 253
(nationalist), 269; politicians,
policy-makers, political figures,
34, 41, 83, 200, 211, 218220,
236, 240, 241
polyphony, polyphonic, 94, 95
posters, 1, 201, 225, 264, 293, 328,
329
poverty, 62, 152, 154, 158, 161
precedents, 134, 219, 223, 241,
258260, 263, 267
prehistory: path back to, 128, 145,
167, 171, 182, 186, 221, 222,
250, 256, 269
prestige, prestigious: ancestors,
forefathers, 12, 14, 15, 18, 24;
model, see models, prestige-
ious; path of, 12; unpresti-
gious, 14, 19
progenitor(s), 13, 2830, 3537,
39, 47, 84, 146, 242, 334. See
also ancestor(s) and forefa-
ther(s)
prognoses, forecasts, predictions
(political), 72, 80, 153, 171, 172,
183, 199, 200, 218, 219, 222,
230, 234, 239, 240, 348, 349,
253, 270
propaganda, x; anti-religious, 114;
communist, Soviet, 52, 145,
197, 337
prudence, prudent (trend), 33, 186,
238, 289, 331335
purism, purist(s), 16, 21, 7274,
76, 79, 85
Pushkin, Alexander, 8, 9, 15, 21,
22, 261, 280, 281, 297
Putin, Vladimir, [61], [182], 187,
290

r'abiz: and flamenco, 104, 346;
and jazz, Blues, 100, 102
104, 346; music, xi, 93, 97
105, 108, 346; sub-culture, xi,
97, 101103, 105108, 346
rallies, x, 34, 56, 60, 61, 74, 76,
82, 88, 89, 122, 144, 153, 174,
186, 211, 217219, 224, 225,
234, 239, 241, 251, 254256,
258, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266,
268, 269, 281, 298, 312, 313,
328, 329, 333, 341. See also
meetings and demonstrations
rebellion, 125, 218, 235, 290, 297,
334; anti-Persian, 331, 333, 338,
see also Avarayr battle; De-
cembrist, 121; path of, xi, 47,
60, 73, 80, 89, 122, 131, 141,
153, 171, 172, 174, 186, 194,
196, 211, 217, 228, 249, 258,
68, 312, 341; rebelliousness,
rebellious (trend), xii, 160,
186, 238, 289, 290, 331335,
347; rituals of, 235
referendum, 46, 56, 72, 75, 83,
113, 196, 220, 221, 223, 224,
227, 229, 257, 313, 333
reforms, 56, 87, 88, 141, 148, 187,
196, 219, 339, 340; and na-
tion-making, 141
refugees, 73, 151, 262, 263, 265,
336; pseudo-, imaginary, 263,
265
religion: Chalcedonism, 127; com-
munist, [134], 176, 178, 179,
207, [283], 314; national,
122, 140; neo-paganism, 8, 129;
Nestorianism, 82, 123, 124, 126;
sectarianism, 129; tribal (Ts'e-
ghakron), 129, 146
renaming, 11, 19, 29, 30, 4552,
56, 290, 318; path of, 17, 30,
45, 176, 187, 196, 313
repatriation, repatriates, 100, 298,

Index 404
335338, 340
revolution(s), 45, 61, 148, 153,
180, 192, 236, 276; Armeni-
an, 223; cultural, 289; French,
51, 121, 279; gender, 153; in-
formation, 88; of the mathema-
ticians, 222; museum of, 280,
287, 314, 315; October, Bol-
shevik, 75, 80, 178, 222, 236,
[283], 294, [296]; revolution-
ary, 21, 22, 5052, 112, 174,
182, 201, 240, 279, 283, 285,
288, 291, 294, 332, 333; Rus-
sian, 51, 115, 279
ritual drama (in primitive and mod-
ern societies), 175, 191, 235,
236, 238, 239
Romanian(s), 82
Rome, Roman(s), 13, 49, 114, 119,
125, 127, 141, 275, 305, 324
Russia, Russian(s), passim: anti-
Russian, 9, 49, 73, 74, 82, 253,
281; of Armenia, 73, 74; czar(s),
192, 200, 224 (king), 248 (cza-
rist), 294 (king), 296, 333, 334;
empire, 47, [53], 61, 75, 205,
258, 281, [338]; language, op-
posed to the Armenian, 89, 227,
238 (schools); model, 9, 14; na-
tional tree, 8, 1416, 2123,
33, 57, 142; new, 105; Russi-
an-Persian and Russian-Turkish
wars, 336; Russianness, 8; rus-
sification, russifying, 21, 7577

Sakharov, Andrei, 223, 258, 259
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 78, 126
Sardarapat, 317, 318
Sasun (Sassoun), 336. See also
David of Sasun
Saxons, 20
Scandinavian Viking, 15
script, see alphabet
Scythians, 21, 22, 67
secessionism, 41, 57, 72, 196, 223;
ethno-, 34, 40, 41
Seljuk invasion, 41, 324, 338, 347
Sevan Lake, 27, 128, 150
Shushi, 41, 264
Slavs, Slavic, Slavonic, 14, 31, 66,
82, 116, 229, 334 (slavophiles)
Smith, Anthony, 111, 138, 146
solidarity, 89, 122, 209, 217, 231,
233, 235, 240, 269, 339, 341
Soviet, passim; Armenia, ix, 58,
59, 76, 149, 150, 163, 209,
260, 268, 310, 335, 336, 340;
heroes, 279, 286, 292; identi-
ty, 76; model, 319; people (as
invented ethnographic entity),
52, 75, 141, 172, 250 (Soviet
and post-Soviet societies); so-
vietology, sovietologists, 145,
171173, 250
St. Petersburg, 4547, 318; see
also Leningrad
Stalin, Joseph, 18, 51 (Stalinist),
52, 61, 67, 69, 71, 81 (Stalin
ist), 116, 176, 180, 193, 195,
196, 200, 207, 241, 248, 276,
282, 283, 287, 290, 292, 312,
313; monuments of, 282284,
287, 292, 294, 312, 313; Sta-
lingrad (Volgograd), 262, 293;
as Sun-God, Thunderer, 177,
207
statue(s), see monument(s)
Step'anakert, 224, 257, 258, 262,
264
stereotypes: of extremist, 217,
260, 261; (image) of enemy,
250, 251; national, 161, 260
and 261 (external and inter-
nal); their transformation, 260
262; victim, 160, 217, 259, 262,
263
Strabo, 33
strikes, 232, 255, 256
Sumerian(s), 13, 18, 19
Sumgait pogroms, 54, 78, 79, 161,

Index 405
243, 252, 253, 257, 259, 260,
262267, 269, 298
supreme power, 129, 148, 186, 192,
208, 210; twofold, double, 117,
206210
Syria, 82, 83, 125, 185, 224, 325,
328

T'amanian, Alexander, 47, 229, 232,
233, 296, 312, 314
Tamurlane, 128, 294
Tayk', 22
Tbilisi, 15, 283, 317
Ter-Petrossian, Levon, 50, 59, 60,
61, 67, 69, 83, 84, 148, 174,
185, 186, 209211, 220, 223,
224, 237, 294, 295, 339
terrorism, terrorist, 61, 75, 111,
148, 186, 212, 260
Theater Square, 217, 224, 227
229, 231233, 236, 237, 239,
256, 281, 312, 313
Thomson, Robert, 30, 35, 53, 137,
138
tolerance, 114, 252, 283; (and ani-
mosity) constructed, imagined,
252; intolerance, 114
Toporov, Vladimir, 120
Transcaucasus, Transcaucasian,
8, 9, 14, 36, 49, 6062, 72,
111, 254, 269, 345, see also
Caucasus, South
translation, xii, 17, 35, 36, 38, 84
86, 105, 126, 127 (untransla-
table), 145, 146, 163 (non-trans-
latable), 185; cult of, xi, 65, 86;
Golden Age of, 85; hypertrans-
lation, 85, 86; translators, x, 35,
84, 85 (saint), 138, 143 (saint)
Tree of Life, 299. See also Cos-
mic Tree
tree(s) (national, genealogical),
2, 3, 7, 9, 16, 19, 22, 23, 28, 33,
57, 93 (musicological), 122,
142; Abkhazian, 23; Arme-
nian, xi, 10, 11, 14, 19, 20,
22, 23 (Gharabaghian), 33,
65; Azerbaijani, 18, 19, 22,
23, 32; Chinese, 21; Geor
gian, 19, 22, 23; Russian, 8,
1416, 2123, 33, 57, 142;
Vietnamese, 32; See also
models and history, national
trickster, 9, 163
Turkey, Turks, Turkish, 1, 18, 26,
32, 50, 67, 100, 112, 116, 186,
211, 251, 252, 259 and 268 (Mes-
khetian Turks), 276, 277, 293,
298, 317, 319, 333, 336, 346,
348, 374
Turkic, 16, 1820, 23, 31, 32, 46,
163, 186, 220, 251, 268, 333
Turkmenistan, 187, 205

Udin(s), 19, 20
United States, USA, 102, 150, 213,
214, 228, 282, 311, 348, 349
upheavals, 218, 219
Urartu, Urartian(s), 1013, 27, 46,
47, 59, 141, 276, 294, 305;
fight for their Armenian iden-
tity, 10, 11, 22
Uzbekistan, Uzbeks, 100, 259, 268,
286

Vagharshapat, 119. See also
jmiatsin
victim(s), 56, 118, 179, 180, 247,
248, 259, 262, 264, 274, 276
278, 282, 288, 297, 298, 348;
of genocide, see genocide, vic-
tims of; stereotype, image of,
160, 217, 259, 261263; trans-
forming into victimizers, 260;
victim-nation, 260
Vietnam, Vietnamese, 31, 32, 184;
Vietnam syndrome, 184
violence: (and aggression) as a by-
product, 253, 269; (and aggres-
sion), self-organization of, 267,

Index 406
268; (and aggressiveness) and
semi-lingualism, 78, 79; and
aggressiveness) of animals, 247;
culture of, 160, 248, 253, 257,
[260], 265, 266, 268270; eth-
nic, interethnic, 180, 219, [242],
[249], [250], 252, 253, 268
270, see also Armenians, mas-
sacres, pogroms of; festival
of, 252; freedom of, 249; na-
tional, 243, 249, 250, 253, 254,
257260; non-violence, non-
violent, 223, 260, 270; path of,
79, 129, 160, 183, 184, 217,
219, 247; state, 243, 248250;
symbolic, 264266. See also ag-
gression

West, Western, x, 19, 37, 40, 50,
[66], 77, 78, 87, 103, 106108,
113, 138, 139, 146, 156, 161,
162, 171, 172, 177, [212],
226, 228, 250, 251, 255, 283,
292, 338, 347, 348; and East,
see East and West; Europe, 309;
Western Armenia, Armeni-
an(s), 116, 165, 326, [334],

336, 339, 340, see also East-
ern Armenia, Armenian(s) and
Western
World War I, 276, 278, 339
World War II, 150, 157, 177, 231,
293, 311, 336

Yeltsin, Boris, 191, 200, 201, 205,
206, 214, 223, 296, 297
Yerevan, x, xii, 11, 29, 46, 47, 49,
51, 75, 88, 89, 97, 98, 100, 104
108, 130, 132, 144, 147, 149,
151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 183,
187, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224
227, 229, 230, 232, 234, 239,
241, 242, 249, 251, 256258,
260, 263, 264, 266, 268, 274,
280282, 284, 287, 292, 294
298, 312, 314317, 328, 334,
336, 340, 341, 346. See also
rebuni
Yezidism, Yezidi(s), 111113

Zoroastrianism, 111, 112, 122
Zvart'nots', 131, 132, 233, 234,
306

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