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1. World Monuments Fund to Conserve Ani Cathedral
2. Honoring NY-Area Early Writers and Intellectuals of the Mirror-Spectator
3. Illustrator Envisions Series of Children’s Books in Armenian
4. `Finding Zabel Yesayan’ In NYC
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1. World Monuments Fund to Conserve Ani Cathedral
NEW YORK (armradio.am) – Bonnie Burnham, president of the New Yorkbased
World Monuments Fund (WMF), has announced that WMF and the Turkish Ministry
of Culture and Tourism have embarked on a historic partnership to conserve
the Ani Cathedral and the Church of the Holy Savior.
Once the site of hundreds of religious buildings, palaces, fortifications
and other structures, Ani was, in the 10th century, one of the world’s great
cities. Today, however, it stands abandoned, and its celebrated historic
buildings are in a precarious state.
Support for these conservation projects has been provided by the US
Department of State’s Ambassadors Fund, the Turkish General Directorate of
Cultural Heritage and Museums and World Monuments Fund.
Burnham added, `There has long been international concern about the fragile
condition of the many extraordinary ruins at Ani, and the site has been
listed on the World Monuments Watch on multiple occasions, beginning in
1996. In conserving these two important structures, WMF and Turkey’s General
Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums will develop methods that can
be applied to the other buildings still standing in this seismic area. We
hope that this work will usher in a new era in the life of this important
site.’
Located in modern-day eastern Turkey, Ani Cathedral is one of the most
significant architectural structures remaining from the prosperous Armenian
Bagratid period in the 10th and 11th centuries AD. The cathedral is one of
the most impressive of the collection of ruins. The cathedral was completed
in 1001 by Queen Katramide, and is widely noted as a leading example of the
origins of Armenian ecclesiastical architecture. The cathedral is often
considered a source of inspiration for many of the key features of Gothic
architecture, which became a dominant architectural style in Western Europe
more than a century later. The cathedral is noted for its use of pointed
arches and a cruciform plan, articulated by four interior columns composed
of clustered piers. Despite its ruined state, Ani Cathedral is a masterpiece
of Armenian medieval architecture.
The conservation state of Ani Cathedral became an object of international
attention in 1996, when the archaeological zone of Ani was placed on WMF’s
inaugural Watch list in 1996. Field missions to Ani were conducted in both
1996 and 1998, leading to documentation and analytic work in subsequent
years.
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2. Honoring NY-Area Early Writers and Intellectuals of the Mirror-Spectator
By Aram Arkun
Mirror-Spectator Staff
NEW YORK – The banquet to honor the forthcoming 80th anniversary of the
Armenian Mirror- Spectator on June 4 in New Jersey will have a little
something for everyone. There will be classical music performed by Elizabeth
Kalfayan, jazz with an Armenian flavor from Datevik Hovanessian and an
opportunity to see old friends and support a worthy cause.
Banquet organizing committee Co-chair Shoghig Chalian announced that
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Kurkjian will be the keynote
speaker, while Peter Sourian, Florence Avakian and Nerses Babayan will
salute the efforts of three great figures involved with the Mirror and the
New York-area Armenian community – Jack Antreassian, Dr. Movses Housepian
and Armine Dikijian.
Chalian exclaimed, `It is turning out to be a very interesting program. It
promises to be a great literary and artistic evening.’
Jack (Ardavast) Antreassian (1920-2009) edited the Mirror-Spectator during
the early 1940s and parts of the 1950s and 1960s. He had a long and
distinguished career in various sectors of the Armenian- American community.
He served, not simultaneously, as executive director of the Diocese of the
Armenian Church and of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) of
America. He was an innovator who established a number of important programs
during the golden age of the Armenian- American community.
Antreassian founded the two organizations’ respective presses – St. Vartan
and Ararat Press, his own Ashod Press and the AGBU literary quarterly,
Ararat, of which he was the first editor. He helped create the Antranig
Dance Group and Camp Nubar for the AGBU, and the Anahid Literary Award,
which became connected to the Columbia Armenian Center. His work at the
Diocese after the Armenian earthquake of 1988 led to the creation of the
Fund for Armenian Relief. He wrote four books of essays, satire and poetry,
edited an anthology of pieces published in Ararat, and published a number of
volumes of translations from the Armenian.
Antreassian’s work will be introduced by writer Peter Sourian. Sourian, born
in Boston in 1933 but raised in New York, is the author of three published
novels – Miri (1957), The Best and Worst of Times (1961) and The
Gate(1965), and has completed three unpublished novels. He has
published a book
of essays and criticism called At the French Embassy in Sofia (1992), and
a number of short stories. Sourian, a Harvard graduate, taught at Bard
College from 1965 to 2010. He was a television critic for The Nation
(1975-81),
and served on various American national awards committees and advisory
boards.
Deeply influenced by French literature and culture, Sourian writes poetry in
French and has done translations from French into English. A number of his
works have Armenian themes, especially The Gate. Last year, a volume of
Sourian’s short stories was published in Armenian translation in Yerevan
as
Entrik otarneri het [Supper with Strangers] and Sourian visited Armenia
and Artsakh at the end of 2010 for a book tour upon the invitation of the
Writers Union of Armenia. Sourian is a member of the Anahid Literary Award
committee and served for many years on the editorial board of Ararat
quarterly, as well as on the board of Columbia University’s Armenian Center.
Dr. Movses (Moses) Housepian (1876-1952), born in Kessab, now in Syria, fled
the Hamidian massacres to England, and then came to the US in 1900. He
graduated from Long Island (New York) Medical College in 1905 and practiced
as a physician until his death. He unselfishly served the Armenian
community, focusing on the needs of humble immigrants. He went to the
Caucasus in 1916 to serve as a physician as part of the Armenian volunteer
movement, and saved many lives.
Housepian became an important leader in the Armenian Democratic Liberal
Party (ADL), regularly participating in New York chapter meetings and party
conventions. Like the party, he was a staunch supporter of Soviet Armenia,
and the work of the AGBU, and actively worked in the latter’s 1946
successful fundraising effort for repatriation. He served as a member of the
central committee of the Armenian National Council of America until his
death. The New York ADL chapter was named posthumously after Housepian.
Housepian was a strong supporter of the Mirror-Spectator. Housepian’s
children, Marjorie and Edgar, followed their father’s example and themselves
soon became important leaders in the Armenian-American community.
Nerses Babayan, who will speak about Housepian, knew his family, as Mrs.
Housepian was a friend of his father. Babayan moved to Boston from Beirut in
order to be assistant editor of Baikar and Mirror-Spectator from 1970 to
1973. He went to Boston State College in this same period and received a
master’s degree in history and political science. He attended graduate
courses at Johns Hopkins in 1974. Afterwards, Babayan came to New York and
opened a consulting and managerial firm. He continues to support and
contribute to the Mirror-Spectator.
Dikijian (1914-1991) was a reporter and columnist for the
Mirror-Spectatorfrom 1936 until her death. She obtained a bachelor’s
degree from Barnard
College and a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University,
after which she worked for some two decades in the Brooklyn Public Library
and several more decades as head criminal justice librarian for the National
Council on Crime and Delinquency. She has served the AGBU, the Eastern
Diocese of the Armenian Church of America and St. Gregory Armenian Church in
various capacities. One of her most treasured awards was a 1971 gontag or
encyclical of appreciation from Catholicos and Supreme Patriarch of All
Armenians Vazken I. Dikijian’s father, Diradour Dikijian, was chairman of
the ADL committee which founded the weekly Armenian Mirror, the predecessor
of the Armenian Mirror-Spectator. The Eastern Diocese instituted the
Armine Dikijian Journalism Scholarship in 1987 as part of the Armenian
Church Endowment Fund.
Florence Avakian will reflect upon Dikijian’s journalistic career. Avakian
is an accredited United Nations journalist who has contributed to both
Armenian and non-Armenian publications on a range of topics. She has been a
columnist for the Mirror-Spectator. Her work has appeared in the New York
Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco
Chronicle and Baltimore Sun. She served for many years on the editorial
board of Ararat quarterly, for which she periodically wrote. For more than
two decades, she has been the voice of Armenian news in English for the
Armenian Radio Hour of New Jersey. Recently, she has delivered a number of
lectures on her own adventures as a journalist. She has been the organist
for St. Vartan Cathedral for some twenty years.
The June 4 banquet will take place at the Teaneck Marriott at Glenpoint (100
Frank W. Burr Boulevard). Donations are $125 per person. For tickets, call
Shoghig at 201-803-0240, Sirvart at 201- 739-7775, or Shemavon at 718-
344-7489. Information about the event’s keynote speaker and other aspects of
the program will be presented in forthcoming articles.
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3. Illustrator Envisions Series of Children’s Books in Armenian
By Daphne Abeel
Special to the Mirror-Spectator
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – `I am an illustrator, not an artist or a painter,’ said
Alik Arzoumanian firmly, as she settled her 4-month-old daughter, Aiki into
her chair. `I do abstract art sometimes, but I need to have a story to
inspire me.’
Arzoumanian, who was born in 1973 in Beirut, said it was her childhood books
that made her want to be an illustrator.
`My aunt, who lived in America, would visit and bring all the Caldecott
Award books for me to read. When I go back to Beirut, I still search out the
books I read as a child,’ she said.
Although Lebanon was torn by war during her childhood, Arzoumanian said she
felt very little sense of disruption growing up there.
`Honestly, during the war, as children, we really didn’t know what was
going
on. We would be happy if the war disrupted our going to school, and we used
to play in the bunkers,’ Arzoumanian said.
Now launched into a developing career as a successful illustrator of
children’s books, Arzoumanian began her working life in a very different
milieu. A graduate of the American University of Beirut, she studied
engineering and landed a job in Dubai, where she worked on irrigation
designs for hotels.
Alik Arzoumanian
`I was terribly bored, and I knew this was not for me. I had a friend who
was a photographer for Gulf News. I was going to explore an opportunity
there, but then I met [her husband] Sevag, who was then living in England,
and I moved there.’
Sevag Arzoumanian, who studied physics and mechanical engineering at
Harvard, completed his PhD recently while living in England. The couple
married and moved to the US where they now live in Cambridge. Sevag
Arzoumanian works as an acoustical engineer in the Boston area.
`When we moved to the US, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it here, but I
discovered there was a big difference between the government and the people.
I love the people here, they are so optimistic,’ said Arzoumanian.
Upon arrival in the US, Arzoumanian enrolled in the Massachusetts College of
Art, from which she graduated in 2007. `I was 27 when I enrolled there,
older than most of the students, but there was a woman in her 60s who was
just beginning her studies. That’s what I like about America. You are not
fixed, doomed to a certain way of life. There is so much freedom, you can
begin again,’ she said.
In addition to her illustrative work, Arzoumanian has taught art to young
children at St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown and
classes in color at her alma mater, Massachusetts College of Art. She hopes
to return to some teaching when her daughter is a little older.
Arzoumanian has taken a somewhat novel approach to contacting publishers,
sending them postcards of her work; this strategy has been successful. Her
work has now been published by a number of different publishers. Her first
book, Tunjur! Tunjur! TunJur!, with text by Margaret Read MacDonald, is
the retelling of a Palestinian folk tale and was published in 2006 by
Marshall Cavendish press in New York. It is the story of a Palestinian woman
who prays for children but is rewarded, instead, with a little pot, that
displays surprising human attributes.
The illustrations for this first book exhibit has become Arzoumanian’s
identifiable style, a reliance often on circular shapes that portray both
people and things, and a use of strong, densely-saturated color. Both
attributes would seem to make her work irresistible to children. There is a
simplicity and directness about her style that communicates instantly. Her
most recent book, Children of God, illustrates a Biblical text, written by
the South African Most Rev. Dr. Desmond Tutu.
Arzoumanian recently attended the Bologna Book Fair, which is entirely
devoted to displaying children’s books, and hopes to see her work published
in other countries than the US. Already, one title has been published in
Lebanon.
Until now, Arzoumanian has illustrated work by other writers, but her new
ambition is to write and publish Armenian stories for Armenian-speaking
children.
`There is so little that is good that is written in Armenian for children. I
want to write for these young readers so that the language will live on,’
she said.
To that purpose, she has developed her own imprint, Kirk-Mirk, which,
roughly translated, means `book fruit.’ Her first title, Dzirani Anoush, is
not about apricot jam, which is the literal translation of the title, but
portrays twin sisters who make up new names for each other. While it is an
entertaining story in and of itself, it also introduces new words and new
ideas to the young reader, therefore the story functions as a teaching tool
as well.
She has also illustrated So Many Houses, written by Hester Bass (Scholastic
Library Publishing), Grateful Animals by Sona Zeitlian and Where Are You,
Little Frog? By Kayleigh Rhatigan and published by Lark books.
Both Alik and Sevag Arzmoumanian have been active politically, and worked
for Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 2004. They
were also deeply involved in helping to expunge the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) program from schools and towns when it became clear that the ADL did
not acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.
Arzoumanian is the recipient of American Library Association Award (2007)
and is a member of the Graphic Artists Guild and the Society of Children’s
Books Writers and Illustrators.
`What I want to concentrate on now is the writing and illustrating of
children’s books in Armenian. There isn’t a wide selection of books in
Armenian for children or indeed in any category. We need all kinds of books
in Armenian.’ To learn more about Arzoumanian’s work, visit her website at
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4. `Finding Zabel Yesayan’ In NYC
NEW YORK – Zabel Yesayan, a prominent writer, activist and feminist,
observed and survived many of the calamities of the Ottoman Armenians before
falling victim to the Stalinist regime in Armenia. She created a number of
important literary works as well as nonfiction works of witnessing, but she
fell into obscurity after her death, outside of small literary circles and
some Diasporan Armenian-language schools. A 40-minute documentary made by
Talin Suciyan and Lara Aharonian in Armenia from 2007 to 2008, called
`Finding Zabel Yesayan,’ seeks to remedy this situation.
The film was shown at the end of March and early this April at the Armenian
General Benevolent Union (AGBU) Alex and Marie Manoogian School of
Southfield, Mich., sponsored by the school, the A r m e n i a n Research
Center of the University of Michigan at Dearborn and the Cultural Society of
Armenians from Istanbul; National Association for Armenian Studies and
Research (NAASR), with the cosponsorship of the Armenian International
Women’s Association; St. Leon Armenian Church; New York University (NYU)
with the sponsorship of NYU Armenian Hokee; the University of Pennsylvania,
through the university’s Armenian Student Association and the AGBU Young
Professionals of Philadelphia; Duke University’s Franklin Humanities
Institute; and at the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Center of the Diocese of the
Armenian Church of America. This US tour was made possible by the initiative
of Dr. Ara Sanjian, head of the above-mentioned Armenian Research Center.
Suciyan spoke about the film at each of these events, and her trip provided
an opportunity to find out more about her work.
The idea for the film arose when Talin Suciyan, originally from Istanbul and
a writer between January 2007 and October 2010 for the Armenian-Turkish
weekly Agos, went to Yerevan in 2007 to participate in a three-month women’s
creative writing workshop run by Nancy Agabian of New York. The workshop was
organized by the Women’s Resource Center in Yerevan, led by Aharonian and
the artists’ collective and non-governmental organization Utopiana.
Aharonian, originally from Beirut, immigrated to Canada during the Lebanese
Civil War, but for the last nine years has been living in Yerevan, where she
founded together with Shushan Avagyan and Gohar Shahnazaryan, the Women’s
Resource Center. Aharonian has studied psychology and comparative
literature, while Suciyan in 2008 began her doctoral studies at Munich’s
Ludwig Maximilian University’s Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies.
She works at the Institute now as a teaching fellow, and is conducting her
doctoral research on the Istanbul- Armenian press after World War II.
At the Yerevan workshop, Suciyan and Aharonian read excerpts from
Averagnerun mech [Among the Ruins], Yesayan’s work about the 1909 Cilician
massacres. Suciyan explained that they realized that as Western Armenians,
`we knew certain parts of Zabel’s life, and our friends in the group,
Armenians from Armenia, knew another part of Zabel’s life. Furthermore, we
realized that according to ordinary public opinion, Zabel had no place in
Armenia. Although she shared the same destiny as Charents or Bakunts
[Eastern Armenian writers], she never became known in Armenia. This was a
little weird for us=85′ Yesayan wrote in Western Armenian for most of her
life, and this may have posed an obstacle for some Eastern Armenians to get
familiar with her work. However, she wrote in Eastern Armenian after 1933.
The two women were moved to read more of Yesayan’s works and when they were
informed by Artsvi Bakhchinyan that Zabel Yesayan had descendants living in
Yerevan, they immediately went to see them. They met her grandson, Alexander
Yesayan, and other family members and family friend Clara Terziyan. They
read the memoirs of her daughter, Sofi Yesayan, and listened to sound
recordings of Zabel’s son, Hrant Yesayan. The two researchers discovered
that Zabel Yesayan’s personal belongings, manuscripts and photographs – and
even some of her hair – were held at the Charents Museum of Literature and
Arts, run by Artsvi’s father, Dr. Henrik Bakhchinyan, and found archival
materials at Armenia’s National Archives pertaining to her lawsuit. All this
material shed new light on the Soviet Armenian period of Yesayan’s life,
and the pair decided that it was worthwhile to prepare a documentary.
Aharonian and Suciyan had personal motivations for the documentary too. For
Aharonian, Yesayan and her writings played an important and liberating role
in her life. Suciyan said, `From my perspective, her being from Istanbul
and
at the same time being diasporan reminds me of the diasporic nature of
Istanbul Armenians, which today we are forcibly made to forget. And I think
that almost 70 years after her death, Zabel Yesayan as a woman who witnessed
two major catastrophes, the first being the Adana massacres, and the second,
the Genocide, as a woman who believed in her ideals and struggled for them
courageously, still is an inspiring figure.’
Suciyan added that Yesayan used the word `feminism’ as early as 1914, in an
article published in the Armenian newspaper Azadamard. She was an extremely
independent woman for her time. Suciyan continued, `I think it is difficult
to find an intellectual woman at the beginning of the century who travelled
as much as Yesayan did and continued to produce and play a political role
not only in Armenian world, but also was part of the societies in which she
lived. For instance, she wrote a novel published in Mercure de France, where
she dealt with the social inequalities of French society.’
The film starts out by showing that even people at Zabel Yesayan Street in
the First District of Yerevan do not know who Yesayan was. Yesayan was
arrested in 1937 as an `enemy of the people’ in Soviet Armenia. The manner
of her death or even its exact date remains unknown. Yesayan’s precocious
start as a writer, her education in Istanbul and France, and her work of
testimony on the 1909 Cilician massacres are related, as well as her escape
in 1915 from the Ottoman roundup of Armenian intellectuals.
Literary critic Marc Nichanian noted in the film that Yesayan was the only
woman in the list of intellectuals who were arrested on April 24 and the
weeks followed. After crossing the Ottoman border and arriving in Bulgaria
in 1915, she wrote of her experience of hiding three months in a hospital in
Istanbul. Furthermore, she published one of the earliest eyewitness accounts
of the Genocide in 1917 in an Armenian journal, Kordz, in Baku. This 136-
page-long testimony of Hayg Toroyan never was turned into a book. Yesayan
spent two years in the Caucasus and in the Middle East collecting Armenian
orphans. She sent articles to French newspapers in order to raise public
awareness in Europe.
Nichanian declared that it was rare for someone escaping a dangerous
situation like Yesayan to be able to write about it so quickly. Furthermore,
Yesayan used to be close to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF)
before 1915, but radically shifted after the war to become its ferocious
enemy. Nichanian stated that this led to ARF not speaking about her life or
politics after she became pro- Soviet.
Art historian Vardan Azatyan said that Yesayan wrote Among the Ruins as if
she was inside the events, but also distant in a way that allowed her to
write about the disaster. In December 1932, Yesayan was invited to lecture
at Yerevan State University. Azatyan thought that this became a safe place,
or a utopian place of hope, which allowed her to write Silihdari bardeznere
[Gardens of Silihdar] about the similarly safe place of her childhood.
Finding Zabel Yesayan was first screened in Yerevan in 2009 and then in
Istanbul the same year. It also has been seen in various cities in Germany,
London and Beirut (at Haigazian University). Armen Haroutiunian, a writer
and patron of Armenian publications in Beirut has offered to sponsor the
preparation and distribution of the film in DVD form to Armenian schools in
Syria and Lebanon.
(Marc Mamigonian of NAASR facilitated the connections necessary for the
preparation of this article.)
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