Author: Torgomian Varazdat

Resignations not to weaken opposition party – Armenian politician
Arminfo
3 Sep 05
Yerevan, 3 September: The opposition Anrapetutyun [Republic] Party
will hold an extraordinary congress in late September or early October
this year, the member of the party’s political board, Gegam Arutyunyan,
said during a press conference at the Azdak Press Club today.
He stressed that the conduct of the congress is not linked to the
resignation of seven members of the party’s political board. “The
decision to hold the extraordinary session was adopted long before the
resignation of the seven members of the political board. Initially,
we intended to discuss at the congress the further strategic steps
of the party in the sphere of implementing a democratic revolution,
however, taking into account the latest events, we will also discuss
the current internal situation in the party and elect its political
board,” Arutyunyan said.
There is no turmoil in the Anrapetutyun Party after the resignation
of the seven members of the political board, Arutyunyan pointed out.
He expressed his confidence that the resignation of the seven members
of the political board will not lead to a mass exodus. Moreover,
[ex-Prime Minister] Albert Bazeyan and his supporters themselves
will not prompt a mass exodus from the Anrapetutyun Party, Arutyunyan
maintains.
He said that members of the party do not condemn their former
colleagues, but only express their regret about their decision.
Arutyunyan found it difficult to explain the reason for the decision of
the seven members of the political board to leave the party, however,
he confidently said that this decision was not adopted on the basis
of their political ambitions or under pressure from some internal or
foreign forces. He stressed that the decision of the seven members of
the political board to leave the Anrapetutyun Party will not weaken
the positions of the party or the Justice bloc, of which the party
is a member.
“The authorities will not manage to split the Anrapetutyun Party or
the opposition in general. The authorities’ attempts to split the
opposition failed when the opposition unanimously said “no” to draft
constitutional amendments,” Arutyunyan said.
[Passage omitted: Arutyunyan comments on Bazeyan’s statement that
the party is making unrealistic plans]

Turkish tourism
How green is their valley
Aug 25th 2005 | CAMLIHEMSIN, TURKEY
>From The Economist print edition
A remote hideaway could thrive on, or be wrecked by, eco-tourism
THEY used to be one of Turkey’s best-kept tourist secrets: the scented
plateaus of the Pontic mountains, with their wild flowers and exuberant
dancers. For the handful of travellers who came this far east, few
landscapes were as enticing as the Hemsin valleys in the province of
Rize, a place where many locals speak a dialect close to Armenian,
practise moderate Islam and are agnostic about their origins.
More recently, news of this area’s beauty has been spreading. A new
breed of eco-tourist, many of them from Israel, has begun to head for
the yaylas, or meadows, with their roaring rivers and stone bridges.
But the very attractions that draw in these green wanderers could be
destroyed if clumsy developers and opportunistic local politicians
get their way.
To see the aesthetic hazards of unregulated tourism, go no further
than Ayder, a yayla overlooking one of the Hemsin valleys that was
once renowned for its tranquillity and hot springs. Thanks to a stream
of Turkish and foreign visitors, the air is thick with smoke rising
from barbecues. Mournful Arabesque music blares from tour buses and
cars. Garish motels and handicraft stands obscure the view.
Many Hemsinlis are furious. Ayder’s degeneration began after it was
linked by road to the nearby town of Camlihemsin, says Selcuk Guney,
a local activist. One of his aims is to ensure his birthplace, the
neighbouring Firtina valley, avoids a similar fate. So far it is
virtually untouched; that is partly because access is by dirt track.
Mr Guney insists that if the region’s unique way of life is to be
preserved, and well-managed eco-tourism is to flourish, the footpaths
leading to yaylas must not be replaced with paved roads; and tour
buses “that leave nothing but trash behind” must be restricted.
Mustafa Orhan, a crusty old bee-keeper who led a successful campaign
against a planned hydro-electric dam on the Firtina river, suspects
that the government’s unspoken aim in building roads is to help
commercial logging. Locals have long used electric pulley-carts,
running along steel cables, to bring food and other supplies to
their yayla homes. So, instead of roads, Mr Orhan asks: “Why not
build electric cable-cars to carry people?”
Locals of his persuasion have found an ally in Rize’s governor, Enver
Salihoglu; he too opposes further road construction in the valleys.
Smart development could avoid ruining this Shangri-la, he believes.
In Camlihemsin, for example, there could be more emphasis on bees,
trout farming and organic tea. Of course, not every Hemsinli is so
conservation-minded. “I want cable television and a fridge,” says
Muazzez Yildiz, an elderly lady whose cottage has a gorgeous view of
the Firtina valley. The question is how to help her without wrecking
the place for those who will pay a premium for its virgin enchantments.

KOCHARIAN TO TAKE PART IN CELEBRATION OF 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF NKR DECLARATION
Pan Armenian News
01.09.2005 07:27
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian President Robert Kocharian will visit
Nagorno Karabakh September 2 to take part in festivities marking
the 14th anniversary of the declaration of the Nagorno Karabakh
Republic. It should be noted that a program worked out by a special
governmental commission provides for festivities in Nagorno Karabakh
September 2. These will begin with a liturgy in Kazanchetsots church
of Shushi town. The first lesson in general education institutions of
the Republic will mark this date. MPs, republic government members
will take part in these. Authority and public representatives will
visit Stepanakert memorial complex to pay tribute to those killed in
the course of the Karabakh national liberation movement.
Russian stars are also planned to be invited to take part in a
traditional concert in Rebirth Square in the center of the NKR
capital. Sport events will also be organized. The festivities will
finish with fireworks, reported IA Regnum.

The Soviet Nation
MOST RUSSIANS, ARMENIANS AND UZBEKS ARE SURE OF THEIR ANCIENT ORIGINS AND UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS. BUT THE PAST THEY SHARE IS JUST AS MUCH A PART OF WHO THEY ARE TODAY.
By Ronald Grigor Suny
Moscow Times
Sept 2 2005
In the West, at least before the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union
was almost always referred to as Russia. Sports stars or politicians,
like Igor Ter-Ovanesyan or Anastas Mikoyan, were invariably called
Russians, as if in a self-conscious effort to either deny the
country’s multinational character or to push the point that Soviet
policies and practices were aimed at Russification and homogenization
of the whole Soviet people. The dominant view of scholars for most
of the Cold War was that Lenin’s nationalities policy of “national
self-determination” for all peoples was disingenuous, dedicated in
reality to the aggrandizement of the central state’s power.
It was only in the 1980s, as non-Russians in the South Caucasus and
Baltic region began agitating for autonomy and independence, that a
few historians and political scientists began to reconsider Bolshevik
attempts to foster ethno-national cultures, promote leaders from
non-Russian nationalities and organize the first state composed of
national territorial units. With the disintegration of the Union and
the formation of 15 independent nation-states just a few years later,
a small army of younger scholars — Yuri Slezkine, Jeremy Smith,
Terry Martin and Francine Hirsch among them — took up the study of
how the Soviet Union was formed.
Now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin,
Francine Hirsch takes us deep into the politics and processes of the
nascent federation with “Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge
and the Making of the Soviet Union.” For most Marxists, nation
and nationalism were impediments to the building of a classless,
socialist society. But Lenin, almost alone of the leading Bolsheviks,
believed that small-nation nationalism could aid in the struggle
against Western imperialism. Russia could prove to oppressed peoples
everywhere that a large socialist state was an ally, not a threat,
to their cultural and political development. Lenin’s policy granted
territory, education and limited political rights to non-Russians but
stopped short of real sovereignty or complete freedom of expression.
As Hirsch shows, the state’s efforts led to a “double assimilation”:
the coalescing of unstructured populations into nationalities and the
further assimilation of these nationalities into a Sovietized society.
Referring to the Soviet Union as an “empire of nations,” Hirsch
demonstrates through prodigious research how ethnographers from
the former tsarist regime collaborated with the Leninists to shape
the new state. Hers is the tale of a modernizing, self-styled
scientific state that imposed categories, names and programs on
ethnic populations with relatively little say in their own fate. The
whole enterprise is reminiscent — indeed, parallels — what European
imperialists, like the British in India, did to their conquered and
colonized subjects. Yet Hirsch is careful not to subscribe to the
older view that Lenin was driven by power alone. Rather, she sees
the building of the Soviet multinational state as the product of a
joint intelligentsia project, at times enthusiastically backed by
ethnographers and others, to liberate a benighted population and
propel them along the evolutionary path toward modernity. Sometimes
the consideration for ethnicity gave way to other more compelling
interests, like economics or defense, but the Soviet state never
abandoned its official commitment to nation-making.
Cornell University Press
The Soviets, like the Nazis, engaged in race science with studies
such as this one, from 1927, of Mordvin and Russian men. But unlike
the Nazis, the Soviets believed that race was a product of history,
and therefore still open to change.
Hirsch is particularly good on how Soviet “race science” differed
from that of the Nazis. Whereas the Hitlerites saw biological race
as immutable and a fundamental determinant of a people’s abilities,
Soviet ethnographers saw “race” as a product of history, therefore
changing and developing. All peoples, in their view, were capable of
progressing through time. They advanced most rapidly in a socialist
society, and there they would eventually form a multicultural community
— the Soviet people.
“Empire of Nations” is an exceptionally rich book and a significant
addition to the growing literature on the construction of the Soviet
state. Beautifully written and clearly presented even when the story
hovers on complicated administrative matters, Hirsch’s account of
the Soviet Union as a “work in progress” that neither began with a
blueprint nor achieved completion reaffirms the now widely accepted
view of nation-formation as a process of human intervention and
invention. Nations, scholars generally agree, are not “primordial”
collectives that have always existed and only await their moment of
awakening and freedom. Rather, they are the product of a conscious
effort to piece together elements of shared language or culture in
defense of the right to political freedom. This “constructivist”
view that nations are made in modern times is illuminated by the
Soviet experience, where the socialist state played a particularly
forceful role in delineating and consolidating nations within its
fold. The great irony of Soviet history is that it was the regime’s
very success in creating and fostering nations that led eventually
to disintegration once the central government began loosening its
hold over the empire’s peripheries.
Every scholar aspires to making an original contribution to her or his
field, and Hirsch can take pride in adding enormously to our knowledge
of the cultural technologies of Soviet rule. And the fact that she is
in an active company of colleagues toiling nearby in the histories of
the non-Russians in no way diminishes her work. Regrettably, she does
not adequately acknowledge those fellow toilers and instead repeatedly
emphasizes how she disagrees with their views. Indeed, Hirsch is one
of the most “disagreeing” scholars one is likely to read, footnoting
over and over again her differences with the other major players.
There is nothing wrong with vigorous scholarly debate, but Hirsch’s
disagreements are not very substantive. To take just two examples,
she disagrees with Harvard historian Terry Martin’s notion of an
“affirmative action empire,” the idea that the Soviet state promoted
the fortunes of non-Russians particularly in the 1920s, although
his analysis jibes perfectly with her own. She also takes Martin
to task for arguing that in the 1930s the Soviet Union shifted
from a “constructivist” to a “primordialist” approach to defining
nationality. But she then goes on to elaborate how the secret police
in the late 1930s required that nationality on internal passports be
based not on an individual’s “choice,” as before, but on his or her
parents’ ethnicity. This greater emphasis on descent, it would appear,
reflects the move under Stalin from subjective national identification
to a more primordial, almost racial idea of nationality.
Thinking of nations as primordial is still common among post-Soviet
peoples. Most citizens of present-day Russia, Armenia or Uzbekistan
are certain that they are distinct and different from their
neighbors precisely because of their ancient origins and unique
cultural characteristics. But this is only one of the legacies of
the long Soviet experiment. Besides inclusion in and allegiance to
a particular nation, post-Soviet peoples share the mentalities and
habits of another unique cultural formation: the culture that can
only be described as Soviet. It might be that you can take peoples
out of the Soviet Union, but you may not, at least for a long time,
take the Soviet out of the people.
Ronald Grigor Suny is a professor of political science and history at
the University of Chicago and the author of “The Soviet Experiment:
Russia, the U.S.S.R. and the Successor States.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

TURKISH AUTHOR FACES CRIMINAL CHARGES
United Press International
Sept 1 2005
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces three years in prison if convicted
on charges of “public denigrating of Turkish identity,” his publisher
says.
Pamuk, 53, was charged after a Swiss interview in which he said
discussing certain topics such as the 1915 Armenian massacre and the
war with the Kurds were off-limits in his country, the Washington
Post reported Thursday.
Because no one talks about such topics, “therefore, I do,” he was
quoted as telling the newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in February.
Tugrul Pasaoglu, Pamuk’s publisher and an editor at the Istanbul
publishing house Iletisim Yayinlari, said the acclaimed novelist
faces trial for “public denigrating of Turkish identity” Dec. 16.
Pamuk’s attorney told the Post, “There is nothing that constitutes
a crime in this interview.”
Pamuk’s books including “My Name Is Red,” have been translated into
more than 20 languages.

AZERI, ARMENIAN PRESIDENTS’ KAZAN TALKS RAISE HOPES
AzerNews, Azerbaijan
Sept 1 2005
Hopes for a settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Upper Garabagh
conflict increased after another around of talks, Foreign Minister
Elmar Mammadyarov told journalists following the closed-door meeting
of the Azeri and Armenian presidents in the Russian Volga river city
of Kazan on Saturday.
The previous meeting of the two presidents in Warsaw raised
expectations for progress in the conflict resolution.
Prior to the Kazan meeting held on the sidelines of the Commonwealth of
Independent States summit, there were presumptions that the sides would
reach a specific agreement or sign a document. However, it became clear
after the meeting of the foreign ministers in Moscow shortly before
the presidents’ talks that considerable results would not be achieved.
As before, the presidents’ meeting was attended by the co-chairs of
the meditating OSCE Minsk Group Steven Mann of the United States, Yuri
Merzlyakov of Russia and Bernard Fassier of France, as well as the OSCE
chairman’s envoy Anzhei Kaspshik. The talks, which first started with
participation of the two foreign ministers and OSCE representatives,
were followed by a private meeting of the heads of state.
Although no extensive information was available on the details and
outcome of the meeting, Foreign Minister Mammadyarov’s statement
enables a conclusion that major results were not achieved. He said,
however, that the meeting cannot be considered fruitless, as talks
between the two presidents always yield results. “The hopes that
emerged after the Warsaw meeting further increased after the Kazan
talks.”
The Minister noted that new proposals were made at the Kazan
meeting and a week or two are needed to analyze them and assess the
situation. Although Mammadyarov did not elaborate, it is clear that
the mediators made certain proposals on the conflict resolution.
Touching on the timeframe for the next meeting, the Minister said
the sides agreed to consider it after analyzing the results of the
presidents’ meeting.
A spokesman for the Armenian President Viktor Sogomonian said
official Yerevan considers the meeting a ‘positive development’ in
the negotiating process. “The two countries’ foreign ministers will
continue working considering the agreements reached in Kazan”, he said.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to the two countries’
leaders prior to the Kazan meeting. In her phone conversations with
the Azeri and Armenian presidents, she said Washington attaches great
importance to the talks on the conflict settlement. Rice also voiced
a hope for a peaceful conflict resolution.
Mammadyarov said prior to the meeting that progress would be achieved
in peace talks if Armenia accepts the proposals made by Azerbaijan.
“The sides have mutual understanding on certain issues. If Armenia
is ready to accept all of our proposals, there will be a breakthrough
in the negotiations.”
The Minister noted that the mediators have stepped up their activity
and continue to put forth ‘compromise’ proposals.
Touching upon the Garabagh status, Mammadyarov emphasized the
importance of discussing the issue strictly within Azerbaijan’s
territorial integrity. “There are different ways to resolve the
issue. Dialogue on the matter should therefore continue… The
main idea is for us to find a way for Azeris and Armenians to live
peacefully in a small territory. The sooner we find a way for this,
the more rapidly our states will develop, as the conflict is an
obstacle for our countries’ development. We should focus on the
processes ongoing around the world and look to the future.”
Meeting ‘was doomed to failure’ A well-known Armenian political analyst
said the meeting of Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Robert Kocharian was
‘doomed to failure’.
“The meeting certainly means some progress. But both Aliyev and
Kocharian understood well that it would be extremely difficult to agree
upon anything on the eve of the parliament elections in Azerbaijan”,
Andranik Migranian told Russian media.
“The pre-election situation has heated up in Azerbaijan so much that
any discussions on compromises are harshly disapproved there. The
meeting was therefore doomed to fail beforehand.”
Asked what Azerbaijan and Armenia should do to achieve success in the
conflict settlement, Migranian said ‘the conflicting sides cannot do
anything on their own’.
“In this case, the decision may be imposed by the international
community or the status quo in the current situation will remain.
This may continue until one of the sides deems itself strong enough
to solve the problem through military action.”
The analyst said that certain progress in the conflict resolution
could be achieved if superpowers ‘impose a compromise solution on
the conflicting sides’.
“Without this decision, it is difficult for the authorities of
Azerbaijan and Armenia to explain to their own electorate why they
would accept such unfavorable concessions.”
In reply to a question whether Russia may step up its mediating role
in the conflict settlement, Migranian said this country is involved
in the process anyway. “However, Russia’s current potential does not
allow doing more that it is doing now.”
“Russia has limited financial, economic and military-political
potential, not to mention the fact it has almost lost its influence
in Georgia and Azerbaijan…Many do not see Russia as a country that
has a key to the solution of the Garabagh problem any more.
Azerbaijan binds greater hopes for Washington or Brussels rather than
Moscow in this respect.”
The analyst said that the increase of Azerbaijan’s military spending
stated by President Ilham Aliyev earlier is a ‘move aimed at pressuring
Armenia’.
Migranian did not rule out that the Azeri government will be ‘tempted
to make a decision to fight back’. “When they build up certain military
potential, they may resort to fighting back”, he said.

ARMENIAN BUDGET DEFICIT AT 0.2% OF GDP IN 7 MTHS
Interfax, Russia
Aug 31 2005
YEREVAN. Aug 31 (Interfax) – The Armenian budget deficit stood at
1.426 billion dram, or 0.2% of GDP, in January-July 2005, the National
Statistics Service told Interfax.
Revenue and official budget transfers were 191.32 billion dram,
or 20.9% of GDP, in the seven months, up 24.5% year-on-year.
The Armenian budget deficit is expected to be 47.5 billion dram, or
2.3% of GDP, in 2005. Revenue is expected to be 327.92 billion dram,
or 16.2% of GDP, and expenditures will be 375.4 billion dram, or 18.5%
of GDP.
The official exchange rate on August 31 was 471.28 dram/$1.

Rice urges Armenian, Azerbaijani leaders to settle Nagorno-Karabakh
problem at summit
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is urging the
leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia to settle their lingering
disagreements over the Nagorno-Karabakh region at a summit conference
in Russia.
Presidents Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Robert Kocharian of Armenia
are meeting Saturday in the Russian Volga city of Kazan at a summit
conference of the Commonwealth of Independent States, 12 former
republics of the Soviet Union.
Rice telephoned Aliyev and Kocharian on Thursday to “stress to them
the importance that the United States attaches” to their meeting, the
State Department said.
The office of the department spokesman said in a written statement
that Rice expressed the hope to the two presidents that they “will
make the compromises necessary in order to reach a settlement of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.” The statement said the two were upbeat
about prospects for progress.
A cease-fire has kept the fragile peace in the enclave since 1994, but
Nagorno-Karabakh’s status remains unresolved.
Fighting began after the legislature of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave
within Azerbaijan dominated by ethnic Armenians, demanded in 1988 to
be incorporated into Armenia. Both were Soviet republics at the
time. Thousands died and a million were displaced after full-scale
military offensives broke out in 1991, the year the Soviet Union
dissolved.
The State Department said Rice also stressed to Aliyev the importance
of free and fair parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan this November
and told Kocharian she hoped Armenia would work to enact
constitutional changes now before the parliament.
08/25/05 20:44 EDT

Newsweek
Aug 21 2005
My Secret Istanbul
Turkey’s best-known novelist recalls a childhood in the city that has
become his soul, rich in mystery.
By Orhan Pamuk
Newsweek International
Aug. 29, 2005 issue – I was born in Istanbul. Except for the three
years I spent in New York City, I’ve lived nowhere else. At the age
of 53, I am living again in the Pamuk Apartments, which my
grandparents built for our large extended family when I was an
infant. On summer evenings, when I stand at my window and peer
through the swaying branches of the old plane trees lining Tesvikiye
Avenue, I can just see the lights of Aladdin’s, the shop where my
father bought his cigarettes and newspapers, and where I would go for
chocolate, bubble gum, water pistols, plastic watches and the latest
issue of Tom Mix comics.
When I was a boy, Istanbul was a tired provincial city with a
population of a million; half a century later it is a metropolis 10
times that size, ringed with strange and distant neighborhoods I’ve
never seen, and whose names I know only from the papers. When I stand
at my window, it’s hard to accept that these alien outlying villages
are really part of my city. Not even in my dreams did I ever expect
the streets of my childhood to be as crowded as they are today. But
when you are as tied to a city as I am to Istanbul, you come to
accept its fate as your own; you come to see it almost as an
extension of your own body, your very soul. So when I see Istanbul
streets and shops and squares changing before my eyes (and over the
past few decades, I’ve seen all the most important cinemas,
bookstores and toy shops of my childhood close their doors), I react
in just the same way as I see my own body growing older. After the
first shock and dismay, I resign myself to my new shape.
Can a city have a soul? If it can, what is its soul made of? Does a
city’s soul come from its size, its culture and its history, or does
it rise out of the image its streets and buildings imprint on our
minds? Or does a city’s soul depend on how crowded it is or how
empty, how misty or how hot? Is it the river flowing through it, or
(as in the case of Istanbul) the sea that divides it in two? Where is
it that we feel this soul most keenly? Is it when we see it from the
top of a high hill, or when we’re walking through an underground
passage, our ears ringing with the din of the city and our nostrils
stinging with its damp and dirty air? Perhaps it’s when we’re all in
bed, listening to the city settle into sleep like a tired old animal,
and we hear a foghorn sounding on the Bosporus. In my view, a city’s
soul changes as the city itself changes. Today’s new and affluent
Istanbul is no longer the melancholy city I knew as a child.
But even now, it speaks to me of loneliness. On summer evenings, the
city’s soul resides in the old buses struggling through clouds of
dust, smoke and exhaust, taking their tired and perspiring passengers
home; it resides in the cloud of smog that hangs over the city as it
goes from orange to purple with the setting sun, and in the blue
light that bursts out from a million windows when the city turns on
its television sets at almost the same moment (and at just the same
moment women all over the city are frying eggplant for the evening
meal). At noon on cold, calm autumn days, when the city is humming
with activity, the city’s soul resides in the lonely man busily
fishing as his little old boat rocks in the wake of the ferries and
the great cargo ships passing up and down the Bosporus.
Everyone in Istanbul is an outsider, and so everyone is alone. When
the Turks arrived in 1453-or, rather, the Ottomans, for there were
Christians in their Army-they found a city waiting for them. And so
they were, by definition, newcomers. Those the Ottomans brought to
this city during their 500-year reign came from vastly different
countries and cultures; so they, too, were foreigners. When a city
goes from a population of a million to 10 million in the space of 50
years, then nine tenths of its inhabitants must also count as
foreigners. This is why, whenever I strike up a conversation with
someone on the street, or on a bus, or in one of the shared taxis
known as a dolmu, the first question they ask, after we have
complained about the weather, is where I’m from. If I admit somewhat
shamefacedly that I’m from Istanbul, they ask, somewhat suspiciously,
about my father’s father and my mother’s relatives.
Istanbul’s great secret is that even those of us who live here do not
really understand it, and we do not understand it because it defies
classification. To wander through our crowded streets is to sense the
many layers of history beneath our feet, but even as we are reminded
of the many great civilizations that came before us, we remember,
too, that we don’t own them. That is what gives the city its foreign
air.
I would go so far as to say that its soul resides in its very refusal
to be categorized or rationally understood. This, indeed, is what I
take from the popular historian Resat Ekrem Kocu’s strange and heroic
enterprise, the Istanbul Encyclopedia, which he began during the ’50s
but never took beyond the letter H: far from putting the city into a
clear order, this hardworking writer added to the confusion by
writing at length about his secret passions and the bizarreries of
Istanbul, to which he added fond accounts of his favorite drinking
companions.
Since childhood, the city’s older stores have seemed to me to be the
most eloquent expressions of its inspired disorder. When I’m standing
in a parfumerie-call it a pharmacy, if you will-and looking around me
at the array of colored bottles and boxes and jars, it seems to me
that the city’s soul comes not just from its history but from the sum
total of all the passions and dreams of all those who have ever lived
here. Like the Beyoglu shops I visited with my mother when I was a
child-Turkish on the surface, but Greek and Armenian underneath-they
remind me how many older cultures feed into our own, and how
unknowably rich their influence has been. In Istanbul, every object
carries its own secret history.
Pamuk’s most recent novel is “Snow.” He is also the author of
“Istanbul: Memories and the City.”

AZG Armenian Daily #147, 20/08/2005
Diaspora
HAMSHEN ARMENIANS TO CELEBRATE DAY OF ARMENIAN CULTURE
The Hamshen Armenians will mark “And the Zurna of Hamshen Will Blow
Again” celebration of the Armenian culture on August 27-28 in Tuapse
region of Krasnodar province, Russia. The celebration is dedicated
to the 1600 anniversary of the Armenian alphabet, Yerkramas newspaper
reports.
The “Hamshen” Armenian cultural organization of Tuapse will held
workshops and concerts with the participation of best Armenian national
ensembles of Kuban. The celebration of culture will open in the village
of Shahumian, which was an Armenian administrative center till 1956.
By Ruzan Poghosian