UkrPoshta releases postmark on occasion of 200th anniversary of Ivan Aivazovsky
18:09, 29.07.2017
UkrPoshta marks the appearance of the anniversary of Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky with the appearance of an artistic stamp.
A new postmark (140,000 copies) and souvenir sheet (36,000 copies) have been put into circulation on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the painter’s anniversary, Analitikaua.net reports.
The design of the stamp, sheet and postmark belong to Vasily Vasilenko, the website of UkrPoshta reports. “The release of the postmark dedicated to the talented marine painter, is a necessary step by a state for his contribution to the development of the Armenian-Ukrainian friendship,” Ukrainian historian Yevgeny Safaris told AnalitikaUA.net.
“On the 200th anniversary of the distinguished painter of Armenian descent Ivan Aivazovsky, it is important to remember that all his life and work were inseparably connected with the wonderful and picturesque country of Ukraine, to which he dedicated part of his paintings,” the historian noted.
In July, the National Bank of Ukraine released into circulation commemorative coin “Ivan Aivazovsky.” The coin was released in the series of “Distinguished persons of Ukraine” and put into circulation in 3,500 copies.
Three major Iranian cities (Tehran, Shiraz and Mahshad) organized the screening of Armenian films as part of a weekly cultural program held from 23 to 29 July, reports the Foreign Ministry’s press service.
The Armenian Movie Week offered the participants a great opportunity to share ideas and discuss the history of Armenian film production, as well as consider the modern trends of its development.
Out of the dozens of works submitted for screening, the organizers selected 10 movies by Aram Shahbazyan, Aren Vatyan, Vigen Chaldranyan, Michael Poghosyan and other directors. The films were screened at the Art and Experience center.
Highly praising the initiative, Armenian Ambassador Artashes Tumanyan highlighted the country’s commitment to hold periodically such cultural events to raise awareness of the Armenian culture in the Islamic Republic. “Our main purpose is to properly present the Armenian culture, and Armenia in Iran. So this event is an important step to that end,” he said.
Motivating students to reach out to all parts of the world fits President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative – the goal is to enrich minds and the economy at the same time
BY COCO LIU
29 JUL 2017
In 2012, when He Yang started her college life in Beijing, the then 18-year-old had a clear plan of her future: after graduating from the Beijing Foreign Studies University, known as the cradle of Chinese diplomats, He wanted to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Five years passed, her life seems far from that plan. Instead of working as a Russian-speaking diplomat in Beijing, she now studies at a graduate school of Yerevan State University in Armenia, a mountainous nation sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Yet still, He is serving a government’s mission.
He is learning Armenian, a language used by about 3 million people in the world, less than the population of Berlin. But with Beijing hoping to set a new world order, the demand for talents that can speak languages like Armenian has been skyrocketing. Once considered itself as the centre of the earth surrounded by barbarians, the Middle Kingdom is now actively reaching out, learning the language of countries stretching from Eurasia to Africa.
Such desire is fuelled largely by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s grandest foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, designed to revive the ancient Silk Road trading routes. Since its debut in 2013, Chinese companies have invested at least US$50 billion in member countries. Following the massive Chinese investment is a soaring demand for talents that help facilitate the success of the multibillion-dollar initiative.
The agenda has become so important that it landed on the list of top 100 tasks of China’s 2016-2020 development plan. Backed with government money, in 2016 alone, thousands of Chinese students and scholars headed to countries involved in the initiative for language learning and other studies. At home, Chinese universities which once stuck to only some of the world’s most popular languages, such as French and Spanish, have begun offering language courses that few people in China have ever heard of.
Meri Knyazyan, an Armenian linguist in Beijing, knows this well as she has witnessed how her personal goal – helping the Chinese learn more about Armenia – has been taking a ride on Xi’s ambition of connecting China with the world.
Besides teaching Armenian as an optional course at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, Knyazyan is now helping the university set up an undergraduate programme on Armenian study, the first of its kind in the country. To create more teachers, the university sent two Chinese students to learn the language in Armenia, with a promise that they can land a teaching job after earning a master degree. By contrast, most lecturers at the university hold a PhD degree.
“Language is part of soft power,” Knyazyan spoke of China’s newly found passion in Armenian and other less-known languages. “It is the best tool to understand the culture of local people,” she said.
At Knyazyan’s weekly course, which is open to students from the Beijing Foreign Studies University and elsewhere, the 35 year old organises the screening of Armenian documentary films, introduces Armenian cuisines and tells Chinese students the history of Armenia where early civilisations date back some 6,000 years. Knyazyan said some students became so interested in the country that they travelled to Armenia to see it with their own eyes, bringing back more stories which have lured more Chinese students into the class.
That’s good news for Chinese companies which have been yearning for a greater presence in overseas markets yet often failed to do so, due to a lack of ability in coping with cultural differences. China’s Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group recently suffered from a clash of cultures at its American factory, indicating the struggle of Chinese businesses has persisted even in countries that they have more experience with.
It remains to be seen how the language learning and culture studies will translate into closer relations between China and Armenia, but He, the Chinese student in Yerevan, has already seen some immediate benefits.
“Whenever I speak Armenian, people in Armenia become more friendly,” He said. “I even get better deals at stores by bargaining in the local language.”
Renowned French-Armenian filmmaker and actor Robert Guédiguian’s film La Villa (English title: The House by the Sea) has been selected for the competition program at the 74th Venice Film Festival, according to a report by the Telegraph.
The film festival announced its line-up today. Darren Aronofsky’s horror film Mother, starring Jennifer Lawrence and George Clooney’s black comedy Suburbicon are also included in competition section.
The Venice Film Festival 2017, which starts up August 30, will open with Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. The film festival will run until September 9.
Yelyzaveta Glybchenko / 29th July 2017 at 16:02 / Et cetera / Armenia
Iveta Mukuchyan and Aram Mp3 are now working on a series of songs about their native land – “Hayastan Jan” – or lovely Armenia. Both of them are former Eurovision representatives. Iveta took part last year, and Aram back in 2014.
Two of Armenia’s Eurovision contestants Iveta Mukuchyan and Aram Mp3 who shook Europe with their songs LoveWave and Not Alone respectively, have now joined forces in a music project that aims at coming back to the origins of the Armenian culture.
The project is called Dashterov – it is a 40 minute long music project, featuring revamped traditional Armenian songs from Al Eghnim to Nazan Im Yary. Iveta and Aram Mp3 are mixing traditional with modern and hopefully creating something truly special.
First came Al Eghnim, followed by the second Qamin Zana and the third is Ghapama. The project is full of club bangers with it’s unique fusion of folk music and techno/house beats.
At the first song Al Eghnim, Iveta and Aram Mp3 use a snippet from Daft Punk’s famous ’00s anthem Around the World as well as Earth, Wind & Fire’s ’80s disco classic Let’s Groove. Dashterov takes the Armenian cultural themes to a new level of modernity and internationality, which sounds like something Eurovision fans will enjoy.
The new project is not the only work that Iveta Mukuchyan has dedicated to Armenia. Hayastan Jan (Lovely Armenia), composed and performed by Iveta, is a song that tells a story of coming back to the origins of the singer.
She should be able to relate to that as she lived away from her native land in Hamburg, Germany, and travelled all over the world as a Eurovision contestant. She returned to Armenia and rediscovered her native land.
The video for Hayastan Jan is even composed around Iveta’s Eurovision experience.
The mountains’ wind is kissing the poppy field, My heart is calling you, oh my lovely Armenia!
Gonna say ‘bye’ to far-far-away shores, Gonna say ‘hello’ to my native land, my lovely Armenia!
Oh, my mountains’ world, you’re the best for me, For me, you’re the fairest and the most native.
There’s a part of me in your mountains, There’s a part of me in your apricots,
There’s a part of me in your name, Oh, my lovely Armenia!
(Go to the full lyrics and translation of Hayastan Jan)
For the upcoming songs of Dashterov as well as other Armenian cultural music projects, keep an eye on the Facebook pages of Iveta Mukuchyan and Aram Mp3.
The world premiere of Haro Stepanyan’s “Sasuntsi Davit” heroic opera will take place in the open-air area of Shushi’s Realakan College on September 1 at 20:30 under the auspices of First Lady Rita Sargsyan and with the support of the NKR Ministry of Culture and Youth Affairs and the RA Ministry of Culture. The performance is dedicated to Artsakh Independence Day, 25th anniversary of liberation of Shushi and 120th anniversary of Haro Stepanyan.
Sasuntsi Davit Opera was written by Haro Stepanyan in 1936.
Hayk Martirosyan played on the 3rd day of the USA- “World” junior teams’ tournament underway in St. Louis. He first defeated the leader of the U.S. team Jeffery Xiong, then got a revenge on his compatriot Samuel Sevyan.
In total after six rounds the world team is winning with 15:9 score. Today the 7th and 8th rounds will be held. Practically World team guaranteed victory, as in the other 12 chess games it is enough to gain 1,5 points.
The Armenian Chamber Choir (ACC) is set to perform an open-air concert in front of the Temple of Garni, the Service for the Protection of Historical Environmentand Cultural Museum Reservations reported in a press release.
According to the source, the concert is scheduled on July 30 at 21:00 “Garni” Historical-Cultural Museum-Reservation. The Choir will conduct headed by Artistic Director and the Principal Conductor Robert Mlkeyan.
Armenia is chess’s perennial overachiever, and Levon Aronian, its greatest player, is a swashbuckling throwback.
In 1988, war broke out between Armenia and its Soviet Republic neighbor of Azerbaijan, over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It was another tragedy in a century of tragedies for Armenia, going back to the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people, beginning in 1915. When the 1988 war began, thousands of ethnic Armenians who lived in Azerbaijan fled their homes. One of them was Melikset Khachiyan, a chess player who studied the game, as a teen-ager, under Tigran Petrosian, Armenia’s greatest-ever player. Khachiyan had shown early promise, but a shot at the game’s highest level, in an era of legends like Kasparov, Karpov, and Tal, eluded him. Now he needed a place to stay. He headed to Yerevan, Armenia’s pretty, pink-stoned capital; there, Grigory and Seda Aronian offered him a room in their modest home on the edge of town. Rather than pay rent, they suggested, he could teach their six-year-old son, Levon, chess.
Three years later, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed and Armenia became an independent nation, Levon Aronian, under Khachiyan’s tutelage, quit school to focus on chess full time. Now thirty-four, Aronian is ranked seventh in the world and has one of the highest ratings in chess history. Armenia, a nation of three million people, is the game’s perennial overachiever. Per capita, more players from Armenia have attained the coveted status of grandmaster than any other country, and Armenia has won men’s gold at three of the last six Chess Olympiads, the highest honor for a national team. Armenia’s President is also the head of the country’s chess association, and he has spearheaded a chess revolution: Armenia is now the only country where the game is a required part of the national curriculum, and its top players receive a state stipend. “For a small, landlocked country, chess is a particularly ingenious way, and effective way, of mobilizing both competitive spirit and sports competition and intellectual discipline, without the need for huge infrastructural resources and, of course, financial spending,” the Armenian-American writer Peter Balakian told me recently.
Aronian has won dozens of tournaments and global admiration, and he has become a bona-fide star in his native country—but he has yet to win chess’s greatest prize, the World Championship. He grew up, he told me, surrounded by reminders of the time “when your country used to be a strong country.” And the longer he shoulders the hopes of a nation desperate for homegrown success, the tougher it is becoming, it seems, to fulfill his immense potential.
I first saw Aronian play in 2015, at a “blitz,” a high-speed chess event in Berlin. Most leading chess players appear tightly wound at the board; Aronian looks like he’s waiting for an Old-Fashioned. Last summer, we met at a swanky new hotel in downtown Yerevan. As we ate lunch, people stared and took selfies. Aronian is raffish and charming, with unkempt hair and louder clothes than his chess-playing peers tend to favor. His chess skills were a route out of poverty. In the years following independence, blockades with Turkey and Azerbaijan, which still hold today, killed trade. Blackouts were common then; Aronian and Khachiyan would often practice by candlelight, up to six hours a day. Aronian loved the concept of sacrifice, and the idea that he could do anything so long as he achieved one goal: kill the king. He went out little, forfeiting friendships and the trappings of boyhood.
Aronian and Khachiyan began walking an hour and a half to play at chess clubs in Yerevan. Soon Aronian was winning tournaments, and making money on the side by beating businessmen in hotel lobbies. Small-time sponsors came and went; an airmail firm put in some cash—at one point, Aronian even travelled abroad with the mail. By the time he was thirteen, he was making enough to support his family. They needed the money, and Aronian turned that desperation into a strength, playing aggressively and unconventionally against his studious, better-dressed opponents. “I had to kick their ass,” Aronian told me. He added, “They look in your eyes and they understand that you are a barbarian, and the kids generally fear the ones who are savages.” He paused as we spoke to prevent a waitress from taking some half-finished plates. “There is still the barbarian in me—I won’t let my food be taken away.”
Aronian reached the level of grandmaster in 2000, when he was seventeen, but the Armenian Chess Federation repeatedly overlooked him in favor of older, more established players. After the A.C.F. froze him out of a tournament in India, his mother decided she had seen enough and uprooted the family to Berlin. Suddenly the Aronians were members of the seven million-strong spyurk(“spread”), the Armenian diaspora created mostly by the 1915 genocide. Unencumbered by Armenia’s infighting and isolation, Aronian flourished. He played over a hundred matches in his first year in Germany. In 2002, he won the Armenian Chess Championship and became World Junior Champion. He is now a rich man.
In n 1963, when Petrosian took on the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik for the World Championship, thousands camped out in Yerevan, watching each move relayed via telegraph to a giant demonstration board in the city’s Opera Square. Petrosian’s victory caused a “chess boom” in the country, Mikayel Andriasyan, the secretary-general of the A.C.F., told me. In recent years, when Armenia has won the Chess Olympiad, there have been similar celebrations. (Armenia did not compete at last year’s Olympiad, because it was staged in the Azerbaijani capital city, Baku: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unresolved.) Aronian played a key role in all of those victories: in 2004, Serzh Sargsyan, a former government defense minister, became the chief of the A.C.F., and he coaxed Aronian, who had climbed into the top hundred of the world rankings, back to the national team. (Four years later, Sargsyan was elected President of Armenia.)
By 2005, Aronian was ranked fifth in the world and became a national hero in Armenia. Stardom is a great honor, Aronian told me, but it’s double-edged. “Some people are cheering you up, while some people who are generally unhappy, they’re sharing their unhappiness,” he said. (Taxi drivers, he added, are particularly blunt with their criticism.) Aronian splits his time between Berlin and Yerevan, where he lives with his fiancée, Arianne Caoili, who has represented both the Philippines and Australia in the Women’s Chess Olympiad and also works as a consultant. Aronian has a small circle of friends and rarely goes out alone. Most days he listens to classical composers—“Bach for his spirituality and passion, Bruckner for his structure, Schubert for his serenity and firm structures, Mahler for the ways he goes from small to grandiose, Shostakovich for the gentle darkness”—and practices chess moves for hours. He still wears his emotions on his sleeve. He often loses chasing improbable wins when he should settle for a draw. And he takes losses badly, blaming anything from the venue to the general public. After a poor performance at a tournament in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, in February, he told me that he lost because he was “not in the mood.”
“For me, Levon is more someone who needs things to flow,” the five-time world champion Vishy Anand told me. Wesley So, a Filipino-born U.S. player ranked second in the world, told me over e-mail that, when playing Aronian, “you never know if any move is straightforward and it’s best to assume it isn’t.” His swashbuckling manner recalls eccentric former greats like Bobby Fischer and Kasparov, and contrasts with the game’s contemporary masters, quiet geniuses who play with quantum precision. “You’re free to express yourself in the game of chess,” Aronian told me, comparing it to his beloved classical music. “You can play anything as long as you are determined to fight for the ideas you put in your moves.”
From 2012 to 2014, Aronian was often ranked second in the world; most people in chess expected him to challenge Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the three-time, and current, world champion. But when Aronian performed badly at the 2014 Candidates Tournament, the event that chooses who will face off against the reigning world champion, it seemed to sparked a decline. Last year he performed erratically, falling well below the mark required to face Carlsen for the world title in New York last November. A month after the Candidates Tournament, I met up with Aronian at a hotel in London. He had just competed at the London Chess Classic, drawing six matches and losing two, placing eighth out of ten entrants. It was cold and gray, and Aronian was tired. “I know that I deserve, one day, to become world champion,” he said. The tournament in Sharjah, two months later, was another chance to rebound, but it didn’t go according to plan. “I haven’t yet achieved anything in my career,” he told me after that event, on the phone. He added, “I want to have a crushing victory somewhere. Something that will make me proud.”
“He is probably too emotional, and the sight of his dream being close makes his vision blurry,” the Dutch player Anish Giri, who is ranked twelfth in the world, told me. Maybe getting some distance from it has begun to help: in June, Aronian won the Norway Chess tournament in Stavanger, beating Carlsen with a dramatic sacrifice that, improbably, he had held back since 2003. “There’s no parallel in sport for that,” the writer and chess player Martin Pein told me, speaking of Aronian’s long-delayed stratagem. “What it demonstrates is someone who thinks incredibly deeply, who’s analyzed a lot of ideas in an almost profound way.”
The intervening period has been characteristically unpredictable for Aronian. He placed badly at a tournament in Leuven, in the Netherlands, before sweeping to victory at a German event with a round to spare. Last week he struggled at a competition in Geneva that comprises part of the qualifying criteria to join the game’s élite at next year’s Candidates Tournament. His next chance to shine is at the three-hundred-thousand-dollar-prize-fund Sinquefield Cup, which begins July 31st, in St. Louis. Aronian looks likely to make the Candidates cut, but it’s not guaranteed. Once again, he must sweat over his future.
Though many of the game’s current leaders are in their twenties, history suggests that Aronian is at an age where his powers should peak; Petrosian won the world title at thirty-three. Aronian wants to give Armenia another victory, and help it move on from past sorrows. “I feel that I’m owing my nation, my country, a lot for their love,” he told me. Failure, he believes, would not only be a personal but a national disappointment. “We’re always dreaming our days will come, and some justice will be delivered,” he said. “I feel that this is my duty.”