Category: 2019

GLENDALE—In celebration of the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God, the annual blessing of grapes was conducted at Glendale Adventist Hospital. The service, which was held on Wednesday, August 14, was led by Bishop Torkom Donoyan, Vicar General, accompanied by St. Mary’s Church pastors Archpriest Vazken Atmajian, Archpriest Gomidas Torossian, and Rev. Ardak Demirjian.

Glendale Adventist President, Alice Issai, delivered welcoming remarks and Senior Chaplain, Al Garcilazo, the invocation.

The Vicar General conveyed his greetings and message. He stated that, “Prayer is a powerful spiritual tool which also impacts our physical bodies,” adding, “we have come today to pray for healing and to comfort all those who are ailing.” On the occasion of the feast of the Assumption, he urged all to beseech the intercession of the Holy Mother of God before her Son Jesus Christ. He concluded by blessing all those present and encouraging them to remain resolute in their faith, in their devoted service and in their worthy mission.

The grape blessing ceremony followed, and the service concluded with the benediction by Chaplain Elias Molina.

YEREVAN—World Congress on Information Technology 2019, one of the largest and most prestigious ICT events in the world, will be held in Yerevan this year. Major hotels in Yerevan and adjacent areas have been reserved for participants of the upcoming 23rd World Congress on IT, to ensure they are fully accommodated. WCIT 2019 will take place from October 6 – 9. Congress guests can book hotels through the event’s official website.

The congress will host technology leaders—CEOs and investors, policy makers and government officials, academics, and technologists. The event promises to explore how information and communications technology is transforming our lives for better and for worse. WCIT will also study its impact on profits and prosperity, safety and security, democracy, and humanity.

WCIT 2019 expects to gather over 2,000 participants from over 70 countries who will come to Armenia to discuss issues such as: “The Power of Decentralization: Promise and Peril,” “Rise of the Machines,” “The Black Swan,” “Blockchain Innovation Meets Capital,” “How Green is Silicon?,” “Smart Cities,” “Start-ups and Incubators,” and others.

Over 1,500 rooms at 50 hotels have been reserved in response to high numbers in preliminary registration. Hotels in cities not far from Yerevan, such as Tsaghkadzor and Aghveran, are also ready in the event Yerevan reaches maximum capacity. Senior officials will be accommodated at Armenia Marriott Hotel Yerevan and Radisson Blu hotel Yerevan—both main partners of this year’s conference.

WCIT 2019 organizers in Yerevan will provide airport-hotel transportation services for delegates, attendees, including shuttles to and from the city center and the Demirchyan Sport and Concert Complex where the conference will be held.

Conference organizers have also announced a special cooperation with Sky Team Airline Alliance, which unites 19 leading airlines worldwide. Travelers taking part in WCIT 2019 are being offered up to an exclusive 15% discount on flights to Yerevan. A special page titled “WCIT 2019“ has been created on Sky Team’s website allowing online reservations from anywhere in the world

WCIT 2019 will be held in Yerevan on October 6 – 9. The Congress is hosted by Armenia with the support and under the high patronage of the Government of the Republic of Armenia. The World Congress on Information Technology was established by the World Information Technology and Services Alliance. Its main organizing body is the Union of Advanced Technology Enterprises.

FRESNO—Four scholars from the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles will discuss their research on Western Armenian in a panel discussion entitled “Western Armenian in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Approaches.” The panel will take place on Friday, September 6 at 7:30 p.m., in the University Business Center’s Alice Peters Auditorium at California State University, Fresno. Armenian Studies Program Director Professor Barlow Der Mugrdechian will moderate the discussion.

The presentation is part of the Armenian Studies Program Fall 2019 Lecture Series and is supported by the Leon S. Peters Foundation.

For the past few years, scholars have discussed how to best teach, and transmit, Western Armenian to future generations. In November of 2017, the Society for Armenian Studies and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation organized a conference on “Transmitting Western Armenian to the Next Generation,” with the participation of six scholars. The conference was organized based on this 2017 discussion, as well as from the 2010 report that UNESCO had placed Western Armenian on the list of the world’s endangered languages. The scholars at the conference presented the latest research in the field of language acquisition, which benefits from theoretical and practical approaches in the field of teaching minority languages in a diasporic situation.

In 2018, The Press at Fresno State published “Western Armenian in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Approaches” as part of the Armenian Series at the university. The book was edited by Bedross Der Matossian and Armenian Studies Program Coordinator Barlow Der Mugrdechian. Four of the contributors to the volume will present their conclusions on September 6.

Dr. Shushan Karapetian is Deputy Director of the Institute of Armenian Studies at USC. She received a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA in 2014, where she has taught Armenian Studies courses for the past nine years. Her dissertation, “‘How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?: A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles,” received the Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2015.

Jesse Siragan Arlen is a PhD Candidate of Armenian Studies in the Near Eastern Languages & Cultures department at UCLA. He has taught Western Armenian at a Sunday school since 2016, and his creative prose and poetry in Western Armenian has appeared in literary journals such as Inknagir and Pakine.

Elizabeth Mkhitarian graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in English and Armenian Studies in 2018. She is a published writer of prose and poetry in English and Armenian. Her first book of poetry in Armenian is forthcoming.

Dr. Hagop Gulludjian received his PhD with highest distinction from the Jesuit University of Buenos Aires. He has been teaching modern Western Armenian at UCLA for many years. His area of research is in post-structural rereading of medieval mystical poetry and in languages without a country: language vitality programs and their replicability.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Free parking is available in Lot P6 or P5 near the University Business Center—parking permits are not required on Friday evenings.

For more information about the lecture please contact the Armenian Studies Program at 278-2669, visit our website or visit our Facebook page.

BY GAREN YEGPARIAN

This round of irritants is all about food.

The first and most obnoxious is mayonnaise. It is an utterly repulsive substance. I don’t know how I used to eat it as a very young child, but something changed along the way and now, I find it completely unfit for human consumption. The snot that sometimes slips into one’s mouth when suffering from a cold is far more palatable than mayonnaise. Oddly enough, it contains nothing I do not otherwise like. But the combination of the ingredients makes it disgusting. I have almost vomited because of it. Yet, people, in homes or food preparation businesses insist on slathering this vile gel onto all manner of edibles, mostly sandwiches. Why is it so difficult to simply put it on the side for those who like the stuff to apply onto bread or mix into sauces and dips? We don’t see mustard, in its varied preparations, applied so liberally, or at all, but it is available for who prefer it as a condiment. On top its being despicable, mayonnaise also contains a massive caloric kick, a real problem in this age of obesity. What makes this particularly annoying in Armenian circles is that it is not even part of our native cuisine. Please, ease up on the mayonnaising of our mouths. And, if you think I’m alone in finding the white slime gross, please read this article in Mother Jones

Let’s move on to another commonly consumed item that is also not part of Armenian cuisine, yet has penetrated our communities’ eating habits. Fungus! Of course it is more commonly referred to as the more innocuous-sounding “mushrooms”. Otherwise, few people would eat these close relatives of the growths found on badly maintained places we bathe in. No one wants to picture her/himself grazing on bathtub or shower stall fungus. Yet people rave over these things which grow in the detritus of plants and animals. They feed directly on rot since they cannot photosynthesize. “Oh,” I am often admonished, “but mushrooms take on the flavor of whatever you cook them with”… The obvious response is that they are therefore unnecessary, eat the food that has the desirable flavor without the presence of fungus. But, some might argue, certain mushrooms have medicinal value. Great! Take and dry out those “shrooms” then put the resulting powder into capsules or mix it with other nutritious items for consumption. Just keep those often poisonous lumps of tree-trunk growth off my plate!

Seedless watermelon! What an abomination! Think of how deprived children are nowadays. No more watermelon fights with seeds being spat at one another. Where’s the joy, the fun? More seriously, why would I want to consume something that is so anomalous on our planet?  Seedless watermelon cannot reproduce. Very few plants are like that and those perpetuate themselves by other means. It turns out these things are produced by using the male an female portions of watermelon to produce a plant with an unnatural number of chromosomes which results in sterile fruit containing just the beginnings of seeds, those white ones you sometimes get in seedless watermelon. And, on the Armenian front, it also deprives us of seeds to pan-fry/toast to then chomp on when we’re sitting around socializing. Things have gotten so bad that it is now more difficult to find a normal watermelon in grocery stores than the seedless abominations that were developed some 50 years ago.

While we’re on the topic of seedlessness, what of grapes? Like watermelons, finding normal grapes has now become more difficult than the ones that cannot reproduce but are perpetuated through cuttings. It is a cloning process. This means that should a blight or pest someday evolve, it could wipe out those grape populations since they are genetically identical and unable to develop resistance to the attacker. It seem seedless grapes may date as far back as Roman times, but their modern propagation, marketing, and consumption started in the late 1800s. Grapes are a big part of Armenian life, from straight-up eating them to making wine, or wrapping the leaves as sarma or filling them with eech for a lovely tart morsel. Let’s not forget the shade arbors created by training the vines onto them to create a cool afternoon space. The final bit of ridiculousness regarding seedless grapes is in the health arena. “Grape seed extract” is made and sold for its beneficial properties. Why not just chomp away on the seeds as we eat the grapes and get those benefits for free?

Let’s stop some of the silliness invading and pervading our food.

ARGENTINA (Prensa Armenia)—Garo Paylan and Ebru Günay of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) of Turkey delivered strong statements during a conference at the National Congress of Argentina on Wednesday.

“The same genocide against the Armenians 105 years ago could be repeated today against the Kurds,” stated Garo Paylan. “I am very grateful for Argentina’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Many countries recognized it, but did this stop our pain? We will achieve justice when the Turkish Parliament recognizes the Armenian Genocide,” added the Paylan. “Only a truly democratic Turkey will recognize the genocide against the Armenian people.”

Ebru Günay said that the HDP party has gender parity and that those accused of gender violence or those who exercise polygamy are not allowed to participate in it. “We are fighting for women in a region where patriarchy is very strong,” noted Günay. “It is very difficult to fight for the rights of different peoples in an almost fascist environment.”

Garo Paylan and Ebru Günay are participating in a tour in South America that includes Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. They met with Uruguayan Vice President Lucia Topolansky and former President Jose “Pepe” Mujica between August 13 and 14.

MISSION HILLS—The feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God was celebrated at Ararat Home in Mission Hills with special services including Divine Liturgy and the blessing of grapes. Western Prelate Archbishop Moushegh Mardirossian presided over the service on Thursday, August 15, in which clergy members participated.

The celebration began at the Nursing Facility with special hymns and prayers dedicated to the Holy Mother of God. In attendance were Board of Trustees Chair Joseph Kanimian and members, Chief Operating Officer Derik Ghookasian, Skilled Nursing Facility Executive Director Margarita Kechichian, staff, and residents. On behalf of the Board, Kanimian thanked the Prelate and clergy for their regular visits, special attention to our elders, and heartfelt prayers.

The Prelate conveyed his greetings and expressed his joy at being with the Ararat Home family once again, where God’s presence can be felt in the loving and serene atmosphere, he said. Prelate Mardirossian noted that, during each visit, the clergy pray for the physical health and spiritual tranquility of the residents and beseech the Lord’s blessings upon them, and, on this occasion, the intercession of the Holy Mother of God. He thanked Kanimian for the administration’s warm welcome, love and respect during each visit, and blessed and commended them for their compassionate service.

Speaking on the feast of the Assumption, the Prelate stated that the Virgin Mary was chosen to be the mother of our Lord because she was a faithful and obedient servant who placed her absolute trust in God’s will, and invited all to follow in her example by submitting to His will and praising Him in all circumstances.

The grape-blessing ceremony followed, and the celebration continued with Divine Liturgy at the Chapel, which was celebrated by Rev. Karekin Bedourian who also delivered the sermon focusing on the piety, purity, and faithfulness of the Holy Mother of God.

At the conclusion of the service, the Prelate conducted the blessing of grapes.

Both of the day’s services came to a close with the offering of Holy Communion and the singing of Cilicia.

Later, Ararat Home Administration hosted a lunch for the clergy.