Category: News

An American punk drummer has become an unlikely historian of the Armenian community in Aleppo, Syria. And he’s recently released a recording of their religious music — just as the city is crumbling during Syria’s ongoing civil war.

Jason Hamacher doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be drawn to a place like Syria.

“I am the son of a Southern Baptist minister,” he says. “I was born in Texas, I have no cultural ties or blood ties whatsoever to the Middle East, or to the populations that inhabit the Middle East.”

Back in the early 2000s, Hamacher was a punk drummer in Washington, D.C., playing in several hardcore bands. A little musical competition between friends changed the direction of his whole life.

“We each challenged ourselves, saying each person has to find something online that we could write music to, and report back to each other,” he says. “So a couple of days later, a friend of mine calls, and said, ‘Hey. I found this really amazing chant from Serbia that you should check out.’ It was a bad phone connection, and I completely misunderstood him and thought he said ‘Syria.’”

He wasn’t a trained musicologist or photographer. But beginning in 2006, he made several trips to Syria, taking photos and recording music he found along the way. He documented many of Syria’s diverse minority communities, including Jews, Sufi Muslims and several different Christian denominations. He’s been releasing those recordings, one by one, on his own label.

His most recent release is an album that Hamacher made at a 15th-century Armenian church in Aleppo. It’s just one priest, Yeznig Zegchanian, chanting.

“It’s the famed Forty Martyrs church, and it’s the actual voice inside the church, which is what really makes the album so special,” Hamacher explains. “The songs are common songs. They can be heard throughout the liturgical year. There’s nothing rare about the songs.”

But the church and its neighborhood are another matter. The Armenian neighborhood of Judayda was a place where everybody went. It’s full, Hamacher says, of “really windy back alleys, and it opens up onto this really amazing square that’s lined with restaurants, trees and silver shops.”

“It was always one of those magical places where you had multiple communities living together, says Elyse Semerdjian, a historian of Syria at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. “From neighborhood to neighborhood, you could switch languages, from Armenian to Kurdish to Turkish to Arabic.”

Semerdjian comes from an Armenian family from Aleppo, and she wrote the liner notes for Zegchanian and Hamacher’s Forty Martyrs: Armenian Chanting from Aleppo. She says the city became important to Armenians many centuries ago, because of Armenia’s religious heritage. Armenia officially became a Christian country 1700 years ago, in the year 301.

“You know, Aleppo was always situated along a pilgrimage route to Jerusalem,” she says. “And so we have very early accounts of Armenians who passed through Aleppo, and stayed in Aleppo for a period of time.”

Semerdjian says that Aleppo became even more of a refuge after 1915, when up to a million and a half Armenians were killed or deported from the Ottoman Empire.

“When the Armenian genocide took place in 1915,” Semerdjian says, “Aleppo was one of the major deportation routes for Armenians, where, on what were, in effect, death marches, that people were very lucky to survive. If they survived them at all, they ended up, many of them, in Aleppo.”

Father Zegchanian was born in Aleppo. He was first recorded by Jason Hamacher in 2006. Hamacher returned to Forty Martyrs four years later to try to record him again. But a deacon refused to even let him speak to Father Zegchanian until the priest himself happened to walk by — and Hamacher chased after him.

“It’s like, ‘I don’t know if you remember me,’” Hamacher recounts. “‘I would love to record an record with you inside the church. He’s like, ‘OK.’”

“‘Oh, that’s great!’” Hamacher continues. “And then he just started walking into the church. I was like, ‘Wait, not now, I don’t have my stuff!’ He’s like, ‘Yes.’ I was like, ‘Yes, you’ll do it? Or … yes to later?’ It’s like, ‘OK … let me go get my equipment!’”

And that recording, made totally on the fly, became an important historical document of an Aleppo that is nearly gone. In April of this year, the church of Forty Martyrs was bombed.

“At first, it seemed that the church, and everything related to the church, was completely destroyed,” Hamacher says. “And fortunately, it turned out to just be the courtyard and complex related to the church.”

Hamacher hasn’t been able to contact Father Zegchanian in the past couple of years. And he hasn’t been able to go back to Syria because of the war — but he says that’s made his work all the more urgent.

“Major portions of the iconic symbolism of that city has been wrecked and destroyed,” Hamacher says emphatically. “The importance to continue at least the memory of these places is to keep the arts going. That’s my attempt, you know, that’s my contribution, is trying to represent these communities in a way that is informational, respectful, artistic and honorable.”

In the meantime, Hamacher is eager to share what he’s collected. He’s working on a book of photos from Aleppo, and says that he’ll be releasing an album a year of music from Syria, as long as he’s got material.

“The frequency of the provocative actions by the Azerbaijani armed forces at the frontline and the quantity and type of the weapons used come to prove that the military-political leadership of Baku pursues the policy of creating a war-like situation,” the NKR Defense Ministry said in a statement.

“The recent developments at the line of contact and the accompanying belligerent statements are a proof of the said. Not only Azerbaijan is trying to present its attacks as a response to the steps of the Armenian side, but also using reactive rocket and artillery weapons as it shells the Armenian positions,” the statement reads.

The Ministry warns that “the tactic adopted by the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan not only causes unjustified and irreversible losses, but also threatens to lead to unpredictable consequences.”

The military-political leadership of Artsakh informs both the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan and the international structures involved in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict, namely the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, that the Azerbaijani side carries full responsibility for the further escalation at the line of contact and the deriving consequences.

The delegation headed by Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan will leave for Grodno (Belarus) on September 8 to participate in the sitting of the Inter-Governmental Council of the Eurasian Economic Council, Government’s Press Service reports.

US Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group James Warlick has said the escalation at the line of contact is unacceptable.

Warlick took to Twitter to comment on the situation at the line of contact between the armed forces of Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan over the past day.

The mediator uploaded the picture of a 120mm mortar released earlier by the with the following message attached:

“This is a 120mm mortar reportedly used in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Such escalation is unacceptable.”

This is a 120mm mortar reportedly used in the Nagorno- conflict. Such escalation in unacceptable.

— James Warlick (@AmbJamesWarlick)

Arpine Hovhannisyan of the Republican Party faction will be appointed as new Justice Minister, Parliament Speaker Galust Sahakyan has revealed, Armenpress reports.

“The issue of appointment was discussed at the sitting of the Executive Body of the Republican Party. It was decided to nominate Arpine Hovhannisyan to the post,” the Speaker said.

The Armenian national team will face Serbia tonight in a Euro-2016 qualifier. The match will take place at Karadjordje stadium in Novi Sad and will kick off at 22:45 Yerevan time.

Armenia and Serbia are placed at the bottom of Group I with one point each.

On Monday, Armenia will host Denmark in Yerevan.

All state agencies are prepared to make prompt and balanced decisions in any situation envisaged by the scenario of the “Shant-2015” strategic command post exercises, Deputy Chief of General Staff of RA Armed Forces Movses Hakobyan told a press conference today. According to him, the country has been brought to a high level of combat readiness, Armenpress reports.

“The exercises aim to reveal the potential of the state in case of possible war. This is the first time Armenia is holding exercises of such scale, involving all state agencies,” Hakobyan said.

“It’s still untimely to assess the results, the outcome will be summed up at a later stage. The agencies get certain assignments, some of which should be applied in practice. All participating bodies will get assessed,” Movses Hakobyan said.

He stressed that the Armenian Armed Forces have seriously prepared for the military exercise and have all kind of material resources stored for as long as 65 days.

– The 14th Istanbul Biennial, Saltwater: a Theory of Thought Forms, opened this week amid calls for all participating artists to suspend their work for 15 minutes in support of Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

Most notable is the focus on Armenia and the Armenian genocide, an atrocity not recognised by the Turkish state. At the press opening on 2 September, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of this year’s biennial, said it was “very timely” to speak about what happened 100 years ago, as well as the “traumas and ethnic cleansing” that has occurred in other parts of the world throughout history, including Australia, Syria, Poland and Germany.

In what Christov-Bakargiev described as a “diplomatic act”, the Dilijan Art Initiative, which sponsored the Golden-Lion winning Armenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, is supporting 13 artists in Istanbul who are either Armenian, of Armenian descent or have made works relating to Armenian history.

They include the Modernist painter Paul Guiragossian, who was born to survivors of the Armenian genocide and has 14 works on show in Istanbul Modern. A self-portrait from 1948 bears witness to Guiragossian’s itinerant life: a shell destroyed the artist’s Beirut studio in the 1970s, damaging many canvases. The self-portrait was repaired, but the scar across his cheek remains.

“My father was born in Jerusalem and his work often deals with displacement and marginalised people,” says Manuella Guiragossian, the president of the Paul Guiragossian Foundation.

At the Galata Greek School, the Lebanese-born artist Haig Aivazian is presenting a performance of a folkloric song by the Armenian-Turkish oud master Udi Hrant Kenkulian, whose family survived the genocide and lived in Istanbul from 1918 onwards. Titled Wavy Wavy Is the Sea of Bolis, O Mother, the work combines “two complex sets of melodic, cultural and linguistic creolisations” that echo the “transition of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish republic”, says Aivazian, who is also exhibiting in the Armenian pavilion in Venice.

Upstairs, the Iraqi-Jewish artist Michael Rakowitz is showing The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours. The newly commissioned installation consists of plaster friezes moulded from architectural details crafted by Armenians throughout Istanbul. “[The friezes] show the traces of Armenian hands and fingers, which bear silent witness to what happened in the city in 1915 when the Armenians were annihilated and dispossessed,” Rakowitz says.

Several other works that refer to Armenian history are dotted around the city—the biennial covers more than 30 venues this year. For example, the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs is presenting a new black and white film, Silence of Ani, which depicts children from Eastern Anatolia playing bird songs on whistles and flute-like instruments.

Despite the potential for backlash over the Armenian question, Christov-Bakargiev says she encountered no censorship in the lead up to the biennial. Indeed, the curator sees hope in the transformative power of art. “With and through art we mourn, commemorate, denounce and try to heal and commit to the possibility of joy,” she says.

Armenian Public TV starts the new season on Monday, September 7 with the launching of a number of new and fresh programs and interesting projects.

Committed to its long-term traditions, the Public TV will offer educational-cultural, entertaining, social and cognitive, patriotic programs, as well as new feature films and documentary series.

As part of the “Shant-2015” strategic command post exercises Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan convened a special sitting of the Government.

The Ministers briefed on the process of implementation of directives in their respective spheres stemming from the scenario of the exercises, reported on the problems in certain situations and presented suggestions for their solution and for application of more efficient measures.

In his opening remarks President Sargsyan stressed the significance of the exercises, underlining that every drill pursues two objectives – to train and to check. The final goal is to be ready to take the most effective measures in case of real threat to the territorial integrity and security of the country.

After the exercises are over, the work of the participating agencies and their leaders will be assessed, plans for the elimination of the shortcomings will be worked out.