Category: News

On a working visit to the Russian Federation, President Serzh Sargsyan attended today the official opening ceremony of the “Armenia: Legend of being” exhibition at the State Historical Museum of Moscow organized under the program of cooperation between the Ministries of Culture of Armenia and Russia.

More than 160 unique items from the three leading museums in Armenia – the History Museum, the Museum of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin and the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts – are showcased.

The exhibition will provide the visitors with an opportunity to learn about the centuries-long history of Armenia, its multifaceted cultural traditions.

President Sargsyan left a note in the book of honorary guests: “It’s an honor for me, as the President of Armenia, to be in one of the oldest buildings of Moscow – the State Historical Museum of Moscow, where the “Armenia: Legend of being” exhibition dedicated to the centuries-long history of the Armenian people is on display. There ar many glorious pages of interweaving of history of the brotherly Armenian and Russian peoples. I’m confident that the collection of the unique documents and items kept here will be enriched with new valuable testaments of our everlasting friendship.”

President Sargsyan later participated in an award ceremony at the Armenian Embassy in Russia. The President bestowed a Friendship Order to Valery Zorkin, President of the Russian Constitutional Court, for considerable contribution to the reinforcement and development of Armenian-Russian friendly ties, the long-term effective cooperation in the field of constitutional justice.

Friendship Orders were awarded to Russian’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chayka and President of the Russian Investigative Committee Ivan Bastrykin for their contribution to the deepening of cooperation between the law-enforcement bodies of the two countries, the reinforcement and development of Armenian-Russian friendly ties.

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian will visit Vienna on March 13 to participate in the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the European People’s Party (EPP), Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan defeated FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhivov in an unforeseen blitz chess game, Narek Nikoghosyan, Assistant to the Press Secretary of the President of the Republic of Armenia, said in a Twitter post.

The game took place on the sidelines of the Candidates Tournament in Moscow.

President of Armenia, Chairman of Armenia’s Chess Federation Serzh Sargsyan attended the official opening ceremony.

Armenia’s leading chess player Levon Aronian  participates in the tournament along with eight other acclaimed contenders. The winner of the tournament will compete for the World Champion’s title in New York on November 11-30.

As the Chess Federation of Armenia is a sponsor of the event, the opening ceremony was dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenia’s independence.

Turkish court’s decision to appoint the mother of ailing Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II as his custodian, has revived the long-standing debate over his potential successor, Daily Sabah reports.

While the Patriarchate in Turkey, headed by acting patriarch Aram Ateşyan, insists on keeping Mutafyan as its leader, some prominent members of the Armenian community have repeatedly called for the election of a new patriarch.

Incumbent Patriarch Mesrob II has been in a vegetative state since 2008, after being diagnosed with dementia. Several plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit for appointment of a custodian for the patriarch in his absence, while Tatyos Bebek, a prominent figure in the Armenian community who was one of the co-plaintiffs, has sought a court order to that extent so that a new patriarch can be elected when the court officially recognizes the patriarch cannot fulfill his duties anymore. An Istanbul court on Wednesday appointed the patriarch’s 78-year-old mother, Mari Mutafyan, as his custodian. She will be eligible for representation of her son by the court order.

Ateşyan, who had reportedly pledged that an election would be held in 2014, though the council of bishops failed to reach a consensus on an election, was seeking a rejection of the lawsuit by the court. He still has the option of appeal to the court’s ruling.

The patriarch acts both as a religious leader and a leader of Turkey’s ethnic Armenian community concentrated in Istanbul, as the patriarchate also runs several non-profit organizations.

Mesrob II, 59, is the 84th patriarch of Turkey’s Armenian Orthodox community who succeeded Karekin II in 1998.

Bedros Şirinoğlu, president of the Armenian community’s Yedikule Surp Pırgiç Hospital Foundation and a proponent of the election of a new patriarch, told Agos daily that the appointment of a custodian is a legal testament to the end of Patriarch Mesrob II’s rule. Pointing to a divide in the community amid those supporting the election and those opposing it, Şirinoğlu said a continued divide would harm the community and electing a new patriarch instead of an “acting” one would help the community “to recover.”

Turkish law bans the election of a new patriarch while his predecessor is alive. A patriarchal election is required to be held by the synod, and the synod has to apply to the Interior Ministry after approving the election. The government ruled out an election of a new patriarch, but a group of Armenians filed a lawsuit for the removal of the regulations blocking the election. The legal process is still underway.

The Armenian patriarchate was established in Istanbul after the city’s conquest by the Ottoman Empire, and oversees Armenian churches throughout the country.

Photo: Aris Nalci

Architects, art historians and engineers from Turkey, Greece and Armenia have come together to review Turkey’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish heritage.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, project coordinator, Cagla Parlak, said that they aimed to reach an estimated 140 structures across Turkey which are at risk.

The group will document findings from their visits to sites in seven regions across Turkey, including the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, the southern region of Adana and Aegean Izmir.

Financed by the U.S. embassy in Ankara, the project took a year to come together and ran parallel with the foundation of the association in 2014.

The project has publicized its first results by publishing a book called ‘Kayseri: With Its Armenian and Greek Cultural Heritage’ in February.

The team conducted a risk assessment of 18 Greek and Armenian buildings in Kayseri such as the Surp Asdvadzadzin Church, Surp Stepanos Church, Sakis Gümüşyan School, the School in Molu and the Agios Georgios Church.

Kayseri, like many other parts of the country, was home to various minorities until the beginning of the 20th century but their numbers fell after the Armenian Genocide.

The Armenian population in the city was around 15,000 at the end of the 19th century, the book states. Today only one Armenian lives there, according to local media.

The group uses an inventory prepared by the Istanbul-based Hrant Dink Foundation, registration decisions by local heritage Protection Boards and literature reviews, Parlak said.

The Hrant Dink Foundation was founded in the name of a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in front of his Agos newspaper in 2007.

The foundation worked for more than two years making an inventory to gather information about Turkey’s cultural heritage.

It found out more than 10,000 monuments across Turkey. According to the research, there are 4,600 Armenian, 4,100 Greek, 650 Assyrian and 300 Jewish structures across the country.

“Each structure is ranged in according to its risk rating,” she said: “If a structure is at the top of the list, this means that this building should have priority for restoration in that region,” Parlak added.

“Our main aim is to ensure the protection of ‘abandoned’ structures,” she said.

Tufts University, Armenian history Darakjian-Jafarian chair Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, the Armenian Club at Tufts University and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research will sponsor the commemoration of the Armenian genocide 7 p.m. April 6 at Tufts’s Goddard Chapel, 419 Boston Ave., Medford, reports.

The event will feature a lecture by Marc A. Mamigonian, director of academic affairs at NAASR, titled “Scholarship and the Armenian Genocide: The State of the Art and the State of Denial.” The evening will be hosted by McCabe.

A reception will be held after the commemoration in the Coolidge Room at the Tufts Ballou Hall.

The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of scholarship on the Armenian genocide, with a significant number of important works of documentation and interpretation. The development of increasingly compelling scholarly works has been paralleled by the evolution of traditional strategies of denial practiced since World War I and advanced during the Cold War era. While scholars have moved beyond simplistic questions of whether or not what the event was a genocide, apologists for the “Turkish position” labor to construct denialism as a legitimate intellectual position within a historical debate through the publication of ostensibly scholarly publications and presentations. Such manufactured controversy is a time-tested and often effective method of means of generating academic credibility.

This lecture will offer an overview of the current state of the art in Armenian genocide scholarship and briefly survey the development of Armenian genocide denial and focus on more recent refinements and the penetration of denial into American academia, with an emphasis on the fundamental challenges of denialism, debate and the quest for intellectual integrity.

Mamigonian has served as NAASR’s director of academic affairs since 2009. An alumnus of the University of New Hampshire and Tufts University, Mamigonian is the editor of the book “The Armenians of New England” and the Journal of Armenian Studies. His most recent publication, “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy,” appeared in the Genocide Studies International in 2015.

Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS

The solution to the Karabakh conflict can be found only by its participants, not international mediators, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters today, TASS reports.

He noted, however, that Russia is working consistently in international formats to contribute to the resolution.

“Being a responsible member of those formats, Russia continues the consistent work towards the settlement of the Karabakh conflict,” he said, reminding that “those are not on-time efforts, it’s a consistent line.”

Peskov added that “some final solutions and initiatives should come from the participants of the conflict.”

“Neither the international mediators, nor Russia can solve the conflict instead of Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he said.

The settlement of Karabakh conflict was on the agenda of the Armenian-Russian summit in Moscow on the eve.

Glendale High students on Thursday walked through several tents featuring photographs and facts about several genocides, beginning with the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915, the reports.

Glendale High sophomore Adam Al-Nihmy volunteered to facilitate students as they learned about massacres that have occurred around the world, and he observed that some of his classmates were unaware of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, although many did know about the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide.

The exhibit’s purpose was to bring awareness about past massacres as well as ones occurring today, such as in Darfur.

The organization has brought the exhibit to hundreds of school campuses nationwide since 2006 and partnered with the Armenian National Committee of America to bring the tents to Glendale High this week.

The organization is also rallying behind an effort to pass the Genocide and Atrocities Act of 2016, which would establish a lasting Atrocities Prevention Board to better enhance the United States’ ability to respond and prevent massacres.

Before Glendale High senior Kassandra Figueroa had even finished looking at the exhibit, she said she was growing emotional.

“It would be so hard losing a younger sibling, your parents, just not having anyone,” she said.

The exhibit also addresses “the very thin line between a perpetrator and a bystander,” Scott Stauring said.

“Even though these [genocides] were all orchestrated by men in power, they were carried out by people like you and me. What makes somebody … follow authority blindly?” she asked. “We’re all bystanders if we know what’s going on and we’re not actively doing something.”

Photos by Photo by Raul Roa

Thomas Tuchel’s side will head into the second leg of their Europa League last-16 tie against Spurs in high spirits after winning the opener by three goals to nil

Henrikh Mkhitaryan admits he never imagined Borussia Dortmund would beat Tottenham so convincingly in the Europa League on Thursday, according to Goal.com.

Dortmund put one foot in the quarter-finals thanks to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s first-half opener and Marco Reus’ double against a second-string Tottenham side at Signal Iduna Park.

Tottenham coach Mauricio Pochettino made seven changes to his team with regular first-teamers Harry Kane, Erik Lamela and Kyle Walker among those named on the bench.

But despite Spurs naming a heavily-changed outfit, Mkhitaryan was still surprised by the scoreline and feels the tie is far from over heading to White Hart Lane.

“It was an incredible game for our fans and us,” the Armenia international told UEFA.com.

“We couldn’t imagine that we were going to win 3-0 because we had analysed Tottenham and we know they have been doing well in the Premier League and Europe League. So we had been expecting a tough game.

“I thought the first half was like that but in the second half it changed a little bit because we made the most of our chances.

“But we have one more game. In 90 minutes anything is possible.”