Vol. 2 No. 26 (2022): 2022-2

The cradle of the Armenian civilization of millennia, Erebuni-Yerevan, is now in the center of Azerbaijani falsification more than ever. From the very first day of its establishment, the Republic of Azerbaijan has pursued a policy of taking over not only Iranian (Persian) but also Armenian settlements. It is not accidental that the capital of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, has also appeared in their target. Having been under Persian rule, and from time to time under Turkish rule, for many years, many buildings in Yerevan bear elements of Eastern, more precisely Iranian architecture, which has become one of the targets of Azeri counterfeit propaganda.

Both during the reign of the Arshakuni dynasty and Marzpanate period, the activities of the Mamikonyan princely family played a special role in the history of the Armenian Nakharar houses. In the mid-240s, as a result of internal strife and a difficult geopolitical situation, they left their homeland - Chenastan, the issue of localization of which for two centuries remained in the focus of attention of researchers who have expressed different points of view.

Studies show that the ancestral home of the Mamikonyans bordered India in the south, the Kushan Empire in the west, Sistan in the north, and the Chinese Empire in the east. Having left their homeland, the Mamikonyans first found refuge in Bahl, where Vasudev Arshakuni gave them shelter. Owing to the efforts of the latter, having escaped punishment, they settled in Greater Armenia, where Trdat II reigned, who fought against the rule of the Sassanids, trying to preserve the independence of the country. In subsequent decades, the Mamikonyans not only gained fame as the best nakharars, but also headed the key position in the Armenian army - the position of Sparapet (supreme commander).

With the coming to power of the Abbasids, the condition of the Armenian Church seriously deteriorated. In the second half of the 8th century, the Armenian Church experienced one of the most difficult periods in its centuries-old history. The church simultaneously faced three challenges coming from the Muslim Arabs, the Chalcedonian Byzantines and the Paulicians. Under the conditions of the triple attack, the Armenian Church strengthened its independence, formed national legislation and ideology. The robbery of church property, the confiscation of lands, the resettlement of Arab tribes, the change in the demographic map of Armenia, accompanied by arbitrariness, became serious blows to the church, which personifies the autonomy of Armenia. As a result, the economic base of the spiritual-feudal structure - church land ownership - was weakened, and the income from it was reduced. Accepting the Armenian Church as an object of robbery and enrichment, at the same time, the Arabs could not ignore the fact that by doing so they weakened one of the important levers for spreading the influence of the main enemy of Byzantium in Armenia. The persecution of the Armenian Church especially intensified after the defeat of the uprising in 774-775, when the feudal houses of Mamikonyan and Kamsarakan, who were ardent supporters of church and state, left the political arena of Armenia. The clergy became more vulnerable because the Arabs did not disdain to torture or kill the clergy. The Arabs discredited the institution of the Armenian Patriarch, which was a symbol of unity for the Armenians. The expressed wary attitude towards the Arab officials did not prevent the Armenian Catholicos from selflessly fighting for the protection of the rights and property of the church.

The heroic self-defense of the Armenians of Yerevan in 1724 is one of the most memorable events in the history of Armenia. The study shows that the researchers are right, who propose to separate the self-defense of the Armenians of the city of Yerevan from the defense of the Yerevan fortress, which began after the end of the self-defense of the Armenians of the city and lasted until September 22. The self-defense of the Armenians in Yerevan lasted 60 days, starting on April 9 and ending on June 7. On May 20, on the outskirts of Yerevan, in Dzoragyugh, the largest self-defense battle of the Armenians of Yerevan took place, where the Armenians, at the cost of the lives of 1,300 soldiers, defeated the Ottoman army and forced it to retreat, losing 6,000 soldiers. Having concentrated an army of more than 60,000 people against the self-defense forces of the Armenians of Yerevan, the Ottoman Turks invaded the city on the morning of June 7. Armenian self-defense units fought to the end, trying to save people. Having plundered the city, killed and captured the population, the Ottoman army attacked the small suburb of the Yerevan fortress, captured and destroyed it, after which the Yerevan fortress was under siege for three months. The Yerevan fortress surrendered to the Turks through the mediation of the Armenian Catholicos Astvatsatur Hamadantsi (715-725) on September 21, 1724.

The first signal of concrete actions aimed at the extermination of the Armenian population in Diarbekir province was in August of 1914 when fire broke ut in the market of Diarbekir city and greatly affected mainly Armenian traders and craftsmen.

In 1915 all Armenian-populated areas of Diarbekir province, as well as throughout Western Armenia, the Armenian population was subjected to violence, deportation, and massacres. Moreover, if the policy of Islamization of Armenians was quite widespread in other settlements, in Diarbekir, Islamization could have been an alternative to deportation or massacre, but did not fully ensure the further security and safety of the converted person.

There were lots of evidences of cruel treatment against women and children in this province and the chances of rescue were low. The fact that policy of extermination of the Armenian population was well organized and implemented in Diarbekir was connected to the governor's person of this province. The main task for Reshid was the elimination of Armenians, and the final Turkification of the area.

 Many settlements in Diarbekir province became the slaughterhouses of deportees from other provinces.   At the same time with the extermination of Armenians, tens of thousands of Kurdish migrants began to settle in these areas.

The same policy of fear, massacres and exile continued towards the Armenians who survived in 1915 which led to the final exile of Armenians from this area.

The issue of the saving of orphans, and later the preservation of the Armenian identity, was a significant task as their Armenian identity was constantly during the Armenian Genocide. The paper analyzes the issues and features of the local orphanages, the external and internal factors, which had an impact on the process of preservation of the Armenian identity.

 After studying initiatives and methods at the orphanages, we may conclude that the Armenians organized the daily life of the orphanages based on the principles of preserving and transferring the orphans' perceptions of the native language, Armenian culture, Armenian apostolic church, as well as on the significance to overcome the complex of Genocide.

There was a focus on the native language and Christianity, publication of press in the orphanages, organization of sports events to raise the national identity, and establishing the environment of mutual assistance. All these actions were based on the principle of not discriminating among orphans.

The modern model of preserving the Armenian identity was elaborated with the primary goal to survive the Genocide. The Armenian teachers and staff members further tuned and successfully implemented the model even in the orphanages under the management of foreign relief organizations. In practice, the model was implemented in all orphanages of the Middle East, securing the possible positive result, even though the model was not approved officially by any institution.

The article presents the massacres, repressions and looting, and the goals they pursued, carried out by the Kemalists against the Armenian civilian population in Gharakilisa province in 1920-1921. The Turkish-Armenian war of 1920 had tragic consequences for Vanand (Kars) and Shirak provinces. The Kemalists also invaded a part of Gharakilisa province. The Pambak area was twice subjected to massacres by Turkish troops. Comparative analyses of the Ottoman invasions of 1918 and the Kemalist invasions of 1920 in the area of Pambak were made. If during the Ottoman invasion of 1918 the main blow reached the eastern region of Pambak, particularly the Great Gharakilisa, then during the Kemalist invasion of 1920 it reached the western region of Pambak. The population of the area from Dzhadzhur mountain pass to Nalband station was massacred. Cruel and bloody massacres took place in the area of Pambak for three days by the fanatical mob and the Kemalist armed forces, until the signing of another ceasefire. Thousands of people were killed - women, children and the elderly. 7500 refugees from Kars and Alexandropol regions, who took refuge in this area, were massacred together with the locals. Studies and the analyses carried out prove the genocidal acts committed by the Kemalists against the Armenian civilian population. The massacres of Gharakilisa province can be considered a continuation of the Armenian Genocide, already in the territory of Eastern Armenia.

The article, keeping to the historical chronology, attempts to reveal and represent the laws forbidding the marriages based on kinship partnership adopted by both Church Councils as well as the secular and religious laws. Based on the comparisons and contradictions the article puts an emphasis on the great influence that the Christian Value System could have on the banning the kinship marriages.  After adoption of Christianity and within its efforts to fight against the pagan rights the Armenian Church via its canonical councils could adopt laws and rules to ban the marriages between the relatives. During the period, those laws and rules have undergone slight changes and reached to us in the form they are now. The article contains some citations from orders by Chatholicos, that particularly emphasise the Church’s strong attitude towards the matter under discussion. The article also discusses the questions of marriage between adopted children and step-relatives and the Church’s attitude is the same.

It is very important to mention the great role of the Armenian Church in the solution and reinforcement of the marriage question in our reality that in its turn, greatly favoured to the heightening and evaluating the role of the Armenian Woman.

For the first time a noticeable and valuable part of Misak Metsarents’ literary heritage, that is, translations and adaptions taken from English-American literature became the subject of a separate study.  It has been proved that even fragments of the materials available to us testify the prematurely deceased poet's good knowledge of English, high literary taste and range of interests and, finally, his ability to master translation skills.

“The sick, gifted youth”, who only lived his 22 springs, was first of all fascinated by the works of English writers containing deep psychology and impressive artistic images: on one hand, it is the humanized animal world of R. Kipling or O. Wide’s philosophical mind, on the other hand, it is G. Chaucer’s and T. Peacock’s sharp pain of love or E. Field’s soulful lullabies.

As a translator Metsarents managed to completely penetrate into the psychological sublayers of the literary works of his choice, to convey to the target language the emotions that were raging in his own inner world: he achieved this by making   original omissions-additions, sometimes reasoned mitigations or changes.

Since the 1920s, new metric forms, including hexametric sizes, have entered the poetry of Yeghishe Charents. The hexameter was one of the most widely used metrical forms in ancient poetry. In new languages, it has undergone significant changes due to the disappearance of the differences between long and short syllables and the strengthening of the role of stress in words. As an imitation of the ancient hexameter or as a “pseudo-hexameter”, this size has become widespread in European and Russian poetry since the XVIII century, especially in translations of ancient literary monuments. Six-strike lines in the poetry of Charents appear as early as 1918-1920, but we observe the conscious use of hexameter with dactylic sfeet in half lines especially in the collection “The Book of the Way”. His distichs, a number of quatrains, translations of Goethe’s elegies and Pushkin’s poem “Labor” are written in hexametric size. The monostichs (one-liners) of Charents are also mostly written in hexameter. According to our observation, in the poetry of Charents, hexametric meters carry different cultural layers in their structure: antique-metrical, Russian dolniks, the principles of Mayakovsky’s tonic verse, and only a genius poet could so skillfully combine all these layers.

The article presents one of the best works by a talented writer of Armenian literature, Stepan Alajajyan, the novel “The Reeds did not Bend”, the first edition of which although published decades ago has not been comprehensively studied and evaluated so far. The novel depicts the life of Cilician Armenians who had miraculously escaped from the Desert of Deir ez-Zor and returned to Zeytun after the First World War, which lasted only two or three years not only because of the activities of Turkish murderers, but also because of the mercenary policies of great powers and especially the treacherous behavior of France. Highly appreciating the ideological and literary merits of the novel, commenting on the system of creating characters, the author especially emphasizes the relevance of the problems raised in the novel. He puts forward the idea that Alajajyan’s novel, in addition to being a fictional story, is also a testimony of historical value, a testimony of the historical and cultural values of Ulnia, an appreciation of folk traditions, rituals and other values that are a powerful force for the people to survive. The main idea set forth in the novel is to survive by struggling, which is important not only in terms of not forgetting the heroic pages of our recent past, but also in terms of finding out future ways. The people of Zeytun once again confirmed that the only guarantee of living in the homeland is to fight against the enemy. Alajajyan's novel is nothing but a story and a saga of an entire nation that does not put down its weapons.

 It is argued that some morphosyntactic phenomena of the Armenian language which have not yet received due explanation within the frameworks of the traditional Armenian linguistics are accounted for in the light of cognitively motivated competing linguistic tendencies and certain psychological motivating factors. As is well-known, due to presence of the compe­ting motivations in grammar and usage, the directionality of a particular diachronic change and the eventual choice of the resulting synchronic morphosyntactic pattern may vary across languages. Accordingly, the relevant synchronic and diachronic evidence of the Armenian language allows us to determine to a greater or lesser extent which of the competing linguistic tendencies (and/or of the motivating factors) has been decisive in each particular case. Sometimes, the joint effect of a number of motivating factors is responsible for the appearance of the given synchronic pattern as is the case, for example, with the doublet forms of the Prohibitive singular of certain verbs in Modern Eastern Armenian.   

This article analyzes in detail the translations of neologisms Grigor Narekatsi uses in his work Book of Lamentation. On the example of Mkrtich Kheranyan’s and Vazgen Gevorgyan’s translations an attempt is made to study how translators perceive, interpret and reproduce neologisms of medieval work in Modern Armenian, what problems they encounter while translating the text and what solutions they offer. Often the content of the whole passage depends on the meaning of the neologisms, which means that their correct translation is important not only for the aesthetic expression of the original, but also for the transmission of its content. Special attention is paid to the context, the time of creation of Narekatsi’s work, the author’s idea, since the words acquire different meanings depending on these factors. The article also examines the interaction of the neologisms of the original text and its various interpretations and translations.

Publication of the fragment “The Grammar of the Kipchak Language”, from manuscript №3522 stored in Matenadaran has been initiated by the researchers of YSU Institute of Armenian Studies to launch an extensive international project, involving specialists in Oriental Studies, Linguistics, Source Studies, Cultural Studies from the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and distant foreign countries. Manuscripts in the Kipchak language, written in Armenian letters, evidence the exclusively strong centuries-long traditions of intercultural cooperation as well as national and religious tolerance in the territory of Northern Eurasia. These manuscripts can serve as a reliable source for the study of the issues of the history of Turkic languages, particularly that the sound system of the latter is best transcribed through the Armenian alphabet