Restitution of Armenian property remains unresolved

 Susanne Güsten

The Armenian monastery of Varagavank stands teetering on the brink of collapse in the mountains above Lake Van, in eastern Anatolia. Built a thousand years ago, and once the seat of an archbishop, it was forsaken in 1915. The monastery's buildings have more recently been used as stables, as a Kurdish villager named Mehmet Coban explained. “The manure was piled this high,” he said, marking the spot with his hand. His clan found the church like this when they settled in the former Armenian village in the 1950s, he recalled. Having shoveled out the dung, Coban now shows visitors around the church and dreams of making the village rich by turning it into a tourist destination. When he enlisted authorities to support the project a couple of years ago, it emerged that a prominent Turkish media executive in Istanbul held the deed to the monastery. His grandfather had amassed vast landholdings around Van after World War I.

The Blackberries of Kharpert

Eric Nazarian

 

It’s been an unspeakably bloody summer in the Middle and Near East. The awful war in Gaza, the beheading of James Foley, the sniper shootings on border villagers in Tavush, the endless mayhem and quagmire of Syria, the micro-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan inflamed by Aliyev’s Twitter threats to bomb Yerevan, and the Yezidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS that has created mushrooming humanitarian disasters all over the region.

One of 38 People Who Speaks Urartian in Van

Mehmet Kuşman, 74, is one of the 38 people in the world who can speak, write and read the Urartian language.

Kuşman has served for 40 years as the watchman of Çavuştepe Castle, an Urartian castle in the eastern province of Van’s Gürpınar district. He still voluntarily keeps watch on the castle. He gives information about the castle and the Urartians to visitors.

Kuşman was given a residence permit from the U.S. to teach the Urartian there and has also received proposals from Japan, but did not accept these proposals because he could not leave the castle, to which he is loyal.

Graves in the Park: Notes from the "Bolis" Uprising

Eric Nazarian

 



I haven’t had time to digest what I saw this past week on the heels of my first journey to the womb of Armenian civilization: Van/Vaspurakan. Dikranakert. Kharpert, the fabled green villages of Bitlis, and the hinterlands of Palu and Sakrat. My fellow travelers, now brothers and sisters for life, trekked across these majestic and cruel roads that hold many secrets. The stubborn rocks jetting from the earth gave us anchor. The mud-covered ruins inside the Armenian cemetery in Edremit in Van, though, put holes in our hearts as we stood before it, bulldozed and abandoned, next to the fresh asphalt of a curving street. It was not development. It was erasure. Rest assured that the bones, now dust, still silently scatter on spirits like us who wander through these roads seeking ancestral root. Not politics, nor the millions spent on genocide denial, can change what remains in the crevices of these stones, where our dead lie buried and anonymous but never forgotten. Perhaps that is the last defense of a people that has been erased from its historic cradle—to hold a flame to memory and preserve what remains of a civilization that flourished once upon a time in Historic Armenia.

A Time to Act: What will become of Varak Monastery after the recent earthquake in Van?

Ara Sarafian 

Varak Monastery, near Van, was one of the great monastic centres of the Armenian church. Its main structure was built at the end of the 10th century. Much of the monastery was destroyed in 1915, a significant part was destroyed in the 1960s, while good sections have just barely survived until our days. In recent years, busloads of tourists have visited Varak as a place of historic interest. Many have been Armenian, but also Germans, Japanese, Italians and Americans. 

Los armenios de Vaspurakán en América del Sur

Simón Vratzián

Traducción y notas de Vartán Matiossián

 

Este breve pero interesante artículo sobre la presencia de los nativos de Vaspurakán (región de Van y alrededores) en América del Sur, particularmente en Argentina, fue escrito por el último primer ministro de la primera República de Armenia, Simón Vratzián, y publicado en 1942 en Boston en un volumen titulado «Վասպուրականը եւ իր տարագիր զաւակները» (“Vaspurakán y sus hijos exiliados”), que incluía como apéndice una lista de todos los vaspurakantsí de Buenos Aires con su edad y domicilio. Vratzián visitó Buenos Aires por primera vez en 1936 y a pesar de contar con información de primera mano, su texto no carece de imprecisiones, algunas de los cuales hemos señalado en nota. Hemos excluido un párrafo sin vinculación con el tema central del artículo. Las fechas entre corchetes han sido agregadas para mayor claridad.

From Van to Buenos Aires: History of Three Generations

Vartan Matiossian

 

Juan (Mgrdich) Binayan was an Armenian from Van who, in 1889, embarked from Marseilles to South America. Born around 1855-1858, he had apparently been involved in some revolutionary activities; therefore in 1874 he had to flee his birthplace. He would never be able to go back. Before going to Marseilles, he had lived and worked in Odessa, Constantinople, Tripoli, Alexandria, and Malta. Attracted by the legendary stories telling “in Chile, you pick gold from the streets with your own hands,” he settled in the capital, Santiago.