This year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival will offer a window on Armenian visions of home.

By Ryan P. Smith,

A modestly sized landlocked nation framed by the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian to the east, Armenia links the southernmost former Soviet Socialist Republics with the arid sprawl of the Middle East. Armenia’s own geography is heavily mountainous, its many ranges separated by sweeping plateaus of vivid green. The wind is stiff and the climate temperate, and the mountainsides teem with archaeological treasures of a long and meandering history.

Thousands of years ago, the land known as Armenia was roughly seven times the size of the current country. Yet even within the borders of contemporary Armenia, cathedrals, manuscript repositories, memorials and well-worn mountain paths are so dense as to offer the culturally and historically curious a seemingly endless array of avenues to explore.

This year, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be bringing deeply rooted Armenian culture to Washington, D.C. From food and handicrafts to music and dance, the festival, taking place in late June and early July, will provide an intimate look at an extremely complex nation. Catalonia, the autonomous region of northeast Spain, is featured alongside Armenia.

What exactly makes Armenia’s cultural landscape so fascinating?

Library of Congress Armenia area specialist Levon Avdoyan, Tufts Armenian architecture expert Christina Maranci, and the Smithsonian’s Halle Butvin, curator of the festival’s “Armenia: Creating Home” program explain the many nuances of the Armenian narrative.

What was Armenia’s early history like?

Given its strategic geographical status as a corridor between seas, Armenia spent much of its early history occupied by one of a host of neighboring superpowers. The period when the Armenia was most able to thrive on its own terms, Levon Avodyan says, was when the powers surrounding it were evenly matched, and hence when none was able to dominate the region (historians call this principle Garsoïan’s Law, after Columbia University Armenia expert Nina Garsoïan).

Foreign occupation was often brutal for the Armenian people. Yet it also resulted in the diversification of Armenian culture, and allowed Armenia to exert significant reciprocal influence on the cultures of its invaders. “Linguistically, you can show that this happened,” Avodoyan says. “Architecturally this happened.” He says Balkan cruciform churches may very well have their artistic roots in early Armenian designs.

What religious trends shaped Armenia?

It’s hard to say what life looked like in pre-Christian Armenia, Avdoyan admits, given that no Armenian written language existed to record historical events during that time. But there are certain things we can be reasonably sure about. Zoroastrianism, a pre-Islamic faith of Persian origin, predominated. But a wide array of regionally variant pagan belief systems also helped to define Armenian culture.

The spontaneous blending of religious beliefs was not uncommon. “Armenia was syncretistic,” Avdoyan says, meaning that the religious landscape was nonuniform and ever-changing . “The entire pagan world was syncretistic. ‘I like your god, we’re going to celebrate your god. Ah, Aphrodite sounds like our Arahit.’ That sort of thing.”

Armenia has long had strong ties with Christian religion. In fact, Armenia was the first nation ever to formally adopt Christianity as its official faith, in the early years of the fourth century A.D. According to many traditional sources, says Levon Avdoyan, “St. Gregory converted King Tiridates, and Tiridates proclaimed Christianity, and all was well.” Yet one hundred years after this supposedly smooth transition, acceptance of the new faith was still uneven, Avdoyan says, and the Armenian language arose as a means of helping the transition along.

“There was a plan put forth by King Vramshapu and the Catholicos (church patriarch) Sahak the Great to invent an alphabet so that they could further propagate the Christian faith,” he explains.

As the still-employed Greek-derived title “Catholicos” suggests, the Christian establishment that took hold in the fourth century was of a Greek orientation. But there is evidence of Christianity in Armenia even before then—more authentically Armenian Christianity adapted from Syriac beliefs coming in from the south. “From Tertullian’s testimony in the second century A.D.,” says Avdoyan, “we have some hints that a small Armenian state was Christian in around 257 A.D.”

Though this alternative take on Christianity was largely snuffed out by the early-fourth century pogroms of rabidly anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, Avdoyan says facets of it have endured to this day, likely including the Armenian custom of observing Christmas on January 6.

How did Armenia respond to the introduction of Christian beliefs? With the enshrinement of Christianity came a period characterized by what Avdoyan generously terms “relative stability” (major instances of conflict—including a still-famous battle of 451 AD that pitted Armenian nobles against invading Persians eager to reestablish Zoroastrianism as the official faith—continued to crop up). Yet the pagan lore of old did not evaporate entirely. Rather, in Christian Armenia, classic pagan myth was retrofitted to accord with the new faith.

“You can tell that some of these tales, about Ara the Beautiful, etc., have pagan antecedents but have been brought into the Christian world,” Avdoyan says. Old pagan themes remained, but the pagan names were changed to jibe with the Christian Bible.

The invention of an official language for the land of Armenia meant that religious tenets could be disseminated as never before. Armenia’s medieval period was characterized by the proliferation of ideas via richly detailed manuscripts.

Continue Reading  on: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/unfurling-rich-tapestry-armenian-culture-180969251/